1898.] Funafuti, Rotuma and Fiji. 489 



Alaska, 1796; it is 3,000 feet high. Captain Dawson, H.M.S. 

 Waterwitch, informed me that in the eruption of Ambry n, New 

 Hebrides, in 1895, the lava where it met the water in its flow, 

 burst into fine cinders and ash; of course under the ash the lava 

 might possibly still flow. Further, so far as I am aware, no deep 

 banks of crater-form have yet been discovered in the sea. The 

 foregoing is sufficient evidence to make it very doubtful whether 

 craters can be formed under the sea, and if the foundation of any 

 atoll should be on the top of a crater ; I consider it can only have 

 been thus formed owing to the subsidence of the crater. The 

 island of Totoya, about 1° due west of Kambara, Fiji, is the 

 remains of an extinct crater, 3 miles across and 1184 feet high, 

 with the south side blown out ; it now has a depth of 30 fathoms 

 of water in the original crater. If it subsided 1300 feet, an almost 

 perfect ring of coral would grow up, but it would take a very long 

 time for the crater to fill up to 30 fathoms, the usual depth of an 

 atoll ; and whether it could ever do so, on account of its opening 

 to the south and the consequent scour inside, is doubtful. I can 

 find no atoll or horse-shoe reefs with depths in any way approach- 

 ing this, and I conclude that it is absolutely necessary to reject 

 this theory in its entirety, as applied to any atolls. 



Darwin's theory has, however, a great advantage over all others 

 which have before or since its publication been put forward, in 

 that it explains all the different forms of reefs on the same hypo- 

 thesis. There can be from the nature of the case little direct 

 evidence brought forward of subsidence. "There is," Dana writes 1 , 

 " not merely probable but positive evidence of subsidence in the 

 deep coast indentations of the high islands within the great 

 barriers. The long points and deep fiord-like bays are such as 

 exist only where a land, having been deeply gouged by erosion, 

 has become half submerged." Such evidence as applied to 

 volcanic islands is, I submit, of very doubtful value. Viti Levu and 

 Vanua Levu, according to Dana's views, must have subsided 

 at least 1000 feet, and, as there are practically no atoll or barrier 

 reefs with land on their rims in the Fiji Group, it must be still 

 subsiding slowly ; yet, although the coast is by no means an 

 even one, a subsidence of even 100 feet would make a very great 

 difference in the direction that Dana has suggested. The coast, 

 too, of Australia inside the Great Barrier Reef certainly does not 

 show the characters that Dana propounded. 



Saville Kent has brought forward an argument for subsidence 

 from the distribution of the animals, now peculiar to Australia 

 and the neighbouring islands. He draws attention especially 

 to the Darling Downs deposit in which the bird remains find their 



1 Loc. cit., p. 273. 



