APPENDIX. 283 



that every bit of dust has been alive, the earth and all its 

 contents being used over and over again, as a wheel in action 

 is turning continually round. 



! Professor Agassiz says that the southern half of the 

 peninsula of Florida, which is built up of coral reefs, took 

 135,000 years to form, and my friend has very kindly author- 

 ized my using the information he received from Dr. J. Schrader 

 illustrating the process of formation, which will exactly 

 answer the question, How did these vast beds of phosphate of 

 lime come to be in the position where he saw them ? 



" Far back in the misty ages of the dead past," he says, 

 " countless centuries before Troy or Athens had a being, 

 before Nineveh was destroyed, or the Pyramids were built, 

 hundreds of generations before the Tower of Babel rose, or 

 the hail of fire swept Sodom and Gomorrah, innumerable 

 ages before the embattled walls and turrets of ancient Baby- 

 lon rose above the Chaldean plains; farther, still farther 

 back, thousands of years before the first rose blossomed in 

 the Garden of Eden, a little animal, one of the lowest orders 

 of animal beings, lived and toiled beneath the ocean's tide. 

 That animal scarcely more animal than vegetable was the 

 polyp, the coral animal, or, as it is sometimes called, the coral 

 insect. He must have led a monotonous life, subsisting on 

 limestone, and making coral day after day and year after 

 year, with never a change of diet or occupation, with no 

 neighbours of a higher order than himself, for there were 

 few forms of animal life in the ocean then, and none on the 

 land. But he was not ambitious ; and, having plenty of ' sea 

 room,' he applied himself diligently to his life-work, forming 

 coral, raising the ocean bed, and laying the foundation for 

 future islands and expanding continents. 



" There were great swelling tides in those days ; tides 

 which swept with impetuous fury, far inland; lashing the 

 feet of the mountains ; and in their retreat, carrying back the 

 disintegrated rock and other calcareous matter, as fresh 

 material for the toiling polyps. 



