306 W. M. DAVIS 
of Sydney, New South Wales), who was sent from England to 
study Christmas Island, an elevated atoll nearly 1,200 feet high 
in the eastern part of the Indian Ocean, seems to have followed the 
belief announced by Suess regarding the elevated Loyalty atolls 
of the Western Pacific; for, although he recognized that the basal 
limestones of shallow-water deposition must have been depressed 
in order to be covered by hundreds of feet of later limestones, 
he afterward suggested that the altitude of Christmas Island 
might not be due so much to a local uplift of 1,200 feet from an 
ocean of stationary level as to a subsidence of the ocean by 1,260 
feet while the island stood still;' he thus, perhaps unintentionally, 
implied that all the ocean bottom elsewhere recently subsided 
1,200 feet, and that all the islands and all the continents which did 
not emerge at the same time by the same amount also subsided 
with the ocean; or else that a smaller part of the ocean bottom sub- | 
sided by a proportionately greater amount. If we could follow 
this author’s lead we should not hesitate to explain the submarine 
banks of the Indian Ocean by subsidence, for a hypothesis which 
accounts for the local emergence of a small island by a great and 
widespread sinking of the ocean bottom elsewhere need not shrink. 
from explaining submarine banks by a subsidence of 40 to 50 
fathoms. But for my own part I can find little support for the 
subsidence theory of coral reefs in a hypothesis so reckless as that 
which accounts for the emergence of Christmas Island by a sinking 
of most of the rest of the world; hence we must look elsewhere 
for evidence as to the behavior of the Indian Ocean bottom. 
We thus come to Gardiner’s study of the Maldive atolls which 
led him to reject recent subsidence; for, although he accepts the 
depression of a large land area between India and Madagascar in 
Tertiary time, he asserts that “‘this depression is not the same as 
the slow and long-continued subsidence postulated by the upholders 
of Darwin’s theory,” and then, ‘seeing the absolute impossibility 
of subsidence affording any explanation”? for the Maldives, he 
concludes that “an almost flat plateau at a depth of 140 to 170 
fathoms was at one time formed by the erosion and denudation of 
™C. W. Andrews, A Monograph of Christmas Island (Indian Ocean) (London, 
1900), p. 208. 
