26 Transactions of the South African Philosophical Society. 



Thomas Smith, Englishman, after a night of merry-making in the 

 city of Santa Cruz, saw two islands." It was known to the Portu- 

 guese as the island of Gomera, and is supposed to be that on which 

 the Scotch abbot, St. Brandan, landed in the sixth century. There 

 is, I think, no evidence to lead one to suppose that any of these 

 legends had a basis in fact, or that during the last few thousand 

 years this great mass of land, or even considerable islands, have 

 disappeared beneath the Atlantic, although we have every reason to 

 believe that such did actually take place in comparatively late 

 geological ages. 



Turning from the Atlantic to the Pacific, we find New Caledonia 

 composed of ancient rocks, crystalline schists containing gold, coal 

 beds, and, in fact, the usual assortment of varieties of rock that are 

 found on the mainland of Australia. But New Caledonia, mani- 

 festly, lies on a submerged ridge connecting New Zealand with 

 Australia and South-Eastern Asia. 



In the Fiji Islands there exists quartzites and granites forming 

 the base on which the volcanic superstructure is built. At Nasogo 

 there is a tuffaceous conglomerate very similar to that at Ascension, 

 containing well-worn pebbles of granite. But here there is an 

 important addition : tertiary fossils occur embedded in the matrix. 

 Besides granite, Woolnough records as having found in situ the 

 following rocks : slates, quartzites, quartz-diorite, and old sedimen- 

 tary rocks of an indeterminate age.f The Fiji Islands must, 

 therefore, be classed among those standing on the same submerged 

 ridge as New Caledonia and New Zealand. 



From the same submerged ridge rise the islands, New Guinea, 

 Borneo and Java, all with continental types of rocks. 



The Solomon Islands contain extensive areas of quartzites and 

 schists ; a coarse hornblendic gneiss occurs at Thousand Ships Bay 

 in Vulavu, crystalline limestone in Guadalcanal^ and Ysabel, and 

 jasper in Guadalcanar and Vulavu. } 



In the New Hebrides, gneiss and crystalline limestone occur at 

 Malicolo and Espiritu Santo, and serpentine, like that at St. Paul's 

 Rocks, at Aneityum. § 



We have thus pushed the submarine plateau out from New 

 Caledonia to the New Hebrides, from here to the truly oceanic 



* A. B. Ellis, "West African Islands," London, 1885. 



t Woolnough, " The Continental Origin of Fiji ; " Proc. Linn. Soc. N.S. Wales, 

 1903, pt. 3. 



\ Guppy, " The Solomon Islands, their Geology and General Features," London, 

 1887. 



§ Imhaus, " Les Nouvelles Hebrides," Paris-Nancy, 1890, p. 122. 



