8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



COLLECTING ON A COEAL EEEF 



By Professor VERNON L. KELLOGG 



STANFORD UNIVERSITY 



ONCE every three weeks a 6,000-ton steamer leaves San Francisco 

 for Sydney. Yon sail with it six days from gray and cold water 

 to warm and blue, and touch at Honolulu. They let you off for tiffin 

 with poi " cocktails " in a hotel hanging over the sliding snrf on won- 

 drous Waikiki. You make the swift drive up the showery Nuuanu 

 Valley past the tombs of tlie Kamehamehas and the flower gardens of 

 the hi sellers, to the Pali, where you look over the ridge of the island 

 and see the ocean on the other shore. Then you come back and reem- 

 bark. Six days more — due south these days and the water all blue and 

 the days all warm and the equator crossed on the fourth day — and you 

 whistle hoarsely in front of a lone mountain towering out of the tropic 

 ocean. Then, as you have knocked, you move slowly in at the open 

 door of a great water-filled bowl, which is simply the yawning crater of 

 a dead volcano that makes all there is of Tutuila, a microscopic island 

 appanage of these imperial United States. 



The sides of this Iwwl, which are the inner faces of the crater, lift 

 swiftly for two thousand feet above the water, and are all clothed and 

 made soft by the velvet-seeming tropic bush that clings to every climb- 

 ing yard. Around the water's edge runs a narrow strip of gleaming 

 coral sand, and here are the toadstool native house and the white gov- 

 ernment buildings of the port village, Pago-Pago. Here too are the 

 dense, dark-green heads of l)read-fruit trees and the gently curving, 

 lazily swaying, slender trunks of cocoanut palms holding up their heavy 

 feather-duster tops. And along this beach stroll the loafing, chattering, 

 friendly Samoans with their naked shoulders shining with fresh anoint- 

 ment of odorous cocoanut oil and loins encircled with the gaudiest of 

 lava-lava. For this is steamer da}^, and there are unsophisticated, globe- 

 trotting, amateur antiquarians to be sold ancient war clubs to, — clubs 

 hastily whittled out and dented and smoke-blackened since our hoarse 

 whistle sounded before the crater's gate. 



But for our coral-reef collecting we are going to the larger German 

 island, TJpolu, with its harbor town Apia, made memorable by the great 

 hurricane of '95 which turned warring factions of English, German 

 and American sailors on warships and Samoan braves on shore into 

 common savers of one another's lives. The children of nature showed 

 their God-head in that terrible day and night, and the republican presi- 



