t, and
keeps in it longest. Conversely, the southerly route by the Azores
is best for outward-bound ships; as it escapes most of the Gulf
Stream, and traverses the still Sargasso Sea, and even the extremity
of the westward equatorial current.

Strange as these Virgin Isles had looked when seen from the south,
outside, and at the distance of a few miles, they looked still more
strange when we were fairly threading our way between them,
sometimes not a rifle-shot from the cliffs, with the white coral
banks gleaming under our keel. Had they ever carried a tropic
vegetation? Had the hills of Tortola and Virgin Gorda, in shape and
size much like those which surround a sea-loch in the Western
Islands, ever been furred with forests like those of Guadaloupe or
St. Lucia? The loftier were now mere mounds of almost barren earth;
the lower were often, like 'Fallen Jerusalem,' mere long earthless
moles, as of minute Cyclopean masonry. But what had destroyed their
vegetation, if it ever existed? Were they not, too, the mere
remnants of a submerged and destroyed land, connected now only by
the coral shoals? So it seemed to us, as we ran out past the
magnificent harbour at the back of Virgin Gorda, where, in the old
war times, the merchantmen of all the West Indies used to collect,
to be conveyed homeward by the naval squadron, and across a shallow
sea white with coral beds. We passed to leeward of the island, or
rather reef, of Anegada, so low that it could only be discerned, at
a few miles' distance, by the breaking surf and a few bushes; and
then plunged, as it were, suddenly out of shallow white water into
deep azure ocean. An upheaval of only forty fathoms would, I
believe, join all these islands to each other, and to the great
mountain island of Porto Rico to the west. The same upheaval would
connect with each other Anguilla, St. Martin, and St. Bartholomew,
to the east. But Santa Cruz, though so near St. Thomas's, and the
Virgin Gordas to the south, would still be parted from them by a
gulf nearly two thousand fathoms deep--a gulf which marks still,
probably, the separation of two ancient continents, or at least two
archipelagoes.

Much light has been thrown on this curious problem since our return,
by an American naturalist, Mr. Bland, in a paper read before the
American Philosophical Society, on 'The Geology and Physical
Geography of the West Indies, with reference to the dist