4 FUNAFUTI ATOLL. 



Caledonia, New Hebrides, Fiji and the Solomons, which during 

 the life of the existing fauna have been first deeply sunk and 

 then slightly elevated. Viewing Australia as the massif around 

 which have been concentrically heaped up* this inner and 

 outer chain, it is noteworthy that the only point in which the 

 outer chain has swelled into large and lofty islands is where, in 

 the Samoan Archipelago, it has swept on to the heel of the 

 Melanesian Plateau. 



Proceeding southwards the following are the inhabited islands 

 of the Ellice : Nanomea, Niutao, Nanomana, Nui, Vaitapu, 

 Nukufetau, Funafuti, Nukulailai, and Nurakita. Every member 

 of the group is essentially an atoll or lagoon island, but in the 

 smallest, like Nurakita, the structure is masked by the filling in of 

 the lagoon having reached completion, and converted the interior 

 of the atoll from water to land. 



To elucidate the relation of Funafuti to the other members of 

 the group, the following sketch of the archipelago is compiled 

 from the notes of various travellers : 



NUEAKITA. " Six hundred miles from Samoa, sailing north- 

 westerly, the first of the group, Sophia Island, is sighted. It is 

 the south-easterly outlier of the group, and is the only one of 

 sufficient height to be seen from the vessel's deck at a distance of 

 twenty miles. Until a few years ago it was uninhabited, although 

 the people of the next island, Nukulaelae, say that ' in the old, 

 old time, many people lived there. 'f It is about three miles and 

 a half in circumference, has bub few cocoanuts growing upon it, 

 and would have remained untenanted in its loneliness to this day 

 'out for the discovery of a fairly valuable deposit of guano. Then 

 it was taken possession of by an enterprising American store- 

 keeper in Samoa, named Moors, who landed native labourers and 

 worked, and is still working, the deposit. The old native name 



* In this connection Messrs. Haddon, Sollas and Cole (On the Geology 

 of Torres Straits, Trans. E. Irish Acad., xxx., 1894, p. 473) have 

 remarked that, " As our knowledge grows, we the more distinctly see 

 in Australia and its islands the ruins of a great southern continent, 

 fractured and submerged, possibly during the great Alpine Himalayan 

 revolutions, and now in process of resurgence, as the vast folds of the 

 earth's crust roll slowly inwards upon the central continental mass." 



f Other instances of Pacific islands once inhabited but afterwards 

 depopulated by war, famine, disease or storm, are : Caroline Island, 

 where the American Scientific Expedition discovered maraes, &c. (Mem. 

 Nat. Acad. Sci., ii., 1884) j Gente Hermosa, of which Whitmee says, " The 

 island was formerly inhabited by a large race of people whose skeletons 

 are now found, all of them I am told exceeding six feet in length. No 

 one knows by what means they became extinct, but the fact that their 

 skeletons are lying unburied in various parts of the island, points to 

 famine, or an epidemic which quickly proved fatal to all the people, as 

 the probable cause " (Missionary Cruise in the S. Pacific, 1871, p. 6) ; and 

 Palmerston Island, described by Gill (Jottings from the Pacific, 1885, p. 37). 



