CONTOUR OF THE COUNTRY, 233 



* In 1596 several towns in Japan were covered by the sea ; 

 in 1638 St Euphemia became a lake ; in 1692 Port Royal, 

 in Jamaica, was submerged ; in 1775 the great earthquake 

 of Lisbon sank many parts of the Portugese and s African 

 shores 100 fathoms under water; in 1819, at the mouth 

 of the Indus, a large tract of country, with villages, was 

 submerged, while a new tract was elevated, called the 

 " Ullah Bund ;" in 1822 about 100 miles of the Chili 

 coast was elevated to the height of four or six feet.''* 



* The late Professor Nicol gave the following beautiful illustration of the fact of 

 depression and upheaval of land going on over extensive areas of the world's surface, in 

 his work entitled The System of the World : 



The vast expanses of the Southern Ocean are peopled near the surface by inconceiv- 

 able throngs of creatures of extreme minuteness, whose continual, incessant, and 

 inexplicable activities are, nevertheless, efficient towards building up the coral rocks. 

 The chemistry by which the Nautilus elaborates its gorgeous shell, apprehended by 

 the instinct of these living molecules, enables them, as they work in myriads, now to 

 erect a fabric solid and extensive as a bed of limestone, now regular and convolved like 

 the human brain, and again so delicate in fibre, and of whiteness so snowy, that it equals 

 some cherished plant in fragility and beauty. Now when traversing the Pacific, the 

 Naturalist meets with a display of this architecture of most peculiar arrangement, and 

 which by its magnitude and immense diffusion for its separate instances are strewn 

 along many thousands of miles has never failed to fill him with a just astonishment. 

 It is an island if island it may be called which consists simply of a circular coral reef, 

 of the average width of a quarter of a mile, enclosing an area varying from a mile to 

 fifty or sixty in diameter. The features even of one such object are sufficiently singular. 

 The insects, for instance, that formed it cannot live beneath a certain depth, and the 

 coral fabric often arises in the midst of waters so deep that we can nowise fancy it to 

 have been built up from the bottom of the ocean. The difficulty was at first apparently 

 overcome by the supposition that the creatures had reared their stupendous walls on 

 the rim of the crater of a submarine volcano, long probably extinct ; but overlooking 1 

 the improbability of craters existing there of a size that rather likened them to the 

 prodigious formations in the Moon than to any exemplar upon Earth, the explanation 

 failed in regard of the two most important and characteristic facts of the case. In the 

 first place, the existence of the coral reef has been recognised at depths quite beyond 

 the limit at which any insect can now carry on its work : but inasmuch as this pheno- 

 menon might be supposed only to point to a disappearance, in the course of the world's 

 history, of species of creatures fitted to live at such profundities, I insist the most on 

 another argument, which seems to admit of no reply. The proposed solution takes no 

 account whatever of the countless numbers of those islands which stud the Pacific, along 

 a line of upwards of four thousand miles. The question as to the various depths at 

 which corals, living or extinct, could possibly have elaborated these rocks, is doubtful 

 only in regard to a number of feet wholly insignificant in respect of any large elevation ; 

 so that the foregoing hypothesis would imply the existence over that immense extension 

 of ranges or groups of submarine volcanos, or other mountains differing by no appreci- 

 able amount in altitude; and this also without regard to the absolute depths of the 

 ocean on whose floor they rest. It were, in fact, as if over some wide continent irre- 

 spective of valley, low land, or table-land- groups and ridges arose, across whose peaks 

 a plane might be stretched so as nearly to touch them all ; and surely nothing can be 

 conceived more opposite to what is visible nothing less analogous to the jagged and 

 varying outline of the most regular masses of existing mountains. That these coral 

 reefs must rest on the tops of submarine elevations, is manifest ; but some new feature 

 or element is thus clearly wanting to render the theory inclusive of all the phenomena. 

 Now this element is supplied, if, as suggested by the sagacity of our admirable Darwin, 

 we suppose these mountains placed on an area of subsidence. Picture, for instance, 

 some island, whose coasts are now encircled by a fringe of coral, gradually sinking 



