Although Mr. Charles Darwin, one of the most conservative of scientists, usually insists that the elevation and subsidence of the earth's crust is accomplished by slow degrees and continues through long geological periods of time, yet in the report of his _Geological Observations_, he records some very important evidences of recent elevations and subsidences as having taken place quite suddenly. One instance is in connection with an elevation on the Island of San Lorenzo, off the coast of Peru near Lima, in which he reaches the conclusion that the beach on that island has been raised 85 feet since Indian men inhabited Peru. [24] He gives another instance of a recent elevation of land on the Island of Chiloe; [25] and still another on the Island of Lemus. [26] In speaking in a general way of the elevation on the western side of the South American continent, Mr. Darwin also says: On the shores of the Pacific, upraised shells of recent species, generally, though not always, in the same proportional numbers as in the adjoining sea, have actually been found over a north and south space of 2,075 miles, and there is reason to believe that they occur over a space of 2,480 miles. The elevation on this western side of the continent has not been equable; at Valparaiso, within the period during which upraised shells have remained undecayed on the surface, it has been 1,300 feet, whilst at Coquimbo, 200 miles northward, it has been within this same period only 252 feet. At Lima, the land has been uplifted at least eighty feet since Indian man inhabited that district; but the level within historical times apparently has subsided. [27] Coming to more recent seismic disturbances I call attention to the one which occurred in 1883, on an island in the straits of Sunda: