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The land above the first shore bluff at Possession Bay rises to a height of some four hundred feet above the sea-level, in a succession of regular horizontal terraces, of which Agassiz counted eight. On these terraces, all of which are built, like the shore-bluffs, of tertiary deposits, were two curious remnants of a past state of things.
This brings us to the shore-bluffs, consisting simply of another Reef exactly like those already described, except that the lapse of time has united it to the main-land by the complete filling up and consolidation of the channel which once divided it from the extremity of the peninsula, as a channel now separates the Keys from the shore-bluffs, and the outer Reef, again, from the Keys.
But in the course of time the outer Reef will reach the surface for its whole length and become united to the inner one by the filling up of the channel between them, while the inner one will long before that time become solidly united to the present shore-bluffs of Florida by the consolidation of the mud-flats, which will one day transform the inner channel into dry land.
But this is not the end of the story. Travelling inland from the shore-bluffs, we cross a low, flat expanse of land, the Indian hunting-ground, which brings us to a row of elevations called the Hummocks.
Seven such Reefs and channels of former times have already been traced between the shore-bluffs and Lake Okee-cho-bee, adding some fifty thousand years to our previous estimate.
These three concentric Reefs, then, the outer Reef, the Keys, and the shore-bluffs, if we measure the growth of the two latter on the same low estimate by which I have calculated the rate of progress of the former, cannot have reached their present condition in less than twenty thousand years.
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