AGASSIZ: FIJI ISLANDS AND CORAL EEEFS. 7 



Friendly group ; two, Taputeaua aud Apia, in the Gilbert group, and 

 five others near the equator, east of the Gilbert group : Swain's, Fakaofii, 

 Oatafu, Hull and Enderburv Island, as well as the reef region of the 

 Sooloo Sea and of the Straits of Malacca." 



In my account of the coral reefs of the Sandwich Islands,^ I have 

 given a short resume of the results of the principal investigations on 

 coral reefs since the days of Darwin and Dana down to 1889. What 

 has been done since that time will be found referred to in Bonney's 

 edition of Darwin's Coral Reefs,"-^ in Kent's " Great Barrier lieef," in 

 Langenbeck's sketches ^ of recent work on the subject, as well as in the 

 reports of the explorations I have carried on in the Bahamas and Cuba,* 

 the "West Indies," Florida,® and the Bermudas'' in the Atlantic, and of 

 the expeditions I have made to the Galapagos,^ the Great Barrier Eeef 

 of Australia,^ and Fiji.^" 



1 Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., Vol. XVII. p. 121 (1889). 



2 Professor Bonney (Coral Reefs, Darwin, 188D, -Sd ed., Appendix II. p. 290), 

 has evidently confounded the views of Professor L. Agassiz on the extent of 

 the formation of the southern extremity of Florida by coral reefs, dating back 

 to 1854, with those which I have published in 1877, in 1880, in 18S8, and again 

 in 1896. Neither Dall nor Heilprin has examined tlie Florida reefs ; their 

 studies have been devoted to other parts of the peninsula, and did not extend 

 south of the northern limit of tlie Everglades. Their criticisms in both cases 

 apply to the views of Professor L. Agassiz, as my observations were limited 

 to the reef region, and did not encroach on the area examined by Dall or Heilprin. 

 But I have plainly shown by the borings at Key West that the recent coral forma- 

 tion is of moderate thickness, not more than about fifty feet, and that it is underlaid 

 by a substratum of tertiary limestones, occasionally coralliferous, of a thickness of 

 nearly two thousand feet. The area probably covered b\' the coral reef of Florida 

 at the time of its greatest expansion is approximately shown on Plate XVII., Bull. 

 Mus. Comp. Zool., Vol. XXVIII. No. 2, 1896. I never made the statement quoted 

 by Bonney that the recent coral reefs extended over any part of Florida north of the 

 Everglades. On the contrary, I said in the conclusion of my memoir on the 

 Tortugas and Florida Reefs (Mem. Am. Acad., Vol. XI. p. 116, 1883), "'All this 

 evidence tends to show that the coral reefs had little, if anything, to do with the 

 building up of the peninsula of Florida, north of Cape Florida." 



3 R. Langenbeck, Die neueren Forschungen iiber die Korallenriffe, Hettner, 

 Geog. Zeits., Bd. IIL, 1897, pp. 514, -566, 634. 



* Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., Vol. XXVI. No. 1, 1894. 



5 Three Cruises of the Blake, 1888, Vol. I. p. 66. 



6 Bull..Mus. Comp. Zoul., Vol. XXVIIL No. 2, 1896. 

 'Ibid., Vol. XXVI. No. 2, 1895. 



8 Ibid., Vol. XXIII. No. 1, 1892. 



9 Ibid., Vol. XXVIIL No. 4. 1898. 



1" Am. Journ. of Science, February, 1898, Vol. V. p. 113. 



