OF SANTO DOMTXGO. 



135 



of steep hill side, where we were forced to dismount, and in the face of a pelting 

 shower. But before this we rode two or three miles over ridges, coming in one place 

 to a little marshy spot called Canitas, in a depression where broken-down pasture- 

 fences and a couple of dilapidated shanties told of former occupation. This seems 

 to have been a military post, now abandoned as unnecessary. From this, one trail 

 runs southwest to San Jnian, while the other, our route, goes south to the Rio de los 

 Cuevas, and thence via Tubanos to Azua. Very soon after leaving this spot, 

 unusual from its having a spring from which runs a permanent stream of water, the 

 route following the ridge descends the spur to the Rio del Medio, which it crosses 

 through and over boulders of hard sandstone, derived fiom beds interstratifled with 

 the shale. Here palms again begin to make a marked feature in the vegetation, and 

 in fact on the hill side are the most abundant trees. A climb of a mile and a half, 

 with an ascent of perhaps more than a thousand feet, took us to the summit over the 

 edges -of slate dipping south almost vertically. Crossing the top of the i-idge, we 

 descended through woods whose conifers had nearly disappeared, and from which 

 they soon became entirely absent, and in which the familiar cabbage or " royal " palm 

 soon became common. This encouraging sign was soon followed by the appearance 

 of thi-ee or four houses — the hamlet of Lagunas, so named from a pond or two, prob- 

 ably the rain-water drainage of the surrounding hills. From Lagunas a gentle though 

 long slope runs down to the broad gravelly bed of the Rio de los Cuevas. While 

 slates of all the forms described in the preceding pages make up all of the region 

 just described, they are so up-tilted that no order of sequence could be made out 

 among them ; and although a southern dip predominates, it is not possible that all of 

 this distance is made up of a succession of regularly superimposed beds up-tilted. 

 There has been much folding, and since all of the dips are high, it is not impossible 

 that there may have been some inversion, some folds tilted backwards. Unfortunately 

 the entire absence of beds of limestone in this section deprives us of the most valuable 

 key we have found for unravelling the problems of sti-atification elsewhere. We only 

 know that the same high dips continue out under the plain, and even beyond Tubanos 

 the shale is vertical. Below Lagunas, on the southei'n face of the hill, the upturned 

 edges of the slate are overlaid by horizontal beds t)f a coarse shingle deposit of Post 

 Pliocene age, the margin of the coast formation. This will be I'eferred to again in 

 the description of the geology of the south side of the Island. 



Returning to Jarabacoa, the only road leading out from the valley, except that to 

 Humunucu, is the camino real to V ega over a ridge. It crosses a mile or two of 

 valley over the Jimenoa and the Yami. Tiie former has a broad sandy bottc^m. in- 



