ATOLL AND REEF FORMATION 213 



days it was but natural that, after a prolonged and uncom- 

 fortable voyage, the sighting of a calm stretch of water girt 

 round with a ring of luxuriant islets should have impressed 

 the romantic voyager as something mysterious in which he 

 saw the hand of Providence. And when he came to know 

 that the whole strange structure was the work of living 

 creatures, he, following the lines of thought of his day, read 

 into the Avhole the extraordinary human vanity of the lower 

 creatures striving with ordered activity to create new fields 

 for man's enterprise. 



The coral rock of which the islands were built was the 

 work of living things, and these living things, although he 

 did not appreciate them zoologically, he knew to be at work 

 creating dry land in the midst of oceans. The building of 

 islands was their function, and they built them of a circular 

 shape, so that within the barrier which they, by their life and 

 death had raised, their offspring might be safely reared, and 

 sent forth to carry on the good work of island building. Such 

 were the views of Flinders, and the ordered circular building^ 

 by the zoophytes is characteristic of the time of the acceptance 

 of these theories. Nothing seemed more true and yet more 

 wonderful than the little beasts conspiring together to make 

 that circle of dry land, knowing it to be the proper way to 

 enclose a piece of water, where they might in safety establish 

 a breeding-ground and a nursery for their kind — and a safe 

 anchorage for the mariner. 



With the advent of the zoological traveller — the scientific 

 man who wandered over the earth during the Kenaissanco 

 period of zoology — this mode of thought became for the most 

 part obsolete among educated people. But it is charac- 

 teristic of the Romantic age of zoological travel, that the 

 impressions which it stamped upon the popular mind have 

 been lasting ones; and the reason for this is very easy to see. 

 The traveller of the Romantic age was a man who made a 

 voyage of adventure. He, as a traveller, observed with YSiVj- 

 ing accuracy the phenomena that he met with ; and assimilated 

 with varying credulity the stories that were told him ; and 



