After the deposition of the Cumaná Series, and the crust movements which led to the consolidation and folding of these rocks, the physical features of Venezuela must have been very much what they are to-day, save that many of the smaller islands and parts of the coast were still submerged as shoals, whilst the Llanos seem to have been a great swampy or submerged plain, with deep water in parts, over which the Orinoco sediments gradually accumulated in the form of current-bedded sands and clays surmounted by gravels, which we may term the Llano deposits. At the same time, along the coast and on the shoals shell-beds were being formed, and can now be seen at Cabo Blanco, west of La Guaira, and similar places, while practically the whole surface of the Island of Cubagua is formed of them, suggesting the name Cubagua Beds. About this period some volcanic rocks were thrust up and cooled both in the Peninsula of Paraguana and near San Casimiro, south of Carácas. In the mountains great masses of gravels containing huge boulders and some _Megatherium_ and other bones were being piled up by the rivers. Last of all we have the still-accumulating recent alluvium of the modern streams, attaining its widest extent in the Delta and round the Lake of Maracaibo. No volcanoes, active or recently extinct, are known in Venezuela, but the country has, like most of South America, been continually subject to earthquake shocks of greater or less intensity. Some of these are historic, but of the many others recorded not a few had far-reaching effects on the population. The first important tremor noticed after the discovery and settlement of the shores of the Caribbean was that of 1530, which shook the city of Nueva Cadiz on the Island of Cubagua and destroyed the fortress of Cumaná, thus checking for some time the colonisation of the mainland in this region. Thirteen years later New Cadiz was visited again by earthquake and hurricane, and so disastrous were the results that from that day to the present Cubagua has been, what it was before the arrival of the Spaniards, a desert island. The many shocks experienced in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seem to have been generally unaccompanied by much loss of life or property, but this period of comparative quiescence was followed by one of the historical examples of severe earthquake early in the nineteenth century. In March, 1812, a shock destroyed great parts of Carácas, La Guaira, Barquisimeto, Mérida, and other towns, and in the capital alone ten thousand people were killed. The great earthquake which, on August 13, 1868, made itself felt all over South America, so much affected some of the Venezuelan rivers that their waters over-flowed the banks, and even remained for a short time in new channels. In 1894 Mérida and other towns in the Andes suffered much damage, houses and churches being shaken down; the destruction was in some cases extraordinarily complete.