CORALS AND CORAL ARCHLTECTURE. 273 



We cannot dismiss this subject without considering the coral- 

 island, or completed atoll, in its relations to life. Upon an area so 

 limited and so uniform, there may be much beauty, but little variety. 

 On many of them there are less than a dozen species of plants, and not 

 an animal higher in the scale than fishes, except a few migratory birds. 

 Twenty-nine species of plants were found upon one island. There, as 

 elsewhere, on the dry rocks, black lichens grow in patches. The germs 

 of this class of plants seem to be present everywhere within the geo- 

 graphical limits of life. On some of the more favored islands are some 

 tropical birds, a few rats and mice, and perhaps other animals intro- 

 duced by man. The drift of the sea may convey to it various organic 

 germs. 



The coral-made land is ocean-born ; its palm-groves were planted by 

 the waves; and here too is man, savage, swarthy, unclothed, filthy, bar- 

 barous. With him degradation is an inheritance, and physical condi- 

 tions hold him with relentless grasp. With occasional surfeit, he is in 

 danger daily of starvation. He is driven to infanticide in self-defence. 

 The taste which adorns our New-England landscapes can never de- 

 velop here. In the land of the elm and the oak, rather than beneath 

 the shade of the pandanus and the cocoa-nut palm, we must look 

 for the conditions which mould manhood in the common struo-ode 

 for life. 



We quote again, and lastly, from Prof. Dana's work : " A coral- 

 island, even in its best condition, is but a miserable place for 

 human development, physical, mental, and moral. There is poetry 

 in every feature, but the natives find this a poor substitute for 

 the bread-fruit and yams of more favored lands. How many of the 

 various arts of civilized life could exist in a land where shells are the 

 only cutting instruments fresh water barely enough for household pur- 

 poses no streams, nor mountains, nor hills ? How much of the poetry 

 and literature of Europe would be intelligible to persons whose ideas 

 had expanded only to the limits of a coral-island, who had never con- 

 ceived of a surface of land above half a mile in breadth of a slope 

 higher than a beach, or of change in seasons beyond a variation in the 

 prevalence of rain ? " 



Such are coral-islands beautiful gems of the ocean ; delightful as 

 a subject of study, equally in their aspects and development, their geo- 

 logical importance and in their relations to life. 



