INTRODUCTION. 27 
‘History of British Zoophytes,’—“ every one has read of 
the coral islands of the tropical seas—how they grow from 
the fathomless profound, and how they rise to-day by the 
operations of puny insects, which, in countless numbers, 
and in untold generations, effectuate changes on our globe, 
superior, perhaps, to what all other animals united do, 
and to which the greatest achievements of intellectual man 
sink to insignificance.’ Still stronger is the language 
of Dr. Macculloch, in his ‘ History of the Western Islands.’ 
“Their plants,’ says he, “are made of stone, and they 
build dwellings. Dwelliigs! they construct islands and 
continents for the habitation of man. The labours of a 
worm which man can hardly see, form mountains like the 
Apennines, and regions to which Britain is as nothing. The 
invisible, insensible toil of an ephemeral point, conspiring 
with others in one great designa—working unseen, unheard, 
but for ever guided by one great volition,—by that one voli- 
tion which cannot err,—converts the liquid water into the 
solid rock, the deep ocean into dry land, and extends the 
dominions of man—who sees it not, and knows it not,— 
over regions which even his ships had scarcely traversed. 
This is the great Pacific Ocean, destined at some future pe- 
riod to be aworld, That same power which has thus wrought 
