410 W. M. DAVIS 
the map would “give an approximately correct view of the general 
distribution of coral reefs over the whole world”’ (123). He added: 
‘““We may therefore conceive that the proximity in the same areas 
of the two classes of reefs [barriers and atolls], which owe their 
origin to the subsidence of the earth’s crust and their separation 
from those [fringing reefs] formed during its stationary or rising 
condition, holds good to the full extent which might have been 
anticipated by our theory” (125). Thus encouraged he constructed 
a theory regarding the movements of continents and ocean bottoms 
out of his theory of coral reefs: ‘‘The eastern and western bound- 
aries of our map are continents, and they are rising areas: the 
central spaces of the great Indian and Pacific oceans are mostly 
subsiding; between them, north of Australia, lies the most broken 
land on the globe, and there the rising parts are surrounded and 
penetrated by areas of subsidence” (143). . 
The facts of reef distribution as now reported are much more 
complicated than they appeared to be in 1842. For example, 
Darwin knew the Fiji group only as containing sea-level barrier 
teefs and atolls, and therefore charted it as indicating simple sub- 
sidence. Dana also interpreted the Fiji group in this way. Since 
those earlier years many high-standing reefs have been found in 
Fiji, and certain observers thereupon completely reversed the pre- 
vious opinion and regarded Fiji as an area of simple elevation and 
as therefore contradicting Darwin’s theory. Closer study gives 
abundant evidence to show that Fiji is really an area of complicated 
oscillation, and that its reefs—those now uplifted as well as those 
still at sea-level—were formed during times of submergence, appar- 
ently the result of subsidence. The latest statement to this effect 
is an article by Foye, cited above, concerning the eastern part of Fiji. 
In view of the interesting complications thus brought forward, it 
has been said that, while the irregular uplifts and subsidences in 
Fiji support Darwin’s coral-reef theory, they “‘negative the idea 
of a general depression of the Pacific islands, a further conception 
of the theory.”’ This seems to me unwarrantably to condemn the 
subsidence theory of coral reefs. The simple theory of the general 
subsidence of the Pacific Ocean bottom was based on a belief regard- 
ing the subsidence of many Pacific islands, and is not an essential 
part of the subsidence theory of coral reefs; the theory of the 
