LIFE OF JAMES DWIGHT DANA 



" Dana has sent me the Geology of the United States 

 Expedition, and I have just read the Coral part. To 

 begin with a modest speech, I am astonished by my own 

 accuracy! If I were to rewrite now my Coral book, 

 there is hardly a sentence I should have to alter, except 

 that I ought to have attributed more effect to recent vol- 

 canic action in checking growth of coral. When I say all 

 this, I ought to add the consequences of the theory on 

 areas of subsidence are treated in a separate chapter to 

 which I have not come, and in this, I suspect, we shall 

 differ more. Dana talks of agreeing with my theory in 

 most points ; I can find out not one in which he differs. 

 Considering how infinitely more he saw of coral reefs than 

 I did, this is wonderfully satisfactory to me. He treats 

 me most courteously. There now, my vanity is pretty 

 well satisfied." 



Popular Errors Corrected 



The erroneous notions of the coral world, widely prev- 

 alent even among educated people, are thus referred to 

 by Dana: 



" A singular degree of obscurity has possessed the 

 popular mind with regard to the growth of corals and 

 coral reefs, in consequence of the readiness with which 

 speculations have been supplied and accepted in place of 

 facts; and to the present day the subject is seldom men- 

 tioned without the qualifying adjective mysterious ex- 

 pressed or understood. Some writers, rejecting the idea 

 which science had reached, that reefs or rocks could be 

 due in any way to ' animalcules/ have talked of electrical 

 forces, the first and last appeal of ignorance. One author, 

 not many years since, made the fishes of the sea the 

 masons, and in his natural wisdom supposed that they 

 worked with their teeth in building up the great reef. 

 Many of those who have discoursed most poetically on 

 zoophytes have imagined that the polyps were mechani- 

 cal workers, heaping up the piles of coral rock by their 

 united labors; and science is hardly yet rid of such terms 

 as polypary, polypidom, which imply that each coral is 

 the constructed hive or house of a swarm of polyps, like 

 the honeycomb of the bee, orthe hillock of a colony of ants. 



" Science, while it penetrates deeply the system of 



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