haustion of the plutonic energy, or the conversion of its upheaving into an ejecting action, on the opening of fractures along the outskirts of the region, before the feebler action there had brought the sea bed into contact with the atmosphere, the result has been to form an expanse of shallow seas and islands, elsewhere unequalled in the world, but perhaps not greater in proportion to the wide continental shores, and the vast bulk of dry land, in front of which it is spread out, than other archipelagoes are to the particular countries, or continental sections, with which they are connected.
The forms and positions of these islands bear an older date than that of any limited subsidence or elevation of the region after its formation, They were determined by the same forces which originally caused the platform itself to swell up above the deep floor of the southern ocean; and it was one prolonged act of the subterranean power to raise the Himalayas into the atrial level of perpetual snow, to spread out the submarine bed on which the rivers were afterwards to pile the hot plains of Bengal, and to mould the surface of the southern region, so that when it rose above, or sunk. into, the sea to certain levels, the mutual influences of air and sea and land should be so balanced, that while the last drew from the first a perennial ripeness and beauty of summer, it owed to the second a perennial freshness and fecundity of spring. Hence it is that, in the Archipelago, while the bank of black mud, daily overflowed by the tides, is hidden beneath a dense forest, and the polypifer has scarcely reared its tower to the sea’s surface before it is converted into a green islet, the granitic rocks of the highest plutonic summits, and the smoke of the volcanic peaks, rise from amidst equally luxuriant, and more varied, vegetation. Certainly, the most powerfully impressive of all the characteristics of the Archipelago is-its botanical exuberance, which has exercised the greatest influence on the history and habits of its human inhabitants, and which, as the most obvious, first excites the admiration of the voyager, and from its never staling, because ever renewing itself in fresh and changeful beauty, retains its hold upon our feelings to the last.
When we enter the seas of the Archipelago we are in a
