Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/97

tion of which they were at liberty to go home if they chose, or were discharged if no longer needed.

On that Sunday there were one hundred and one people on the island, of whom five only were white. However, this proportion of black to white was no greater than in the neighboring islands.

In the afternoon, while taking a nap, I was awakened by what I vaguely thought to be the thunder of a coming storm; but it proved to be Chalmers trying to drive a goat off the iron roof, to which it had sprung from the steep incline behind the house. Though it was now the beginning of the hurricane season, the weather was calm and fine during our whole stay in the tropics.

On Monday the brigantine Foley arrived for a cargo of phosphate, and we went to the lookout west of the house to see her drop anchor. We were at least six hundred feet above the sea, and as the vessel lay in the shelter of the cliff she looked like a boy's ship floating on a pond. The wind was blowing briskly at the time, but the island afforded a perfect shelter against it, and the calm area could be seen extending like a shadow over the sea for half a mile. This protection from the wind also caused it to be almost unbearably hot down on the beach in the afternoon sun, which was reflected from water and cliffs.

On Tuesday, July 8th, we bade good-by to Mrs. H—— and Miss Dorothea, and descended the wires for the last time. Captain H—— went with us aboard the sloop which was to take us to Montserrat. We were soon on our way, and the ensign of Great Britain, flying in front of the house, was dipped three times. We waved a final adieu, and the lofty walls of Redonda were thereafter seen by us only from a distance.

 

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Mr. Jacques W. Redway expresses the opinion in the Geographical Journal that the reason why the prairies and plains of the United States are treeless, is because they have never been seeded with trees, and this because they have never been exposed to inundations from tree-bearing districts. "Water," he says, "has been the chief agent in the distribution of trees, and the treeless regions are the greater part in regions that have not been disturbed by physiographic agencies. From the southern limit of glaciation to the made lands along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, the central plain of the United States is the level bed of a Palæozoic sea. Excepting such places where the streams of Champlain times have cut channels through the upper strata, the surface of this vast plain is undisturbed; it is at once a sedentary soil of Silurian disintegrations and a Quaternary epoch. Throughout much of its extent it is treeless, not because of prairie fires, nor yet of unwholesome conditions of the soil, but from the simple fact that the seeds of forest trees have never been distributed over its surface at fortuitous times. Prairie fires have doubtless had more or lees to do with retarding the distribution of forestry; so undoubtedly have unwholesome conditions of the soil. Neither condition, however, is sufficiently potent to prevent the emboisment (tree-clothing) of a treeless area; it is still less able to deforest a timbered area."