AGASSIZ: FIJI ISLANDS AND CORAL REEFS. 7 
Friendly group; two, Taputeaua and Apia, in the Gilbert group, and 
five others near the equator, east of the Gilbert group: Swain’s, Fakaofu, 
_Oatafu, Hull and Enderbury Island, as well as the reef region of the 
Sooloo Sea and of the Straits of Malacca.” 
In my account of the coral reefs of the Sandwich Islands,’ I have 
given a short résumé of the results of the principal investigations on 
coral reefs since the days of Darwin and Dana down to 1889. What 
has been done since that time will be found referred to in Bouney’s 
edition of Darwin’s Coral Reefs,? in Kent’s “Great Barrier Reef,” in 
Langenbeck’s sketches? of recent work on the subject, as well as in the 
reports of the explorations I have carried on in the Bahamas and Cuba,* 
the West Indies,> Florida,® and the Bermudas’ in the Atlantic, and of 
the expeditions I have made to the Galapagos,® the Great Barrier Reef 
of Australia,® and Fiji.! 
1 Bull. Mus. Comp. Zoél., Vol. XVII. p. 121 (1889). 
2 Professor Bonney (Coral Reefs, Darwin, 1889, 3d ed., Appendix II. p. 290), 
has evidently confounded the views of Professor L. Agassiz on the extent of 
the formation of the southern extremity of Florida by coral reefs, dating back 
to 1854, with those which I have published in 1877, in 1880, in 1888, and again 
in 1896. Neither Dall nor Heilprin has examined the Florida reefs; their 
studies have been devoted to other parts of the peninsula, and did not extend 
south of the northern limit of the Everglades. Their criticisms in both cases 
apply to the views of Professor L. Agassiz, as my observations were limited 
to the reef region, and did not encroach on the area examined by Dall or Heilprin. 
But I have plainly shown by the borings at Key West that the recent coral forma- 
tion is of moderate thickness, not more than about fifty feet, and thatit is underlaid 
by a substratum of tertiary limestones, occasionally coralliferous, of a thickness of 
nearly two thousand feet. The area probably covered by the coral reef of Florida 
at the time of its greatest expansion is approximately shown on Plate XVII., Bull. 
Mus. Comp. Zo6l., Vol. XXVIII. No. 2,1896. I never made the statement quoted 
by Bonney that the recent coral reefs extended over any part of Florida north of the 
Everglades. On the contrary, I said in the conclusion of my memoir on the 
Tortugas and Florida Reefs (Mem. Am. Acad., Vol. XI. p. 116, 1883), “ All this 
evidence tends to show that the coral reefs had little, if anything, to do with the 
building up of the peninsula of Florida, north of Cape Florida.” 
8 R. Langenbeck, Die neueren Forschungen iiber die Korallenriffe, Hettner, 
Geog. Zeits., Bd. III., 1897, pp. 514, 566, 634. 
4 Bull. Mus. Comp. Zodl., Vol. XX VI. No. 1, 1894. 
5 Three Cruises of the Blake, 1888, Vol. I. p. 66. 
6 Bull. Mus. Comp. Zodl., Vol. XXVIII. No. 2, 1896. 
7 Tbid., Vol. XX VI. No. 2, 1895. 
8 Ibid., Vol. XXIII. No. 1, 1892. 
9 Ibid., Vol. XXVIII. No. 4, 1898. 
10 Am. Journ. of Science, February, 1898, Vol. V. p. 118. 
