Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- CHAPTER IX
- CHAPTER X
- CHAPTER XI
- CHAPTER XII
- CHAPTER XIII
- CHAPTER XV
- CHAPTER XVI
- CHAPTER XVII
- CHAPTER XVIII
- CHAPTER XIX
- CHAPTER XX
- CHAPTER XXI
- CHAPTER XXII
- APPENDIX I
- APPENDIX II
- Plate section
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- CHAPTER IX
- CHAPTER X
- CHAPTER XI
- CHAPTER XII
- CHAPTER XIII
- CHAPTER XV
- CHAPTER XVI
- CHAPTER XVII
- CHAPTER XVIII
- CHAPTER XIX
- CHAPTER XX
- CHAPTER XXI
- CHAPTER XXII
- APPENDIX I
- APPENDIX II
- Plate section
Summary
There are few portions of this earth's surface that can afford more interest to the student of natural history, and certainly none more deserving of the attention of the geologist. Trinidad, though dignified with the title of “Queen of the Islands,” and greater in extent than the whole of our Windward islands combined, is still, comparatively speaking, a mere spot or speck in the great chart of the world. Yet in this small spot we find not a few of what may be considered the living representatives of the first inhabitants of a former world, the modified types of long-extinct races of animal and vegetable creations. We have here a beautiful illustration of what geology tells us was the condition of the surface of the whole earth, ere it was prepared for the residence of man; and we find almost every variety of material and of structure that has as yet been discovered by man in his subsequent researches throughout what Professor Buckland has so appropriately denominated “the archives of the interior of the earth.” We have the land fitted only for the support of vegetable life, or, at most, of a few animals whose forms indicate that their principal abode must be in the waters; we have the mud and slime that had been deposited at the bottom of the earliest seas, baked into hard and stratified rocks, and forming mountains of great extent, some thousand feet above the surface of the present ocean.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The West IndiesThe Natural and Physical History of the Windward and Leeward Colonies, pp. 328 - 355Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010First published in: 1837