276 R. T. HILL — PELE AND THE WINDWARD ARCHIPELAGO 



These theories all disappear before the indisputable proof that the 

 islands are simple constructional volcanic piles which have grown above 

 the ocean floor around persistent volcanic vents, oceanic in origin, and 

 which have never been united as a whole with each other, much less 

 with the North American continent. 



It is better now to abandon these unfounded continental theories and 

 to concentrate our attention on what the islands really are — merely vol- 

 canic piles, as oceanic (non-continental) in origin and relations as the 

 islands of the Pacific. These volcanoes are the most ancient feature of 

 the region and typify a persistent field of vulcanism which has existed as 

 far back in geologic time as we can see in the locality, and which existed 

 prior to the formation of any of the secondary local sedimentary rocks 

 which now veneer the volcanic piles, and which would not have accu- 

 mulated had it not been for the volcanic piles in the oceans. 



The simple fact that all the islands, excepting Barbados, are or have, 

 been old volcanic piles born of the ocean, as most volcanoes are, is the 

 basis of the entire history of the Windward islands. Volcanic eruption, 

 marine planation, secular upheaval, and lime-making oceanic life —these 

 are the simple factors which have built up these islands, planed some of 

 them down below sealevel, and lifted up the lime-covered banks into 

 calcareous veneered islands again. 



Each of the Windward islands represents a chimney, past or present, 

 of the great volcanic mechanism of the earth's interior, where dynamic 

 substances, usually banked in below, have now and then, through the 

 long years of geologic time, occasionally broken forth and added strata 

 of ashes to the preexisting surface. Hence it is that the present islands, 

 projecting and subterranean, ever diminishing by atmospheric and ma- 

 rine erosion, represent only infinitesimal fractions of the total quantities 

 of material which has been erupted. 



In comparison with the vast work of the greater mechanism to which 

 the volcanoes belong and the totality of the matter transferred from the 

 earth's interior to its exterior, the lessons inland and continent making, 

 and the conflict between the constructive work of the volcanoes and the 

 destructive work of the atmosphere and ocean, one can not but consider 

 the human events of the recent eruptions as indeed a trivial incident of 

 the larger story. Here is a great amphitheater where the competitive 

 battle of natural forces of construction and destruction have and are 

 being fought — where vulcanism in its broadest sense is bringing up ma- 

 terial from the earth to add to the land of its surface, to be attacked and 

 redistributed by the exterior processes. 



In fine, we have in these islands the spectacle of a battery of volcanic 

 vents, pin-holes, in the ocean's bottom, leading up from the earth's inte- 



