412 CORAL AND CORAL REEFS 



age of the world's history which has yet been examined, 

 accumulations of limestone, many of which have certainly 

 been built up in just the same way as those coral reefs 

 which are now forming the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. 

 And even if we turn to the oldest periods of geologic history, 

 although the nature of the materials is changed, although 

 we cannot apply to them the same reasonings that we can 

 to the existing corals, yet still there are vast masses of 

 limestone formed of nothing else than the accumulations 

 of the skeletons of similar animals, and testifying that 

 even in those remote periods of the world's history, as now, 

 the order of things implies that the earth had already 

 endured for a period of which our ordinary standards of 

 chronology give us not the slightest conception. In other 

 words, the history of these coral reefs, traced out honestly 

 and carefully, and with the same sort of reasoning that 

 you would use in the ordinary affairs of life, testifies, like 

 every fact that I know of, to the prodigious antiquity 

 of the earth since it existed in a condition in the main 

 similar to that in which it how is. 



