ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 65 



excellent investigator of nature has given of the gradual 

 production of these wonderful forms. As on the one 

 hand Cavolini, Ehrenberg, and Savigny have perfected the 

 scientific anatomical knowledge of the organisation of coral- 

 animals,, so on the other hand the geographical and geo- 

 logical relations of coral-islands have been investigated and 

 elucidated, first by Eeinhold and George Forster in Cook's 

 Second Voyage, and subsequently, after a long interval, by 

 Chamisso, Peron, Quoy and Gaimard, Flinders, Lutke, 

 Beechey, Darwin, d'Urville, and Lottin. 



The coral-animals and their stony cellular structures or 

 scaffolding belong principally to the warm tropical seas, and 

 the reefs are found more frequently in the Southern than in 

 the Northern Hemisphere. The Atolls or Lagoon Islands are 

 crowded together in what has been called the Coral-Sea, off 

 the north-east coast of New Holland, including New Cale- 

 donia, the Salomon's Islands, and the Louisiade Archipe- 

 lago ; in the group of the Low islands (Low Archipelago), 

 eighty in number ; in the Fidji, Ellice, and Gilbert groups ; 

 and in the Indian Ocean, on the north-east of Madagascar, 

 under the name of the Atoll group of Saya de Malha. 



The great Chagos bank, of which the structure and rocks 

 of dead coral have been thoroughly examined by Captain 

 Moresby and by Powell, is so much the more interesting, 

 because we may regard it as a continuation of the more 

 northerly Laccadives and Maldives. I have already called 

 attention elsewhere (Asie Centrale, T. i. p. 218), to the 

 importance of the succession of these Atolls, running exactly 

 in the direction of a meridian and continued as far as 7 



VOL. II. J 



