CORALS AND CORAL ISLANDS, 



CHAPTER I. 



CORALS AND CORAL MAKERS. 



A SINGULAR degree of obscurity has possessed the popular 

 mind with regard to the growth of corals and coral reefs, in 

 consequence of the readiness with which speculations have 

 been suppUed and accepted in place of facts ; and to the 

 present day the subject is seldom mentioned without the quali- 

 fying adjective mysterious expressed or understood. Some 

 writers, rejecting the idea which science had reached, that reefs 

 of rocks could be due in anyway to "animalcules," have talked 

 of electrical forces, the first and last appeal of ignorance. One 

 author, not many years since, made the fishes of the sea the 

 masons, and in his natural wisdom supposed that they worked 

 with their teeth in building up the great reef. Many of those 

 who have discoursed most poetically on zoophytes have 

 imagined that the polyps were mechanical workers, heaping up 

 the piles of coral rock by their united labours ; and science is 

 hardly yet rid of such terms as polypary, polypidom, which 

 imply that each coral is the constructed hive or house of a swarm 

 of polyps, like the honeycomb of the bee, or the hillock of a 

 colony of ants. 



B 



