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A bird's-eye view of the islet suggests a podao or Madeiran billhook, about six miles by three. The tool's broken point is the Ilha da Cima, facing to north-east, a contorted pile which resembles a magnified cinder. The handle is the Ilheu Baixo, to the south; and the blade is the tract of yellow sandy lowlands the sole specimen of its sort in the Madeiras connecting the extremities.
Hartung, in his account of the Azores, published in 1860, describes twenty- three shells from St. One of the most characteristic and abundant of the new species, Cardium Hartungi, not known as fossil in Europe, is very common in Porto Santo and Baixo, and serves to connect the Miocene fauna of the Azores and the Madeiras.
Half-a-dozen boats, some of them neat little feluccas with three masts, are drawn up on the beach: there is not much fishing; the vine-disease has raged, and the staple export consists of maize in some quantities; of cantaria, a grey trachyte which works more freely than the brown or black basalt, and of an impure limestone from Ilheu Baixo, the only calcaire used in Funchal.
The villages are joined to one another by roads which attempt to follow the sea-line; the chasms are spanned by the flimsiest wooden bridges, and the cliff is tunnelled or cut into a corniche. After disembarking passengers at Ponta d'Agua and Ribeira Nova we passed the great landslip of 1805, Lugar do Baixo. The heap of ruins has long been greened over.
From the mouth of the Xingu the route followed by vessels leads straight across the river, here ten miles broad. Towards midnight the wind failed us, when we were close to a large shoal called the Baixo Grande. We lay here becalmed in the sickening heat for two days, and when the trade-wind recommenced with the rising moon at 10 p.m. on the 6th, we found ourselves on a ice-shore.
The largest number of fossils have been collected from the tuffs and conglomerates and some beds of limestone in the island of Baixo, off the southern extremity of Porto Santo. They amount in this single locality to more than sixty in number, of which about fifty are mollusca, but many of these are only casts.
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