Geology. 289 
I wrote to Prof. Smyth to know where and at what height above the sea, 
and under what geological circumstances, he or his informants had detec- 
ted these shells. In reply he could give me no information on any one 
of these three heads, “ he had merely given the statement on report, and 
not from his own observations.” It appears, then, that he had simply 
learnt that marine fossil shells had been met with somewhere in the island 
d 
Hartung and I were there in 1854. These shells, however, did not occur 
“on the slopes of the crater,” but in the suburbs of Santa Cruz, along the 
shore to the northeast of the town, a part of the island which is geo- 
graphically and geologically independent, not only of the Peak, which is 
more than twenty miles distant, but also of that volcanic chain which 
extends many miles from the flanks of the great cone, trending in a north- 
easterly direction. The separation of the Santa Cruz rocks from the 
chain to which the Peak belon , will be understood by a glance at the 
maps of Von Buch and Captain Vidal, and by reference to the view of 
do not conform “to the slope” of any crater or cone. So far as they can 
en, they appear to be nearly horizontal, and occur only at slight 
elevations above the level of the sea. We were told that the same re- 
mark holds good in reference to certain other deposits containing shells, 
Which we did not examine, in the northeastern extremity of the island, 
still further from the Pea 
o the first of the p es above cited, Prof. Smyth has alluded to 
fossiliferous strata in the islands of Grand Canary and Palma, In 
to Palma, I may mention that Mr. Hartung and I, when we were there 
tly, as to the Grand Canary, Von.Buch was, I believe, the first to 
call attention to the existence of marine shells in that island, where Mr. 
Hartung and I collected them in abundance in 1854, an ertained 
that they are imbedded in nearly horizontal strata continuous over a 
