islands
first appeared above the stormy sheet of the North-West Atlantic as a
little rising group of mountain tops, capping a broad boss of submarine
volcanoes. My attention was originally called to the new archipelago by
a brother investigator of my own aerial race, who pointed out to me on
the wing that at a spot some 900 miles to the west of the Portuguese
coast, just opposite the place where your mushroom city of Lisbon now
stands, the water of the ocean, as seen in a bird's-eye view from 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 aeonian 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
re