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Montserrat Island Several examples belonging in a more complicated sequence may now be presented, beginning with a composite island of easy analysis. Montserrat, nine by five miles across, was seen only from a steamer that passed near its western and northern coast; but five or six cones in different stages of erosion and hence of different dates of eruption were recognized. It has therefore had a more complicated history than the small, one-cone island of Saba. Its oldest cone, Silver Hill, occupies the northern corner of the island, with a height of 1285 feet; it is a cone no longer but is so maturely eroded as to have lost all its initial form; its exposed shore is cliffed, and it is fronted by a two-mile rimless bank. Silver Hill, a maturely dissected volcanic mass at the northern angle of Montserrat. The cliff of the most exposed headland is about 450 feet high and is one of the highest cliffs seen on any island. Center Hill, a few miles to the southwest, about five miles in diameter and 2450 feet in height, is much less eroded; for, while its loftier slopes are sharply incised by deep, close-set, steepsided valleys between which the original upper surface of the cone is reduced to acutely serrated ridges, its lower and gentler slopes still preserve their initial form little changed between the same valleys, which are there wider spaced and much less deep; its shore line is moderately cliffed. The Soufrières, a compact group of the youngest and loftiest cones, 3002 feet at the highest point, still smoking and little trenched, occupy the southern part of the island with low, beach-based bluffs along the shore and with no submarine bank offshore; their southeastern slope pitches down at an angle of 35° or 40°, as if part of the cone there had slipped into the sea. This young cone does not therefore possess the long basal slope of very gentle declivity seen on Nevis, to be described below, and it thus gives support to the idea shortly to be presented that the gentle basal slope of Nevis is a consequence of the growth of its young cone on a preëxistent bank of moderate depth, while the steeper slopes of the Soufrières on Montserrat result from their descent into deep water. On the other hand, Center Hill descends by gentler slopes northwestward and eastward to its bluffed shore, as if its volcanic beds were there spread out on a bank now buried on the south of Silver Hill, like the bank that is not buried to the north of it. Only Silver Hill, the oldest, maturely dissected cone at the northern angle of Montserrat, shows signs of submergence in its slightly embayed valleys. No reefs occur around this island; those that are believed to have once rimmed the bank in front of Silver Hill have been cut away; and none can yet have been formed on the beached shores of the younger cones. Plymouth, the chief town of Montserrat, lies where, in consequence of the projection of a low lava point a little farther north, the shore is moderately concave on the bluffed slope of a young cone of small size on the west coast. The smooth lower slopes of Center Hill and other similar cones are cultivated. The saddles between adjacent cones guide cross-island roads. Center Hill, on the northwest coast of Montserrat, showing the deeply incised inner valleys between sharply serrated ridges, the moderately dissected lower slopes, and the low cliffs of the shore. The higher cliffs in the left foreground are part of Silver Hill. Home