Mr. Couthouy’s Reply to Mr. Dana. 381 
were called for in evidence, they could no where be discovered 
among the other archives of the expedition, deposited at the Navy 
Department, and Mr. Wilkes professed entire ignorance of their 
fate. Neither am I aware that up to the present hour, they have 
been found or even sought for. But for the documents referred 
to, I might therefore, at this moment, stand comparatively pow- 
erless to repel the accusations of Mr. Dana. 
These documents are not at present in my possession, but I 
pledge myself to obtain and produce them in evidence at the next 
meeting of the American Association of Geologists and Natural- 
ists, before whom it appears the charge of Mr. D. was first made. 
The publication of my article on coral formations in the Boston 
Journal of Natural History, for January, 1842, was first induced by 
certain statements of Mr. Lyell, in one of his lectures before the 
Lowell Institute, which caused considerable misapprehension as 
to the features of some of the Polynesian islands visited by me. 
Looking upon the suggestions which had presented themselves 
to my mind, upon the influence of temperature on the growth 
of corals, as of some importance, and having learned from Mr. 
Lyell that Mr. Darwin was about publishing an elaborate work 
on the subject of their distribution, &c., I concluded, after con- 
sultation with my friends, to embrace this opportunity for a brief 
expression of my views, and thereby avoid being forestalled by 
him, in case his observations had led him to similar conclusions. 
Unlike Mr. Dana, I deemed it highly probable that another per- 
son, observing the same facts as myself, might draw precisely the 
same inferences. ‘This was my sole motive for publication. 
I will now pass to the fact of my instancing the Gallapagos 
and Bermudas as deviations from the general limit of coral for- 
mations. From the manner of Mr. Dana’s mention of his re- 
marks on these groups, one would naturally infer that they were 
the only anomalous cases cited by me, as well as by himself, and 
therefore to be viewed in the light of collateral evidence of my 
having purloined his notes. But this is far from a fair statement 
of the case. The former are spoken of, simply as an instance 
occurring in the equatorial Pacific of the same singular destitu- 
tion of corals characterizing a number of the intertropical islands 
of the Atlantic, such as Trinidad, Martin Vas, Fernando Noronha, 
the Cape Verds, and Canaries, and Mr. Dana will not, I pre- 
sume, include these also, among those whose anomalies “‘ were 
