Islands and Coral Reefs of Fiji. 409 



Friendly group ; two, Taputeaua and Apia, in the Gilbert group, 

 and five others near the equator, east of the Gilbert group; Swain's 

 Fakaofu, Oatafu, Hull and Enderbury Island, as well as the reef 

 region of the Sooloo Sea and of the Straits of Malacca.' 



" In my account of the coral reefs of the Sandwich Islands, I have 

 given a short resume of the results of the principal investigations on 

 coral reefs since the days of Darwin and Dana down to 1889. What 

 has been done since that time will be found referred to in Bonney's 

 edition of Darwin's Coral Eeefs,^ in Kent's ' Great Barrier Reef,' in 

 Langenbeck's sketches of recent work on the subject, as well as in 

 the reports of the explorations I have carried on in the Bahamas and 

 Cuba, the West Indies, Florida, and the Bermudas in the Atlantic, 

 and of the expeditions I have made to the Galapagos, the Great 

 Barrier Reef of Australia, and Fiji. 



" An excellent account of the Samoan Reefs has been published 

 by Dr. Kramer, supplementing the earlier short notice of Dr. Graeff 

 on the reefs of the group ; also interesting notes by Admiral Wharton, 

 on Submarine Banks of the Pacific. A careful account of the geology 

 of the Friendly Islands by Lister, published in 1891, seems to have 

 escaped the attention of writers on coral reefs. A few notes on the 

 reefs of some of the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago have been 

 published by Dr. Dahl, but the evidence he gives does not seem to 

 me to warrant his conclusions. The great thickness of elevated 

 reef he found (570 m.) may (as is the case elsewhere in the Pacific) 

 not belong to the present epoch, as he takes it for granted, and no 

 one supposes that elevation has necessarily always taken place 

 uniformly either in time or space over any great stretch of territory. 



"The articles by Heilprin and by Ortman on what they call 

 ' Patch Reefs,' do not seem to me to have any special bearing on the 

 general theory of coral reefs. The existence of such ' patches ' has 

 long been known and referred to by Darwin, and by many writers 

 on coral reefs, as reef patches. These patches occur in localities 

 where fringing reefs for local causes would not flourish except at 

 a little distance from shore and play a very subordinate part in the 



1 Professor Bonney (" Coral Reefs," Darwin, 1889, 3rd ed., Appeadix ii, p. 290), 

 lias evidently confounded the views of Professor L. Agassiz on the extent of the 

 formation of the southern extremity of Florida by coral reefs, dating back to 1854, 

 with those which I have published in 1877, in 1880, in 1888, and again in 1896. 

 Neither Dall or Heilprin has examined the Florida reefs ; their studies have been 

 devoted to other parts of the peninsula, and did not extend south of the northern 

 limit of the Everglades. Their criticisms iu both cases apply to the views of 

 Professor L. Agassiz, as my observations were limited to the reef region, and did not 

 encroach on the area examined by Dall or Heilprin. But I have plainly shown by 

 the borings at Key West that the recent coral formation is of moderate thickness, 

 not more than about tifty feet, and that it is underlaid by a substratum of Tertiary 

 limestones, occasionally coralliferous, of a thickness of nearly two thousand feet. 

 The area probably covered by the coral reef of Florida at the time of its greatest 

 expansion is approximately shown on plate xvii. Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., vol. xxviii 

 (1896), No. 2. I never made the statement quoted by Bonney that the recent coral 

 reefs extended over any part of Florida north of the Everglades. On the contrary, 

 I said in the conclusion of my memoir on the Tortugas and Florida Reefs (Mem. Am. 

 Acad., vol. xi, 1883, p. 116), " All this evidence tends to show that the coral reefs 

 had little, if anything, to do with the building up of the peninsula of Florida, north 

 of Cape Florida." 



