Hereabouts a week is as a day. Whilst carriage was collecting we inspected the neighbourhood of Axim. Our first visit was to Bobowusua island, a 'fetish place for palavers,' where the natives object to guns being fired. Here it was that Admiral van Ruyter built his battery of twelve cannons and forced Fort Santo Antonio to surrender on January 19, 1642. The rock is of trap, greenstone, or whinstone, which miners call iron-stone and Cornishmen 'blue elvan:' this diorite, composed of felspar and the hardest hornblende, contains granular iron and pyrites like silver. Some specimens are beautifully banded in onyx-fashion and revetted with 'spar' (quartz) of many colours, dead-white and crystalline, red and yellow. We find the same trap on the mainland. Near the smaller Akinim or Salt-pond village there is a mass threaded with quartz-veins from north to south (1º 30'), bossed by granite dykes [Footnote: It is generally believed that these granite injections have been cooled and consolidated deep below earth's surface.] trending east-west (96º 50'), and traversed by a burnt vein striking 67º. From the surf-boat we remarked that there were no sharks; apparently they shun coming within the reefs. Our landing was not pleasant for the Krumen; the shallow bottom was strewed with rounded pebbles, and the latter are studded with sharp limpets and corallines. We climbed round the seaward bluff, fissured with deep narrow clefts, up which the tide-waves race and roar. Here the trap has a ruddy hue, the salt water bringing out the iron. Corallines, now several feet above water, clothed the boulders. This, corroborated by a host of other phenomena, argues a secular upheaval of the island, and we find the same on the mainland. There were fragments of grey granite, but not _in situ_; all had been washed from the continent, where it outlies all other formations. Water-rolled bits of brickstone also appeared; and hence, probably, Dr. Oscar Lenz [Footnote: _Geolog. Karte von West-Africa_. Gotha, Justus Perthes, 1882.] makes Axim and the neighbourhood consist of _rother Sandstein_ upon laterite. Bobowusua is a cabinet of natural history. The northern flank is ever wet with dew and spray; the southern shows a little dry earth and sand. The latter in this and in other parts of the islet is a medley of comminuted shells. We collected cowries of four kinds, large and small, crabs and balani, lobsters and sea-urchins (_erinacei_) with short spines; diminutive rock-oysters and a large variety with iridescent mother-o'-pearl, pink, red and yellow. The latter yields a white seed-pearl, and here, perhaps, we might attempt to develope it into That great round glory of pellucid stuff, A fish secreted round a grain of grit.