profound that the minds of the wisest men reel, totter and 

 give way when they attempt to grasp and follow it, the little, 

 tireless, plodding, stone-secreting corals of our own times have 

 descended. The monuments of their Past are the islands and 

 continents, whose foundations they laid, that have arisen out of 

 the sea — while the Future patiently, in solemn majesty, awaits 

 the completion, in tropical and semi-tropical latitudes, of those 

 new foundations, now being so quietly and noiselessly laid by 

 these diligent builders, upon which the " new earth " of prophecy 

 is to rest. 



Looking at them in the perfectly clear waters of the Bahamas, 

 how insignificant they appear! Studying them more carefully 

 in the light of the vast results which they have already accom- 

 plished, they seem foremost among the great builders, made and 

 set apart by God for the erection of homes, in a vast and wild 

 waste of waters, for all the varied forms of vegetable and animal 

 life. Individually they are seemingly as insignificant as the motes 

 in a sun-beam. Collectively, as seen through the dim mists 

 which shroud in gloom the vast unknown periods lying back of 

 the small cycles of recorded time, they glow and are hallowed 

 with a radiance reflected from a divinity whose decrees they ex- 

 ecute. " The mill of the gods grinds slow;" to Him who had no 

 beginning and is ever existing, ''a thousand years are as one 

 day," — and as we, from time to time, gazed at and reflected upon 

 these little but most important creatures in their ocean homes, 

 they revealed to us more of the divine than did ever the lofty 

 cloud-capped mountain in its sublimity, or the vast ocean when 

 vexed and tossed by the wildest and most angry storms. Upon 

 our arrival in Nassau they were the first to attract our attention, 

 and, before leaving, they were among the last to engage our 

 thoughts and employ our pen. "When we would propose the task 

 of attempting some description of them, we felt an indescribable 



