32 THE BERMUDA ISLANDS. 



Chafe blustering round their prison door : 

 He, throned on high, the sceptre sways, 

 Controls their moods, their wrath allays. 

 Break but that sceptre, sea and land. 

 And Heaven's etherial deep, 

 Before them they would whirl like sand. 

 And through the void air sweep. 



(Conington's jiEneid.) 



The aeolian or wind-drift character of the Bermuda Islands 

 is everywhere apparent; along the roads, on the hillsides, and 

 in the caves we find the same rock made up of organic par- 

 ticles. The layers or seams, inclining now one way, now in 

 another, point to the different positions into which the sand 

 had been fortuitously cast by the winds, patted down, and 

 built up into a series of superimposed layers. Shells, both 

 marine and terrestrial, have been caught up in the drifts, for 

 we find them now embedded in the rock, and scattered over the 

 most remote corners of the island group. I picked up a fairly 

 large fragment of coral at an elevation of probably not 

 less than 150 feet; and, doubtless, other equally large fragments 

 occur at still greater heights. In regions where freshwater 

 streams abound, the materials of terrestrial destruction are 

 washed into these streams, and by them carried into the sea ; 

 geologists have long since recognized the force of the say- 

 ing: "the land-surface is on one grand march to the sea." 

 But here, where freshwater streams are entirely wanting, and 

 the falling drops are immediately absorbed into the porous 

 soil, the conditions are at least in one sense reversed — the 

 march is in a direction away from the sea. Whither it may 

 ultimately tend cannot be foretold. 



It is difficult to conceive that these lovely hills, buried beneath 

 their sombre covering of juniper and sage (Lantana), should 

 have been thus shaped by the wind ; but the facts are plain in 

 their statement, and leave no loop-hole for the doubting 

 mind. The height of the sand-hills, or dunes, for such they 

 really are, is unusually great for a coral island, and serves to 



