CORAL AND CORAL REEFS* 



THE subject upon which I wish to address you to-night is 

 the structure and origin of Coral and Coral Reefs. Under 

 the head of " coral " there are included two very different 

 things; one of them is that substance which I imagine a 

 great number of us have champed when we were very 

 much younger than we are now, the common red coral, 

 which is used so much, as you know, for the edification and 

 the delectation of children of tender years, and is also 

 employed for the purposes of ornament for those who are 

 much older, and as some think might know better. The 

 other kind of coral is a very different substance ; it may 

 for distinction's sake be called the white coral; it is a material 

 which most assuredly not the hardest-hearted of baby 

 farmers would give to a baby to chew, and it is a substance 

 which is to be seen only in the cabinets of curious persons, 

 or in museums, or, may be, over the mantelpieces of sea- 

 faring men. But although the red coral, as I have 

 mentioned to you, has access to the very best society ; and 

 although the white coral is comparatively a despised pro- 

 duct, yet in this, as in many other cases, the humbler thing 

 is in reality the greater ; the amount of work which is done 

 in the world by the white coral being absolutely infinite 

 compared with that effected by its delicate and pampered 

 namesake. Each of these substances, the white coral and 

 the red, however, has a relationship to the other. They 

 are, in a zoological sense, cousins, each of them being 

 formed by the same kind of animals in what is substantially 

 the same way. Each of these bodies is, in fact, the hard 

 skeleton of a very curious and a very simple animal, more 

 comparable to the bones of such animals as ourselves than 



* A Lecture delivered in Manchester, November 4th, 1870. 

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