LIFE OF JAMES DWIGHT DANA 



FROM PROFESSOR DANA 



Montgomery 's "Pelican Island" 



" NEW HAVEN, May 27, 1853. 



" I observe that in your last number you make honor- 

 able mention of my opinion on the science of Montgom- 

 ery's Pelican Island, and cite a paragraph from the poem. 

 That paragraph, as it stands on your page, might be 

 taken for the only objectionable passage, although but 

 one among many, and far from the worst. It contains 

 two important errors one is, its attributing the formation 

 of the coral to the instinct and labor of the coral animal, 

 as if a product analogous to the honeycomb of the bee, 

 or the hill of the ant ; and the other is the idea that the 

 coral polyp lives within the coral as its cell ; whereas, in 

 fact, the coral is a secretion within the polyp, and is 

 wholly internal, as much so as the skeleton in our own 

 bodies. There is no more labor or instinct in the growth 

 of a reef than in the accumulation of beds of peat in a 

 peat swamp, or of deposits of shells along a coast. The 

 peat and the mollusk in this respect merit as pretty a 

 verse as the coral polyp. The errors are old errors, and 

 have pervaded science as well as popular belief, and as 

 truth is the end of science, if not of poetry, there is suffi- 

 cient reason assuredly for excluding such verses from 

 scientific works. 



" But never were the beautiful inhabitants of the coral 

 world so grossly defamed, or nature so utterly belied, as 

 by some of Montgomery's lines which you have not 

 quoted. He seems to have imagined that the wonder of 

 the result would appear the more wonderful and perhaps 

 poetical, according to his conceptions, by attributing 

 the most unsightly forms and disgusting habits to the 

 coral animal. He says, ' Shapeless they seemed,' an 

 epithet as true of the flowers of our gardens, for the 

 coral animals closely resemble flowers in form and beauty 

 of coloring; and ends a line thus begun with ' endless 

 shapes assumed ' ; while in fact the variation of form 

 that is observed is an expanding and shutting of the 

 polyp-flower, somewhat analogous to the opening and 

 closing of the petals of a daisy. He goes on : ' Elon- 

 gated like worms, they writhed and shrunk their tortuous 



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