SGO REMARKS AND OPINIONS. 



may be compared with Yucatan ; only between 

 Timor and Cape Van Diemen in New Holland, the 

 isthmus is broken through, which corresponds 

 with the isthmus of Darien in America. 



On the western coast of the Old World, Europe, 

 with the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and the ad- 

 jacent islands and peninsulas, forms the only 

 exception to the law which results from the con- 

 templation of the terrestrial globe. 



Though on the coral reefs, and the kind of rock 

 of which they consist, we no where recognize the 

 skeletons of tlie Lithophytes in their original 

 places, and the spot where they lived and grew, 

 and in this differ from Flinders, for whose observ- 

 ations we have otherwise the highest respect*, we 

 cannot but believe, that in those parts of the sea 

 where the enormous masses of this formation rise, 

 even in the cold and unillumined bottom of the 

 ocean, animals are continually employed, in pro- 

 ducing, by the process of their life, the materials 



* In his voyage, passim, he assumes, that the skeletons of 

 the madrepores are converted into reef-stone on the spot where 

 they grew, by the filling up of their interstices with coral sand, 

 or the fragments of other madrepores, while their upper 

 branches continue to grow, and others build on the ground thus 

 raised. Forster touches this subject but slightly, and what he says 

 of it is not worth notice. Thp supposition that polypi produc- 

 ing limestone, live only in the walls of the already-existing 

 reef'^, and their internal lagoons, would not explain the first 

 origin of these reefs, the perpendicular height of which 

 cannot well be taken at less than a hundred fathoms. 



