2 CORALS AND CORAL LSL.AhWS. 



Science, while it penetrates deeply the system of things about 

 us, sees everywhere, in the dim limits of vision, the word 

 mystery. Surely there is no reason why the simplest of organ- 

 isms should bear the impress most strongly. If we are aston- 

 ished that so great deeds should proceed from the little and low, 

 it is because we foil to appreciate that little things, even the 

 least of living or physical existences in nature, are, under God, 

 expressions throughout of comprehensive laws, laws that govern 

 alike the small and the great. 



It is not more surprising, nor a matter of more difficult com- 

 prehension, that a polyp should form structures of stone (car- 

 bonate of lime) called coral, than that the quadruped should form 

 its bones, or the mollusk its shell. The processes are similar, 

 and so the result. In each case it is a simple animal secretion ; 

 a secretion of stony matter from the aliment which the animal 

 receives, produced by the parts of the animal fitted for this 

 secreting process ; and in each, carbonate of lime is a constituent, 

 or one of the constituents, of the secretion. 



This power of secretion is then one of the first and most 

 common of those that belong to living tissues ; and though dif- 

 fering in different organs according to their end or function, it is 

 all one process, both in its nature and cause, whether in the 

 Animalcule or Man. It belongs eminently to the lowest kinds 

 of life. These are the best stone-makers ; for in their simpli- 

 city of structure they may be almost all stone and still carry on 

 the processes of nutrition and growth. Throughout geological 

 time they were the agents appointed to produce the material ot 

 limestones, and also to make even the flint and many of the 

 siliceous deposits of the earth's formations. 



Coral is never, therefore, the handiwork of the many-armed 

 polyps ; for it is no more a result of labour than bone making in 

 ourselves. And again, it is not a collection of cells into which 

 the coral animals may withdraw for concealment any more than 

 the skeleton of a dog is its house or cell ; for every part of the 

 coral — or corallum, as it is now called in science — of a polyp, in 

 most reef-making species, is enclosed within the polyp, where it 

 was formed by the secreting process. 



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