BURIED LANDS. 89 
‘‘the thoughts of God in the sky,” so the geologist who reads to 
us from the book of the rocks, seems, like Moses upon Sinai, to 
commune with Jehovah and to have his lips hallowed with a 
divine i inspit ation. 
To man’s inquiring thought, the ocean responds only in dirge- 
like harmonies. In its mystic and profound depths, during the 
long and silent ages, the sea has kept its secrets well. But in 
our own time—thanks to a Darwin, a Dana, a Marsh, and an 
Agassiz—the key of the known has unlocked many of the mys- 
teries of the unknown, and in these rocky isles we now behold 
the head-stones of lands that the sea engulfed ! 
Prof. Dana, in his work upon Corals and Coral Islands, aftcr 
alluding to ‘‘the northern continental upward movements which 
introduced the glacial era,” and stating that ‘while the earth’s 
crust was arching upward” at the north, ‘it may have been 
bending downward over the vast central area of the great ocean,” 
adds: 
“‘The changes which took place, contemporancously, in the 
Atlantic tropics, are very imperfectly recorded. The Bahamas 
show by their form and position that they cover a submerged 
land of large area, stretching over six hundred miles from north- 
west to south-east. The long line of reefs, and the Florida 
keys, trending far away from Southern Florida, are evidence 
that this Florida region participated in the downward movement, 
though to a less extent than the Bahamas. Again, the islands 
of the West Indies diminish in size to the eastward, being quite 
small in the long line that looks out upon the broad ocean, just 
as if the subsidence increased in that direction. Finally, the 
Atlantic beyond is water only; as if it had been made a blank by 
the sinking of the lands.” 
* * * * * * * 
«The peninsula of Florida, Cuba and the Bahamas, look, as 
