GRENADA AND THE GRENADINES. 249 
winter storm when a fierce wind has swept along, 
leaving them combed or sharply cut, suggests either 
immense denuding, eroding floods, or upheaval. 
Were these islands once connected with the main 
land of either continent? How often this question 
arises in one’s mind as he gazes on these mountains 
peering above the sea! Did they, in the language 
of Humboldt, “belong to the Southern continent, and 
form a part of its littoral chain,” or have they been 
upheaved from the depths of the sea? The great 
naturalist thus refers to these islands and the various 
theories regarding their origin: “The supposition of 
an oceanic irruption has been the source of two other 
hypotheses on the origin of the smaller West India 
islands. Some geologists admit that the uninterrupted 
chain of islands from Trinidad to Florida exhibits the 
remains of an ancient chain of mountains. They con- 
nect this chain sometimes with the granite of French 
Guiana, sometimes with the calcareous mountains of 
Paria. Others, struck with the difference of geo- 
logical constitution between the primitive mountains 
of the Greater and the volcanic cones of the Lesser 
Antilles, consider the latter as having risen from the 
bottom of the sea. In opposing the objections of some 
celebrated naturalists, I am far from maintaining the 
ancient contiguity of all these smaller West India 
islands. I am rather inclined to consider them as 
islands heaved up by fire, and ranged in that regular 
line of which we find striking examples in so many 
volcanic hills in Mexico and in Peru. The geological 
constitution of the archipelago appears, from the little 
we know respecting it, to be very similar to that of 
the Azores and the Canary Islands. Primitive forma- 
