VOLUME XXVI NUMBER 5 
THE 
IOURNAT Om GEOLOGY 
JOLYAAUG OSM rors 
W. M. DAVIS 
Cambridge, Massachusetts 
PART III "Pal Muse 
Submarine banks in the coral seas —Most modern writers on the 
coral-reef problem have followed Darwin in explaining the sub- 
marine banks of the coral seas as submerged atolls which had sub- 
sided so fast that their reefs were not built up to the sea surface; 
but they are regarded by Daly as representing still-standing pre- 
glacial volcanic islands, reduced first by long-continued erosion to 
low relief, and then by abrasion before or during the glacial period 
to smooth platforms, around which postglacial reefs have been less 
completely formed than around the corresponding platforms of ordi- 
nary atolls. Thus here again subsidence is the essential factor of 
the older explanation, while it is essentially excluded from the newer 
one. One explanation is as easily conceived as the other; the 
difficult matter is, as before, to find appropriate tests by which the 
true explanation can be determined. If the submarine banks were 
today all of the same depth and if they still preserved the form of 
very flat cones which abrasion would give them the problem might 
be easily solved; but their depths vary and their form is not that 
of flat cones but, as a rule, of shallow saucers; thus the problem 
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