reckoned with the West Indies: Buen Aire, or Bonaire,
Curasao, and Aruba. Curagao is the largest
and by far the most populous. Its area is two hundred
and twenty square miles and its population
26,000. Buen Aire, to the east of it, has two hundred
and fourteen square miles of land and only
about 5000 inhabitants, while Aruba, to the west,
has nearly 8000 people within its area of sixty-six
square miles.
T he statistics given above, drawn from the latest
authentic sources, are probably not exact, for authorities
do not agree, and in no one authority do the
details and the aggregates precisely correspond.
But it is close to the truth to say that the entire
land area of the West Indies is 95,000 square miles,
of which nearly 85,000 is in the Greater Antilles,
and of that about 48,000 in the island of Cuba alone!
O f the rest more than half is contained in the Bahamas,
and the total area of the Lesser Antilles, including
the Virgins and Trinidad and Tobago, and
even the three Dutch islands of the Venezuelan
coast, is a trifle less than 5000 square miles. The
aggregate population of the archipelago is about
5>75°j°oo, of which more than 4,500,000 is contained
in the Greater Antilles. T he Bahamas are sparsely
peopled with a little over 50,000 souls, while the
Lesser Antilles, including the outlying islands at
either end of the long chain, contain about 1,200,000
inhabitants.
C H A P T E R II
ORIGIN AND PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
IT is a familiar scientific fact that far back in the
geological ages the crust of the earth was subject
to upheaval and subsidence under the cooling process,
which resulted in enormous changes of level in
the surface remaining above water. T he changes
were greatest and lasted longest in the equatorial
regions, where the globe’s diameter transverse to its
axis was greatest, and where the radiation of internal
heat was slowest.
It is the latest scientific opinion that in those ages
of “ the dark backward and abysm of tim e,” there
was a great upheaval of land where this archipelago
now is, which made it substantially, if not absolutely,
a continuation of the continents, with broad plains
upon the west, occupying most of the two basins of
the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. There
was an ocean connection with this land from the Pacific,
over one or more of the depressions where now
are the isthmuses of Tehuantepec, Nicaragua, and
Panama, for the level of the western verge of the continent
was lower than it is at present. In later ages