[Footnote V:  Llorente, Tom.  I. p. 28.]

In 1542, Charles V. procured a bull from Pope Paul III. restoring the Indians to their natural freedom:  this he confirmed and despatched to the island.  Las Casas, the Protector of the Indians, had carried his point at last, but the Indians were beyond protection.  The miserable remnant were no longer of consequence, for the African had begun to till the soil enriched by so much native blood.  Thus ends the first chapter of the Horrors of San Domingo.

Schoelcher reminds us that the traveller may read upon the tomb of Columbus at Seville:  “Known worlds were not enough for him:  he added a new to the old, and gave to heaven innumerable souls.”

[To be continued.]

METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY.

A few miles from the southern extremity of Florida, separated from it by a channel, narrow at the eastern end, but widening gradually toward the west, and rendered every year more and more shallow by the accumulation of materials constantly collecting within it, there lies a line of islands called the Florida Keys.  They are at different distances from the shore, stretching gradually seaward in the form of an open crescent, from Virginia Key and Key Biscayne, almost adjoining the main-land, to Key West, at a distance of twelve miles from the coast, which does not, however, close the series, for sixty miles farther west stands the group of the Tortugas, isolated in the Gulf of Mexico.  Though they seem disconnected, these islands are parts of a submerged Coral Reef, concentric with the shore of the peninsula and continuous underneath the water, but visible above the surface at such points of the summit as have fully completed their growth.

This demands some explanation, since I have already said that no Coral growth can continue after it has reached the line of high-water.  But we have not finished the history of a Coral wall, when we have followed it to the surface of the ocean.  It is true that its normal growth ceases there, but already a process of partial decay as begun that insures its further increase.  Here, as elsewhere, destruction and construction go hand in hand, and the materials that are broken or worn away from one part of the Reef help to build it up elsewhere.  The Corals which form the Reef are not the only beings that find their home there:  many other animals—­Shells, Worms, Crabs, Star-Fishes, Sea-Urchins—­establish themselves upon it, work their way into its interstices, and seek a shelter in every little hole and cranny made by the irregularities of its surface.  In the Zoological Museum at Cambridge there are some large fragments of Coral Reef which give one a good idea of the populous aspect that such a Reef would present, could we see it as it actually exists beneath the water.  Some of these fragments consist of a succession of terraces, as it were, in which are many little miniature caves, where may still be seen the Shells or Sea-Urchins which made their snug and sheltered homes in these recesses of the Reef.