Science in Arcady | Page 2

some three thousand feet above, formed a distinct
greenish patch such as always betokens shoals or rising ground at the
bottom. Flying out at once to the point he indicated, and poising myself
above it on my broad pinions at a giddy altitude, I saw at a glance that

my friend was quite right. Land making was in progress. A volcanic
upheaval was taking place on the bed of the sea. A new island group
was being forced right up by lateral pressure or internal energies from a
depth of at least two thousand fathoms.
I had always had a great liking for the study of material plants and
animals, and I was so much interested in the occurrence of this novel
phenomenon--the growth and development of an oceanic island before
my very eyes--that I determined to devote the next few thousand
centuries or so of my æonian existence to watching the course of its
gradual evolution.
If I trusted to unaided memory, however, for my dates and facts, I
might perhaps at this distance of time be uncertain whether the moment
was really what I have roughly given, within a geological age or two,
the period of the Mid-Miocene. But existing remains on one of the
islands constituting my group (now called in your new-fangled
terminology Santa Maria) help me to fix with comparative certainty the
precise epoch of their original upheaval. For these remains, still in
evidence on the spot, consist of a few small marine deposits of Upper
Miocene age; and I recollect distinctly that after the main group had
been for some time raised above the surface of the ocean, and after
sand and streams had formed a small sedimentary deposit containing
Upper Miocene fossils beneath the shoal water surrounding the main
group, a slight change of level occurred, during which this minor island
was pushed up with the Miocene deposits on its shoulders, as a sort of
natural memorandum to assist my random scientific recollections. With
that solitary exception, however, the entire group remains essentially
volcanic in its composition, exactly as it was when I first saw its
youthful craters and its red-hot ash-cones pushed gradually up, century
after century, from the deep blue waters of the Mid-Miocene ocean.
All round my islands the Atlantic then, as now, had a depth, as I said
before, of two thousand fathoms; indeed, in some parts between the
group and Portugal the plummet of your human navigators finds no
bottom, I have often heard them say, till it reaches 2,500; and out of
this profound sea-bed the volcanic energies pushed up my islands as a

small submarine mountain range, whose topmost summits alone stood
out bit by bit above the level of the surrounding sea. One of them, the
most abrupt and cone-like, by name now Pico, rises to this day, a
magnificent sight, sheer seven thousand feet into the sky from the
placid sheet that girds it round on every side. You creatures of to-day,
approaching it in one of your clumsy new-fashioned fire-driven canoes
that you call steamers, must admire immensely its conical peak, as it
stands out silhouetted against the glowing horizon in the deep red glare
of a sub-tropical Atlantic sunset.
But when I, from my solitary aerial perch, saw my islands rise bare and
massive first from the water's edge, the earliest idea that occurred to me
as an investigator of nature was simply this: how will they ever get clad
with soil and herbage and living creatures? So naked and barren were
their black crags and rocks of volcanic slag, that I could hardly
conceive how they could ever come to resemble the other smiling
oceanic islands which I looked down upon in my flight from day to day
over so many wide and scattered oceans. I set myself to watch,
accordingly, whence they would derive the first seeds of life, and what
changes would take place under dint of time upon their desolate
surface.
For a long epoch, while the mountains were still rising in their active
volcanic state, I saw but little evidence of a marked sort of the growth
of living creatures upon their loose piles of pumice. Gradually,
however, I observed that spores of lichens, blown towards them by the
wind, were beginning to sprout upon the more settled rocks, and to
discolour the surface in places with grey and yellow patches. Bit by bit,
as rain fell upon the new-born hills, it brought down from their
weathered summits sand and mud, which the torrents ground small and
deposited in little hollows in the valleys; and at last something like
earth was found at certain spots, on which seeds, if there had been any,
might doubtless have rooted and flourished exceedingly.
My primitive idea, as I watched my islands in