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CHAPTER XXI

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2011

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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.

Type
Chapter
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The West Indies
The Natural and Physical History of the Windward and Leeward Colonies
, pp. 328 - 355
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010
First published in: 1837

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  • CHAPTER XXI
  • Andrew Halliday
  • Book: The West Indies
  • Online publication: 05 July 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511782664.021
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  • CHAPTER XXI
  • Andrew Halliday
  • Book: The West Indies
  • Online publication: 05 July 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511782664.021
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • CHAPTER XXI
  • Andrew Halliday
  • Book: The West Indies
  • Online publication: 05 July 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511782664.021
Available formats
×