ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 115 



that he had been unable to find any traces of subsidence, his 

 opponents retorted that the region he had been investigating 

 must be an exceptional one. This occurred so frequently 

 that his long-continued exploration of the tropical seas may 

 be described as an exhaustive and fruitless search for a 

 typical coral reef. After his visit to the Maldives in the 

 Indian Ocean in 1901, his son writes : " Agassiz had now 

 visited practically all the important coral-reef regions of the 

 world, and in no single instance had he seen an atoll or 

 barrier reef whose formation he thought could be satis- 

 factorily explained by subsidence. It naturally followed 

 that his final conclusion was a total dissent from Darwin's 

 theory on the subject." 



Professor Stanley Gardiner had visited the Maldives just 

 before Agassiz, and it is important to note that in all essential 

 respects they are in accord, and both have decided that 

 *' Darwin's theory is not applicable to the Maldives." 



The late Dr. A. G. Mayer, formerly Director of the Carnegie 

 Institute Research Laboratory on the Tortugas, who had 

 been with Agassiz on several of his expeditions, writing of his 

 coral-reef explorations, says : " I believe science will come to 

 see that he succeeded in showing that Darwin's simple 

 explanation of the formation of atolls does not hold in any 

 part of the world." 



It was during Agassiz 's Maldive trip in the winter of 1901-2 

 that I had a most interesting interview with him. I had 

 met him before that in Edinburgh, had visited him in his 

 Newport laboratory, and, again since at Harvard, but at 

 Colombo in Ceylon in January, 1902, we spent a long day 

 and evening together. He had just returned from his 

 Maldive expedition and I was just starting on mine to the 

 pearl banks in the Gulf of Manaar. Our two steamers, both 

 chartered from the British India Co., lay at anchor side by 

 side in the harbour, and we dined on shore that evening and 

 discussed coral reefs, tropical seas and marine biology in 

 general. My expedition profited greatly by that chance 



