36 THE BERMUDA ISLANDS. 



substantially to those which are here presented. That is to say, 

 the raised beach-line would be an interrupted one — continuous 

 possibly along an inner contour, but broken on the outer face, 

 where a low-level beach would mark that portion of the^'shore 

 which had last risen. In this way, it is not improbable that 

 much of the interior drifts of the Bermudas will be found to 

 be underlaid by elevated beach-rock, and that a continuity of 

 extent actually exists. It appears to me that geologists have 

 not taken sufficient account of the irregularities in an ascending 

 coast line as factors determining the positions or relative al- 

 titudes to which points of elevation must necessarily attain. 

 They are too ready to interpret the obliquity or inclined posi- 

 tion of marine terraces on the assumption of terrestrial oscilla- 

 tions. 



The one fact above all others which immediately appeals to 

 the geologist in the Bermudas is the rapid waste which the 

 islands are undergoing and have undergone for some long 

 past period. Everywhere along the coast we have evidences 

 of this waste; the outer cliffs, the cliffs and ledges of the inner 

 waters, the serially disposed islands and islets, all bear witness 

 to a common annihilating process. Along the south shore the 

 lesson of destruction is presented on the most impressive scale, 

 and it is here that we read most clearly the record of waste 

 which the islands have undergone. The huge cliffs are still 

 being undermined and are still crumbling, but they are merely 

 the remains of a land-mass that at one time projected far be- 

 yond the present coast-line into the sea. This is clearly shown 

 by the disposition of the drift-rock of which they are composed, 

 the layers of which in most places decline steeply in the direc- 

 tion of the land, turning their basset edges to the sea. 

 Manifestly, the cliffs are merely the inner halves of dunes, the 

 outer slopes of which have been carried away by the sea. The 

 height of the cliffs indicates dunes of great extent, but it will 

 probably never be told at what point in what is now sea they 

 originated, and how much thej' have lost through oceanic ero- 

 sion. Not improbably the land at one time projected at least 

 as far southward as the position which is now occupied by the 

 crest of the reef. 



