ANTHOZOA HELIANTHOIDA. 191 



referred to any particular figure." After moving about for 

 several days, during which their forms suffer some slight 

 change, they insensibly relax in their activity, the cilia disap- 

 pear, and, having become stationary, each rapidly runs through 

 the stages of development that lead it up to the similitude of 

 its parent. 



Every one has read of the coral islands of tropical seas ; 

 how they grow from the fathomless profound, and how they 

 rise to day by the operations of puny insects, which in count- 

 less numbers, and in untold generations, effectuate changes on 

 our globe superior, perhaps, to what all other animals united 

 do, and compared to which the greatest achievements of " in- 

 tellectual man, 1 ' sink to insignificance.* Geology teaches us 

 that with these worms the great work of creation began ; and 

 from that uncertain date even to the present day, their amaz- 

 ing labours have been continued, the product remaining in the 

 extensive ranges of limestone rocks which lie buried in our 

 northern regions, as well as in those islands of new formation 

 with which they threaten to convert the equatorial seas into 

 dry land. " They that sail on the sea tell of the danger 

 thereof; and when we hear it with our ears we marvel 

 thereat, "f 



" JVIiHions of millions thus, from age to age, 

 With simplest skill, and toil unwearyable, 



* " Their plants are made of stone, and they build dwellings. Dwellings ; they 

 construct islands and continents for the habitation of man. The labours of a worm, 

 which man can barely see, form mountains like the "Apennines, and regions to which 

 Britain is as nothing. The invisible, insensible toil, of an ephemeral point, con- 

 spiring with others in one great design, working unseen, unheard, but for ever 

 guided by one volition by that One Volition 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 day, 

 to be a world ! That same power which has thus wrought by means which blind 

 man would have despised as inadequate, by means which he has but just discovered, 

 here too shows the versatility, the contrast of its resources. In one hour it lets 

 loose the raging engines, not of its wrath, but of its benevolence ; and the vol- 

 cano and the earthquake lift up to the clouds, the prop and foundation of new 

 worlds, that from those clouds they may draw down the sources of the river, the 

 waters of fertility and plenty." Dr. Macculloch, Highlands and West. Islands, 

 vol. iv. p. 1 4. 



t Ecclesiast. chap, xliii. v. 24. 



