CORALS AND CORAL ISLANDS. 

CHAPTER I. 
CORALS AND CORAL MAKERS. 
SINGULAR degree of obscurity has possessed the popu- 
lar mind with regard to the growth of corals and coral 
reets, in consequence of the readiness with which speculations 
have been supplied and accepted in place of facts; and to the 
present day the subject is seldom mentioned without the qual- 
ifying adjective mysterious expressed or understood. Some 
writers, rejecting the idea which science had reached, that 
reefs of rocks could be due in any way to ‘ animalcules,” 
have talked of electrical forces, the first and last appeal of ig- 
norance. 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 
zodphytes have inagined that the polyps were mechanical 
workers, heaping up the piles of coral rock by their united la- 
bors; 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 honey-comb of 
the bee, or the hillock of a colony of ants. 
Science, while it penetrates deeply the system of things 
2 
