The strata of most of these hills in the upper part, where alone the planes
of division are distinguishable, are inclined at a small angle from the
interior of the island towards the sea-coast. The inclination is not the
same in each hill; in that marked A it is less than in B, D, or E; in C the
strata are scarcely deflected from a horizontal plane, and in F (as far as
I could judge without ascending it) they are slightly inclined in a reverse
direction, that is, inwards and towards the centre of the island.
Notwithstanding these differences of inclination, their correspondence in
external form, and in the composition both of their upper and lower parts,-
-their relative position in one curved line, with their steepest sides
turned inwards,--all seem to show that they originally formed parts of one
platform; which platform, as before remarked, probably extended round a
considerable portion of the circumference of the island. The upper strata
certainly flowed as lava, and probably beneath the sea, as perhaps did the
lower feldspathic masses: how then come these strata to hold their present
position, and whence were they erupted?

In the centre of the island there are lofty mountains, but they are
separated from the steep inland flanks of these hills by a wide space of
lower country: the interior mountains, moreover, seem to have been the
source of those great streams of basaltic lava which, contracting as they
pass between the bases of the hills in question, expand into the coast-
plains. (I saw very little of the inland parts of the island. Near the
village of St. Domingo, there are magnificent cliffs of rather coarsely
crystallised basaltic lava. Following the little stream in this valley,
about a mile above the village, the base of the great cliff was formed of a
compact fine-grained basalt, conformably covered by a bed of pebbles. Near
Fuentes, I met with pap-formed hills of the compact feldspathic series of
rocks.) Round the shores of St. Helena there is a rudely formed ring of
basaltic rocks, and at Mauritius there are remnants of another such a ring