That view our host and his suite had seen themselves the year before; and they assured me that Humboldt had not overstated its grandeur.  The mountains of Trinidad do not much exceed three thousand feet in height, and I could hope at most to see among them what my fancy had pictured among the serrated chines and green gorges of St. Vincent, Guadaloupe, and St. Lucia, hanging gardens compared with which those of Babylon of old must have been Cockney mounds.  The rock among these mountains, as I have said already, is very seldom laid bare.  Decomposed rapidly by the tropic rain and heat, it forms, even on the steepest slopes, a mass of soil many feet in depth, ever increasing, and ever sliding into the valleys, mingled with blocks and slabs of rock still undecomposed.  The waste must be enormous now.  Were the forests cleared, and the soil no longer protected by the leaves and bound together by the roots, it would increase at a pace of which we in this temperate zone can form no notion, and the whole mountain-range slide down in deluges of mud, as, even in the temperate zone, the Mont Ventoux and other hills in Provence are sliding now, since they have been rashly cleared of their primeval coat of woodland.

To this degrading influence of mere rain and air must be attributed, I think, those vast deposits of boulder which encumber the mouths of all the southern glens, sometimes to a height of several hundred feet.  Did one meet them in Scotland, one would pronounce them at once to be old glacier-moraines.  But Messrs. Wall and Sawkins, in their geological survey of this island, have abstained from expressing any such opinion; and I think wisely.  They are more simply explained as the mere leavings of the old sea-worn mountain wall, at a time when the Orinoco, or the sea, lay along their southern, as it now does along their northern, side.  The terraces in which they rise mark successive periods of upheaval; and how long these periods were, no reasonable man dare guess.  But as for traces of ice-action, none, as far as I can ascertain, have yet been met with.  He would be a bold man who should deny that, during the abyss of ages, a cold epoch may have spread ice over part of that wide land which certainly once existed to the north of Trinidad and the Spanish Main:  but if so, its traces are utterly obliterated.  The commencement of the glacial epoch, as far as Trinidad is concerned, may be safely referred to the discovery of Wenham Lake ice, and the effects thereof sought solely in the human stomach and the increase of Messrs. Haley’s well-earned profits.  Is it owing to this absence of any ice-action that there are no lakes, not even a tarn, in the northern mountains?  Far be it from me to thrust my somewhat empty head into the battle which has raged for some time past between those who attribute all lakes to the scooping action of glaciers and those who attribute them to original