138 A NATURALIST ON DESERT ISLANDS. 



slopes of the Honduran Banks, from which we have 

 imagined the water to have receded, another yawning 

 gulf would be fixed ; and again we should creep back 

 dismayed and full of a wondering awe. And so we might, 

 in imagination, go on ; taking a two mile walk in an easterly 

 direction from the eastern end of the island, and a four 

 mile walk from the westerly end ; and each time be driven 

 back by the same prospect of hideous abysses, covered 

 with a slimy coat of evil-smelling slush and ooze. 



At the western end of the plateau, we might even get a 

 glimpse of the far distant " Yucatan Basin," as it wound 

 its way round the western end of the Cayman-Mysteriosa 

 ridge, to join with Bartlett's Deep — a broad submarine 

 valley it would be, 15,000 feet deep, which must have 

 nurtured in its ample bosom, through many a past and 

 changing age of upheaval and depression, a host of strange 

 life-forms, identical with those of their colleagues in the 

 Pacific. 



For it may be pointed out in passing, that the whole 

 fauna of these Honduran depths is far more closely 

 allied to that of the Pacific depths, than to that of the 

 Atlantic ; a fact explained by the much freer communica- 

 tion of the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific, than with the 

 Atlantic, in Cretaceous and Eocene times, before the 

 Isthmus of Panama had finally emerged to separate once 

 and for all the two areas. 



We should like too, if space permitted us, to dwell 

 upon those times of vast land elevation in Pliocene days, 

 when perhaps this Honduran sea region had shrunk and 

 dwindled into one of long fiords or deep basins, which lay 

 among high mountain ranges ; when its waters may have 

 been almost, or even entirely, landlocked, forming a 

 retreat for those ancient deep-sea types of fish and other 

 marine animals, which had been cut off from the deep 

 Avaters of the Pacific in the past Miocene age, at which 

 period Central America rose from its watery bed. Here, 

 in these mountain-girt fastnesses, they were to hold out 

 through these and other periods of elevation (Pleistocene), 



