The Coral-Reef Theory 369 



Darwin's final and very characteristic utterance on the coral-reef 

 controversy is found in a letter which he wrote to Professor 

 Alexander Agassiz, May 5th, 1881 : less than a year before his 

 death : " If I am wrong, the sooner I am knocked on the head and 

 annihilated so much the better. It still seems to me a marvellous 

 thing that there should not have been much, and long-continued, sub- 

 sidence in the beds of the great oceans. I wish that some doubly rich 

 millionaire would take it into his head to have borings made in some 

 of the Pacific and Indian atolls, and bring home cores for slicing 

 from a depth of 500 or 600 feet 1 ." 



Though the " doubly rich millionaire " has not been forthcoming, 

 the energy, in England, of Professor Sollas, and in New South Wales 

 of Professor Anderson Stuart served to set on foot a project, which, 

 aided at first by the British Association for the Advancement of 

 Science, and afterwards taken up jointly by the Royal Society, the 

 New South Wales Government, and the Admiralty, has led to the 

 most definite and conclusive results. 



The Committee appointed by the Royal Society to carry out the 

 undertaking included representatives of all the views that had been 

 put forward on the subject. The place for the experiment was, with 

 the consent of every member of the Committee, selected by the late 

 Admiral Sir W. J. Wharton — who was not himself an adherent of 

 Darwin's views — and no one has ventured to suggest that his selec- 

 tion, the splendid atoll of Funafuti, was not a most judicious one. 



By the pluck and perseverence of Professor Sollas in the pre- 

 liminary expedition, and of Professor T. Edgeworth David and his 

 pupils, in subsequent investigations of the island, the rather difficult 

 piece of work was brought to a highly satisfactory conclusion. The 

 New South Wales Government lent boring apparatus and workmen, 

 and the Admiralty carried the expedition to its destination in a 

 surveying ship which, under Captain (now Admiral) A. Mostyn Field, 

 made the most complete survey of the atoll and its surrounding seas 

 that has ever been undertaken in the case of a coral formation. 



After some failures and many interruptions, the boring was 

 carried to the depth of 1114 feet, and the cores obtained were sent 

 to England. Here the examination of the materials was fortunately 

 undertaken by a zoologist of the highest repute, Dr G. J. Hinde — who 

 has a wide experience in the study of organisms by sections — and he 

 was aided at all points by specialists in the British Museum of 

 Natural History and by other naturalists. Nor were the chemical 

 and other problems neglected. 



The verdict arrived at, after this most exhaustive study of a series 

 of cores obtained from depths twice as great as that thought 



1 L. L. in. p. 184. 

 D. 24 



