CORALS AND CORAL ISLANDS. 



CHAPTER I. 



CORALS A1NTD CORAL MAKERS. 



A SINGULAR degree of obscurity has possessed the popu- 

 lar mind with regard to the growth of corals and coral 

 reefs, in consequence .of the readiness with which speculations 

 have been supplied and accepted in place of facts ; and to the 

 present day the subject is seldom mentioned without the qual- 

 ifying adjective mysterious expressed or understood. Some 

 writers, rejecting the idea which science had reached, that 

 reefs of rocks could be due in any way to " animalcules," 

 have talked of electrical forces, the first and last appeal of ig- 

 norance. One author, not many years since, made the fishes 

 of the sea the masons, and in his natural wisdom supposed 

 that they worked with their teeth in building up the great 

 reef. Many of those who have discoursed most poetically on 

 zoophytes have imagined that the polyps were mechanical 

 workers, heaping up the piles of coral rock by their united la- 

 bors ; and science is hardly yet rid of such terms as polypary, 

 polypidom, which imply that each coral is the constructed 

 hive or house of a swarm of polyps, like the honey-comb of 

 the bee, or the hillock of a colony of ants. 



Science, while it penetrates deeply the system of things 



