18 CORALS AND COMAL ISLANDS. 



about us, sees everywhere, in the dim limits of vision, the word 

 mystery. Surely there is no reason why the simplest of organ- 

 isms should bear the impress most strongly. If we are aston- 

 ished that so great deeds should proceed from the little and 

 low, it is because we fail to appreciate that little things, even 

 the least of living or physical existences in nature, are, under 

 God, expressions throughout of comprehensive laws, laws that 

 govern alike the small and the great. 



It is not more surprising, nor a matter of more difficult 

 comprehension, that a polyp should form structures of stone 

 (carbonate of lime) called coral, than that the quadruped 

 should form its bones, or the mollusk its shell. The pro- 

 cesses are similar, and so the result. In each case it is a sim- 

 ple animal secretion ; a secretion of stony matter from the 

 aliment which the animal receives, produced by the parts of 

 the animal fitted for this secreting process ; and in each, car- 

 bonate of lime is a constituent, or one of the constituents, of 

 the secretion. 



This power of secretion is then one of the first and most 

 common of those that belong to living tissues ; and though dif- 

 fering in different organs according to their end or function, it 

 is all one process, both in its nature and cause, whether in the 

 Animalcule or Man. It belongs eminently to the lowest kinds 

 of life. These are the best stone-makers ; for in their simplici- 

 ty of structure they may be almost all stone and still carry on 

 the processes of nutrition and growth. Throughout geological 

 time they were the agents appointed to produce the material 

 of limestones, and also to make even the flint and many of the 

 siliceous deposits of the earth's formations. 



Coral is never, therefore, the handiwork of the many- 

 armed polyps ; for it is no more a result of labor than bone- 

 making in ourselves. And again, it is not a collection of cells 



