uropeans, Sikhs,
Malays and Chinese, by whom roads have been cut and patches of cleared
ground cultivated.

The island is the flat summit of a submarine mountain more than 15,000
ft. high, the depth of the platform from which it rises being about
14,000 ft., and its height above the sea being upwards of 1000 ft. The
submarine slopes are steep, and within 20 m. of the shore the depth of
the sea reaches 2400 fathoms. It consists of a central plateau
descending to the water in three terraces, each with its "tread" and
"rise." The shore terrace descends by a steep cliff to the sea, forming
the "rise" of a submarine "tread" in the form of fringing reef which
surrounds the island and is never uncovered, even at low water, except
in Flying Fish Cove, where the only landing-place exists. The central
plateau is a plain whose surface presents "rounded, flat-topped hills
and low ridges and reefs of limestone," with narrow intervening valleys.
On its northern aspect this plateau has a raised rim having all the
appearances of being once the margin of an atoll. On these rounded hills
occurs the deposit of phosphate of lime which gives the island its
commercial value. The phosphatic deposit has doubtless been produced by
the long-continued action of a thick bed of sea-fowl dung, which
converted the carbonate of the underlying limestone into phosphate. The
flat summit is formed by a succession of limestones--all deposited in
shallow water--from the Eocene (or Oligocene) up to recent deposits in
the above-mentioned atoll with islands on its reef. The geological
sequence of events appears to have been the following:--After the
deposition of the Eocene (or Oligocene) limestone--which reposes upon a
floor of basalts and trachytes--basalts and basic tuffs were ejected,
over which, during a period of very slow depression, orbitoidal
limestones of Miocene age--which seem to make up the great mass of the
island--were deposited; then elapsed a long period of rest, during which
the atoll condition existed and the guano deposit was formed; from then
down to the present time there has succeeded a series of sea-level
subsidences, resulting in the formation of the terraces and the
accummulation of the detritus now seen on the first inland cliff, the
old submarine slope of the island. The occurrence of such a series of
Tertiary deposits appears to be unknown elsewhere. The whole series was
evidently deposited in shallow water on the summit of a subma