shoulder the infant Christ, and so gave a name to the whole island.

From the lava and ash ejected from this focus, the whole soils of
the island have been formed; soils of still unexhausted fertility,
save when--as must needs be in a volcanic region--patches of mere
rapilli and scoriae occur. The mountain has hurled these out; and
everywhere, as a glance of the eye shows, the tropic rains are
carrying them yearly down to the lowland, exposing fresh surfaces to
the action of the air, and, by continual denudation and degradation,
remanuring the soil. Everywhere, too, are gullies sawn in the
slopes, which terminate above in deep and narrow glens, giving,
especially when alternated with long lava-streams, a ridge-and-
furrow look to this and most other of the Antilles. Dr. Davy, with
his usual acuteness of eye and soundness of judgment, attributes
them rather to 'water acting on loose volcanic ashes' than to 'rents
and fissures, the result of sudden and violent force.' Doubtless he
is in the right. Thus, and thus only, has been formed the greater
part of the most beautiful scenery in the West Indies; and I longed
again and again, as I looked at it, for the company of my friend and
teacher, Colonel George Greenwood, that I might show him, on island
after island, such manifold corroborations of his theories in Rain
and Rivers.

But our eyes were drawn off, at almost the second glance, from
mountain-peaks and glens to the slopes of cultivated lowland,
sheeted with bright green cane, and guinea-grass, and pigeon pea;
and that not for their own sakes, but for the sake of objects so
utterly unlike anything which we had ever seen, that it was not
easy, at first, to discover what they were. Gray pillars, which
seemed taller than the tallest poplars, smooth and cylindrical as