Yol. 51.] AND PHYSICAL GEOLOGY OF THE WEST INDIES. 307 



West Indies and the Mediterranean can only be explained by the 

 assumption of the existence of a shallow- water connexion across 

 the Central Atlantic in — at latest — Miocene times. That the fauna 

 did not follow along the shores of the North Atlantic basin is 

 shown by its absence from the northern Miocenes of Europe and 

 America. The evidence now adduced from the fossil corals of 

 Barbados lends support to this view, as showing that the "West 

 Indian fauna is only a fragment of that of the Mediterranean 

 Miocene, and has received nothing from the Pacific. This is in 

 full agreement with Prof. Suess's theory that the Atlantic is of 

 ■comparatively recent geological age, and arose by the gradual 

 -enlargement of two great bays which run north and south from a 

 sea that once extended across the mid-Atlantic from Europe to 

 America, including both the Mediterranean and the Caribbean 

 seas. 



The Permanence of Oceans and Continents. — The geological history 

 of the West Indian area is therefore strongly opposed to the theory 

 •of the permanence of the great continental masses and of the ocean- 

 basins. For, while on the one hand it supplies us with an example 

 of the elevation of true abyssal oozes to the height of 1095 feet 

 above the sea, on the other the origin of its shallow-water fauna 

 can only be explained by the formation of the basin of the Central 

 Atlantic in Middle Kainozoic times. It has been objected that the 

 discovery of true deep-sea oozes in Barbados did not really seriously 

 affect the question, as these occurred only on the extreme margin 

 of a volcanic area, where great earth-movements were most likely 

 to have taken place. The discovery, however, of exactly the same 

 deposits in Cuba shows that this argument is invalid, as they there 

 occur in the very centre of the West Indies. The submergence was 

 therefore probably regional in extent, though it is possible that 

 these two sets of oozes may have been formed in isolated areas of 

 depression. It is not improbable that the subsidence which led to 

 the deposition of the Oceanic Series of the West Indies was one of 

 the earth-movements which, in Langhian or Helvetian (Lower or 

 Middle Miocene) times, broke up the great Antilleo-Mediterranean 

 Sea, by the formation across it of the main trough of the Atlantic. 

 That the deep-sea oozes were subsequently raised in Barbados to a 

 great height above the sea is doubtless due to the position of that 

 island on the line connecting the eastern coasts of North and South 

 America. The remarkable amplitude of the oscillations of level 

 along this is not surprising, whether we simply regard it as one of 

 the primitive lines of weakness in the crust of the earth, or, with 

 Prof. Lapworth, explain its instability by its coincidence with a 

 septum of the Atlantic fold. 



