.

But so works the average, i.e. the uneducated and barbaric
intellect, afraid of the New and the Big, whether in space or in
time. How the fear of those two phantoms has hindered our knowledge
of this planet, the geologist knows only too well.

It was excusable, therefore, that this Pitch Lake should be counted
among the wonders of the world; for it is, certainly, tolerably big.
It covers ninety-nine acres, and contains millions of tons of so-
called pitch.

Its first discoverers, of course, were not bound to see that a pitch
lake of ninety-nine acres was no more wonderful than any of the
little pitch wells--'spues' or 'galls,' as we should call them in
Hampshire--a yard across; or any one of the tiny veins and lumps of
pitch which abound in the surrounding forests; and no less wonderful
than if it had covered ninety-nine thousand acres instead of ninety-
nine. Moreover, it was a novelty. People were not aware of the
vast quantity of similar deposits which exist up and down the hotter
regions of the globe. And being new and big too, its genesis
demanded, for the comfort of the barbaric intellect, a cataclysm,
and a convulsion, and some sort of prodigious birth, which was till
lately referred, like many another strange object, to volcanic
action. The explanation savoured somewhat of a 'bull'; for what a
volcano could do to pitch, save to burn it up into coke and gases,
it is difficult to see.

It now turns out that the Pitch Lake, like most other things, owes
its appearance on the surface to no convulsion or vagary at all, but
to a most slow, orderly, and respectable process of nature, by which
buried vegetable matter, which would have become peat, and finally
brown coal, in a temperate climate, becomes, under the hot tropic
soil, asphalt and oil, continually oozing up beneath the pressure of
the strata above it. Such, at least, is the opinion of Messrs. Wall
and Sawkins, the geological surveyors of Trinidad, and of several
chemists whom they quote; and I am bound to say, that all I saw at
the lake and elsewhere, during two separate visits, can be easily
explained on their hypothesis, and that no other possible cause
suggests itself as yet. The same cause, it may be, has produced the
submarine spring of petroleum, off the shore near Point Rouge, where
men can at times skim the floating oil off the surface of the sea;
the petroleum and asphalt of the Windward Islands and of C