254 VIEWS, &C. PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. 



interval, by Chamisso, Peron, Quoy and Gaimard, Flinders, 

 Liitke, Beechey, Darwin, d'Urville, and Lottin. 



The coral-animals and their stony cellular scaffoldings be- 

 long, for the most part, to the warm tropical seas ; and the 

 reefs occur most frequently in the Southern Hemisphere. 

 Thus we find the Atolls or Lagoon Islands crowded together 

 in the so-called coral-sea between the north-east coast of New 

 Holland, New Caledonia, Solomon's Islands, and the Louisiade 

 Archipelago ; in the group of the Low Islands (Low Archi- 

 pelago), eighty in number ; in the Fidji, Ellice, and Gilbert 

 Islands ; and in the Indian Ocean, north-east of Madagascar, 

 under the name of the Atoll group of Saya de Malha. 



The great Chagos Bank, whose structure and dead coral- 

 trunks have been thoroughly investigated by Captains Moresby 

 and Powell, is the more interesting to us, because we may 

 regard it as a prolongation of the more northern Laccadive and 

 Maldive Islands. I have previously directed attention in ano- 

 ther work* to the importance of the order of succession of the 

 Atolls, which are exactly in the direction of a meridian as far 

 as 7° south lat., in reference to the general mountain system, 

 and the form of the earth's surface, in Central Asia. The 

 meridian-chains, which mark the intersection of many moun- 

 tain-systems running from east to west at the great bend of 

 the Thibetian river Tzang-bo, correspond with the great 

 meridian mountain rampart of the Ghauts and of the more 

 northern Bolor in further or trans-Gangetic India. Here lie 

 the parallel chains of Cochin China, Siam, and Malacca, as well 

 as those of Ava and Arracan, M-hich, after courses of unequal 

 length, all terminate in the gulfs of Siam, Martaban, and 

 Bengal. The bay of Bengal appears like an arrested effort of 

 nature to produce an inland sea. A deep inbreak of the 

 waters, between the simple western system of the Ghauts, and 

 the very complex eastern trans-Gangetic system, has swal- 

 lowed up a great part of the eastern lowlands, but met with 

 an impediment not so easily overcome in the early existing 

 and extensive table-land of Mysore. 



An oceanic inbreak of this nature has given rise to two 

 almost pyramidal peninsulas of very different length and 

 narrowness; and the prolongation of two opposing meridian 

 systems, the mountain system of Malacca in the east, and the 



* Asie centrale, t. i. p. 218. 



