ably slow, processes changed that sea-bottom from one
salt enough to carry corals and limestones, to one brackish enough
to carry abundant remains of plants, deposited probably by the
Orinoco, or by some river which then did duty for it? Three such
periods of disturbance have been distinguished, the net result of
which is, that the strata (comparatively recent in geological time)
have been fractured, tilted, even set upright on end, over the whole
lowland. Trinidad seems to have had its full share of those later
disturbances of the earth-crust, which carried tertiary strata up
along the shoulders of the Alps; which upheaved the chalk of the
Isle of Wight, setting the tertiary beds of Alum Bay upright against
it; which even, after the Age of Ice, thrust up the Isle of Moen in
Denmark and the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, entangling the
boulder clay among the chalk--how long ago? Long enough ago, in
Trinidad at least, to allow water--probably the estuary waters of
the Orinoco--to saw all the upheaved layers off at the top into one
flat sea-bottom once more, leaving as projections certain harder
knots of rock, such as the limestones of Mount Tamana; and, it may
be, the curious knoll of hard clay rock under which nestles the town
of San Fernando. Long enough ago, also, to allow that whole sea-
bottom to be lifted up once more, to the height, in one spot, of a
thousand feet, as the lowland which occupies six-sevenths of the
Isle of Trinidad. Long enough ago, again, to allow that lowland to
be sawn out into hills and valleys, ridges and gulleys, which are
due to the action of Colonel George Greenwood's geologic panacea,
'Rain and Rivers,' and to nothing else. Long enough ago, once more,
for a period of subsidence, as I suspect, to follow the period of
upheaval; a period at the commencement of which Trinidad was perhaps
several times as large as it is now, and has gradually been eaten
away by the surf, as fresh pieces of the soft cliffs have been
brought, by the sinking of the land, face to face with its slow but
sure destroyer.

And how long ago began the epoch--the very latest which this globe
has seen, which has been long enough for all this? The human
imagination can no more grasp that time than it can grasp the space
between us and the nearest star.

Such thoughts were forced upon me as the steamer stopped off San
Fernando; and I saw, some quarter of a mile out at sea, a single