THE LOWER FORMS OF LIFE. 129 



in which there is rarely more than a few fathoms of water, most of 

 which is uncovered at low tide. The shore itself is made up of 

 " bluffs " rarely more than ten feet high. North of the shore come 

 what are called Indian hunting grounds, " low, flat, marshy ponds, 

 hardly above the level of the sea ;" and still further up country are 

 another series of what are called "hummocks," which are "little 

 hilly tracts of land from five feet to ten feet above the level of the 

 sea, strangely arrayed in a row." 



To make a long story short, Professor Agassiz discovered that 

 these bluffs of the shore, and the " hummocks " beyond them, were 

 severally the remains of coral reefs similar to that on which the 

 " Keys " are formed, and that which is just completed three miles 

 beyond it ! They have the same average thickness, and have been 

 built up by polyps specifically the same as those now living. There- 

 fore, says Professor Agassiz, we have evidence that " twenty-four 

 thousand years ago there was a sea washing the place where these 

 ' hummocks ' are, and that no reef had then formed beneath them." 

 But still more. It appears that the space occupied by the four reefs 

 described covers only sixteen miles, but that similar concentrically 

 placed ".hummocks" exist as far as Lake Okeechobee, sixty miles in 

 the interior. "We shrink," says Professor Agassiz, "even from the 

 evidence that it has required 24,000 years to build this narrow strip 

 of land ; how shall we shrink from the assumption that hundreds of 

 thousands of years must have been required to build that prolonga- 

 tion of the peninsula of Florida, which is entirely made up of coral 

 reefs ? And yet what is that compared with the age of the world ? 

 It is to-day ! It is modern time ! It is the period called the present, 

 for it is a period within which the species of animals which now live 

 began to exist on the earth." 



Such is the famous " Florida reef " induction one of the latest 

 scientific investigations into the age of that world which was truly 

 "made in the beginning," and perfected for the success and main- 

 tenance of each successive race of beings, which we know full well 

 from the unerring records of geology have successively inhabited it. 



I have not noticed the beauty of the scenery, nor the lovely 

 climate, nor the natural productions, nor the wild savages, nor the 

 still wilder storms, which are characteristic of the Coral Islands in the 

 Pacific Ocean. In Mr. Ellis' s interesting "Polynesian Eesearches " 

 much information on this subject will be found. 



Of the other two divisions of the Actinozoa, viz., the Eugosa, the 

 species of which are all fossil, and the Ctenophora, which are all 

 oceanic, a good deal that is interesting might be said ; but their con- 

 sideration is of more importance to the purely-scientific man, and I 

 will, therefore, end here my "Popular Illustrations" of the Coelenterata. 



