OF SANTO DOMIXOO. 



marked only by shells and a few turtle and fish bones, resting on the locky floor, and 

 through which I excavated to a depth of nine feet. Over this is a thinner layer of • 

 ashes with bones of birds, agouti, fish and turtles, and an abundance of pottery evi- 

 dently of the immediately pre-Columbian era. Over this, liberally intermixed with 

 bat guano, is a modern deposit of broken earthen and iron kettles and beef and pig 

 bones, indicative of a higher, or at least, more modern civilization, though justice re- 

 quires us to admit that the pottery is inferior in workmanship, in elaborateness and 

 in beauty of design to the preceding era. It is a remarkable circumstance, that 

 although the Indians of the pottery period manufactured polished stone hatchets and 

 other implements equal in degree of finish to the finest ever discovered, and they are 

 not rare, not a stone instrument was discovered in the cave, unless we except some 

 rough rounded pebbles found among the shells, and which seem to have been used as 

 hammers for extracting the mollusca. I may also mention, although irrelevant, that 

 no arrow or lance heads have ever, so far as I can learn, been found in the country, 

 notwithstanding that the jaspers of the l^Tigua, of which the hatchets were made, are 

 admirably adapted for this purpose. The absence of any mammal larger than the 

 timid little agouti, and of any birds fit for food, except the pigeons, equally difficult 

 of ai^proach. probably rendered the use of arrows for the chase nearly unnecessary ; 

 while not improbably fragments of shells, or the innumerable varieties of hard woods, 

 much easier to prepare than stone-tips, may have answered the required pur])ose in 

 warfare. This explanation is of course purely hypothetical. 



The Bay of San Lorenzo is bounded on the west by these hills and the little out- 

 lying islands, while its eastern side is a flat sandy plain, with little patches of wood 

 and broad savanas. Savana-la-Mar, a few miles further east, is at the base of the 

 first piece of elevated land on this plain, a little low hill of Cretaceous shale, whose 

 outcrops in the bhdf are barely large enough to enable one to identify the formation. 

 There is no pass across the mountains fui'ther east than this, and this road is so 

 muddy at best of times that it has the reputation of being the worst on the Island. 

 It is so l)ad that experts prefer to travel it when it is wettest, because the mud, al- 

 ways soft, is then less sticky, and although the horses sink perhaps a trifle deepei", 

 the}^ have less difficult}'^ in pulling their feet out of the mud. The constant rains 

 maintain a vegetation so dense that the sun never penetrates to the ground, little 

 evaporation takes place and the wet soil completes the circle by stimulating to greater 

 rankness the already too dense forest. Open places, like Savana Grande for instance, . 

 are not unpleasantly wet and prove that, the woods cleared away, the whole range 

 could be rendered habitable ; Avhile the rains due to the trade-winds Avould diminish 

 but little in quantity and would mninlain a degree of fertility difiiciilt to sui-pass. 



