CORAL REEFS AND ISLANDS 207 



When we want a thing of that kind done for the benefit 

 of science in this country, we generally go to the British 

 Association and ask that a research committee be appointed 

 for the purpose, and that was done over thirty years ago, 

 at the meeting of the British Association at Cardiff in 1891. 



A typical atoll, thought to be of irreproachable character, 

 called Funafuti, in the EUice group, near the centre of the 

 Pacific, was chosen for the purpose ; and several successive 

 expeditions, under the leadership first of Professor Sollas, of 

 Oxford, and afterwards of Professor Edgeworth David, of 

 Sydney, eventually, after many difficulties, succeeded in 

 boring through the reef to a depth of 1,114 feet, and in 

 bringing home a core formed of various layers of coral 

 and other calcareous structures, which was most carefully 

 examined from end to end, microscopically and chemically, 

 and has been exhaustively discussed in a valuable report 

 pubHshed by the Royal Society. Extraordinary to relate, 

 this boring of Funafuti has not settled the matter. The 

 upholders of the two rival theories each find in the Funafuti 

 core support^f or their own views. Professor Sollas and other 

 supporters of Darwin maintain that the corals found in the 

 core at depths of over 1,000 feet prove that the reef is based 

 upon what was once living coral in situ, which has been carried 

 bodily down by subsidence from the shallow water in which 

 it lived to that depth at which it was found ; while Murray 

 and his adherents answered : " Not at all. The present 

 reef of Funafuti has grown out upon a talus of broken 

 fragments, the boring has gone down through that talus, 

 and the corals in the core are not in situ, but are pieces 

 which have broken off from the edge of the reef and rolled 

 down into deeper water." 



There seems no way at present of settling the matter 

 further ; but it is very possible that both theories are 

 partly right and partly wrong, and that different atolls 

 have been formed in different ways. In a slowly sinking 

 area no doubt Darwin's theory would apply, and a fringing 



