214 CORAL AND ATOLLS 



then lie gave his adventures and his Natural History to the 

 public as an interesting pot-pourri. 



The scientific man of to-day can reach the popular mind 

 in no such way ; he has no record of stirring adventure ; he is 

 as a rule a specialist whose bare results are not acceptable to a 

 wide public. The result of all this is that when Natural His- 

 tory is served up for that period of childhood when Nature's 

 wonders are of interest to nearly all, and when most people 

 gather their ideas of Nature, it is from the writings of the 

 Romantic age that the greater part of the information is 

 culled. It is in travellers' tales that we as children 

 delighted, and the plates that adorned these tales bid fair to 

 outlast the tales themselves. All this is but natural, for it must 

 be admitted that it is the fault of modern zoological literature 

 that it is devoid of interest, except to a very limited number 

 of specialists. I do not think that the man exists who, merely 

 possessing a thirst for information and a general love of 

 Nature, could read with any pleasure the mass of modern 

 literature on the corals and coral islands. It is easy to recall 

 the time when we were told or when we read of coral islands, 

 and revive a thought association of busy living creatures 

 building, building — always building and dying — in the midst 

 of the ocean. By their efforts these living creatures made the 

 islands where the waving palm trees grow, and where the 

 weary mariner may rest in the calm lagoon, and gather in 

 the green island groves all the splendid fruits of the tropics. 



It is, I believe, a common enough idea that the coral 

 creatures build coral, much as bees build honeycomb, but the 

 comb is to them their dwelling-place and their mausoleum, and 

 the comb is raised up and up from the depths of the sea as 

 the busy creatures build below. Such ideas are of course no 

 longer tenable, and serve only as landmarks of the time when 

 the whole of Nature's happenings were explained by reading 

 into the great puzzle the direct intervention of Providence on 

 man's behalf, and by giving to the lowest of creatures most 

 of the emotions and all the instincts of human beings. 

 Although this mode of thought has long since departed from 



