PRELIMINARY REMARKS. 
27 
§ 23. The coast of the United States is flanked within sound¬ 
ings by an arenaceous deposit, arranged in the manner already 
described. The shore deposits are more thoroughly arenaceous 
than the more distant depths occupied by the valleys. Here the 
formation is more muddy, and partakes of an argillaceous 
character; while it is highly probable that farther from land 
the calcareous matter will be found. The West Indian archi¬ 
pelago may well be regarded as the repository of the calcareous 
formations. Here, aided by the incessant toil of the coralline 
animals, a limestone bed or rock is in the progress of formation, 
equal in extent to the Onondaga limestone of New York, and 
like that abounding in branched corals and massive madre- 
pores, fragments of shells, together with the perfect animal 
forms which abound in the Carribean sea. This formation 
becomes the conservatory of the constructive works of man, as 
well as the burial place of his remains. Guadaloupe has fur¬ 
nished an instance verifying this assertion, by the discovery of 
a human skeleton nearly perfect in its parts. No sea is so 
richly freighted with the remains of animal life from the high¬ 
est to the lowest—-from man to the polyp. An entire record of 
human life, since the day the Carribee set his foot upon these 
islands, is treasured up in the archives of its deposits. Every 
layer is a leaf bearing the impress of the past; and the medals 
strewed profusely upon its bottom tell of the strange vicissitudes 
of a lost continent, whose existence is proclaimed by the crests 
of Cuba and the volcanic peaks of the lesser Antilles. 
§ 24. The complexity which is created in geological re¬ 
searches by the contemporaneous formations, may well create a 
hesitancy in pronouncing upon the age of a given deposit. 
Looking upon the present as a type of the past, we see in the 
arenaceous shores of America the exterior muddy deposits, 
which may be regarded as argillaceous, and the coralline forma¬ 
tions far from its coasts, whose rocky nature is completed by 
the cementing agency of calcareous matter in solution and sus¬ 
pension. Three contemporaneous formations of vast extent and 
importance, and which, being judged of by their lithological 
