490 Mr Gardiner, The Coral Reefs of [Mar. 7, 



nearest allies in New Zealand, of which one species is classed 

 directly with the genus Dinornis 1 . The deposit is referred to an 

 epoch not later than the early Pliocene. The time at which the 

 Great Barrier Reef of Australia originated is placed " somewhere 

 about the period of the later tertiaries." The Rev. A. H. Cooke, 

 in speaking of the distribution of the land Mollusca of the 

 Melanesian Province, including the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, 

 the Loyalty and Fiji Islands, remarks that "these islands are very 

 probably the remains of what was once a much wider extent 

 of land 2 ." The arguments to be deduced in favour of subsidence 

 from the distribution of animals are worthy of every attention. 

 If the views of Saville Kent and Cooke are correct the origin of 

 coral reefs must be, comparatively speaking, either quite recent, 

 or the subsidences must have been very rapid and the traces of all 

 the former reefs have been obliterated, or, finally, the origin of 

 coral reefs must be put down to some other cause than subsidence. 

 Again, the subsidence, required by Darwin's theory, must be 

 slow and long-continued to form the atolls and barrier reefs of the 

 Pacific. All the evidence of movement in this ocean such as it is, 

 decidedly points, however, to the movement as being rapid- and 

 local. There are many local upheavals, and conversely, if local 

 upheavals occur, there should also be taking place in a similar 

 manner local subsidences. The evidence does not show that these 

 elevations have been slow, but rather in sudden steps. I have 

 already given my reasons for thinking that the upheavals, which 

 formed the several limestone islands of the Lau Group of Fiji, 

 were rapid ones. The characters of the raised reefs of the 

 Solomon and Tongan Islands as described by Guppy and Lister 

 also go to show that the upheavals, which formed these, were 

 probably rapid. The terrace formation of Christmas Island 3 , in 

 the eastern part of the Indian Ocean and of Cuba, is not what one 

 would expect to find if the elevation had been slow ; there would 

 rather be required a series of sudden upheavals with, between 

 these upheavals, periods of rest. Conversely there should also 

 have been sudden local subsidences with long periods of rest. I 

 have examined all the charts of the islands in the Pacific Ocean, and 

 of no island can I find any indication of such subsidences in the 

 soundings off them. Professor Bayley Balfour, in his description 

 of the island of Rodriguez 4 , mentions the existence of what he 

 believes to be an old reef at a depth of about 90 fathoms ; it 

 must be remarked in connection with this that he considers that 

 the present reef rests on it, but whether directly, or by an outward 



1 The Great Barrier Reef of Australia, p. 136 et seq. 



2 Mollusca in the Cambridge Nat. Hist. , p. 323. 



3 Dana, loc. cit., p. 274. 



4 Phil. Trans. R. Soc, clxviii., 1879. 





