40 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
they lie together, as if all were once part of a greater Florida or 
south-eastern prolongation of the continent. The north-western 
and south-western trends, characterizing the great features of 
the American continent, run through the whole like a warp and 
woof structure, binding them together in one system.” 
To the author of this book it seems probable, from a simple 
examination of a good West India map, that the subsidence ex- 
tended in the same general direction to South America, a dis- 
tance of some fifteen hundred miles further. While the crust 
of the earth was being elevated, depressed and rolled “like a 
scroll,” it would have been a slight matter to have enlarged the 
area of disturbance to the extent supposed. 
In the shallow water, upon the mountain tops, the corals 
planted their colonies, and these islands, and banks, these coral 
rocks and coral sands, entirely destitute as they are of primitive 
or volcanic rocks, and of fossil remains, are their monuments. 
Geologically speaking the Bahamas arc of a very recent age. 
This is indicated by the fact that their hammocks and woods are 
almost destitute of soil, yet the growth of coral islands is excecd- 
ingly slow. The coral groves and bowers are individually of 
small extent, very unlike the ‘‘illimitable forests” of the floral 
world, and the limestone annually secreted seems in quantity re- 
latively insignificant. The vast areas of coral limestones and of 
coral sands, are composed only of the detritus, torn, grounded 
and scattered by an ocean never at rest, and often exhibiting an 
energy and power almost divine, and of fragments of marine 
shells broken, pounded and rounded in the same way. Shells 
of existing species are found in the rocks, and Charles Burnside, 
Esq., son of a late Surveyor-general of the Bahamas, informed 
us that in a Nassau quarry upon his grounds which we visited, a 
large and perfect egg was taken from the rock at a distance of 
sixteen feet below the rock’s surface. It is clear that ocean has 
