Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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But This Supposition Is
Not Justified By Any Chemical Analogy.
The cayos are composed of
rocks, and not of sands, and their smallness renders it extremely
improbable that the
Pluvial waters should unite in a permanent lake.
Perhaps the fresh water of this chain of rocks comes from the
neighbouring coast, from the mountains of Cuba, by the effect of
hydrostatic pressure. This would prove a prolongation of the strata of
Jura limestone below the sea and a superposition of coral rock on that
limestone.* (* Eruptions of fresh water in the sea, near Baiae,
Syracuse and Aradus (in Phenicia) were known to the ancients. Strabo
lib. 16 page 754. The coral islands that surround Radak, especially
the low island of Otdia, furnish also fresh water. Chamisso in
Kotzebue's Entdekkungs-Reise volume 3 page 108.)
It is too general a prejudice to consider every source of fresh or
salt water to be merely a local phenomenon: currents of water
circulate in the interior of lands between strata of rocks of a
particular density or nature, at immense distances, like the floods
that furrow the surface of the globe. The learned engineer, Don
Francisco Le Maur, informed me that in the bay of Xagua, half a degree
east of the Jardinillos, there issue in the middle of the sea, springs
of fresh water, two leagues and a half from the coast. These springs
gush up with such force that they cause an agitation of the water
often dangerous for small canoes. Vessels that are not going to Xagua
sometimes take in water from these ocean springs and the water is
fresher and colder in proportion to the depth whence it is drawn.
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