336 ALEXANDER AGASSIZ 



Writing from Honolulu at this time (1898), he says: 

 " They are now boring a well and have got down to 

 120 feet already, and have just got through the modern 

 reefs and are now on what the contractor calls an old 

 reef, which is nothing but a mass of shells. This prac- 

 tically knocks out all the evidence there was in favor of 

 subsidence derived from the [previous] boring holes. 

 . . . There are forty wells down 400 to 1100 feet, but 

 unfortunately no samples of these worth anything have 

 been kept. All that was limestone they have called coral, 

 so that both Dana and I were fooled, he in one way and 

 I in another, but I suppose that nothing I can now say 

 will obliterate the things that have been said about these 

 wells, and which mean nothing except complication of 

 the subject." 



Some years later he writes : " The borings for arte- 

 sian wells passed through thirty to fifty feet of recent 

 coral reef to enter Tertiary beds, in which a few corals 

 were found, and which alternated with beds of volcanic 

 ashes or mud. In the Tertiary beds Dana saw the con- 

 tinuation of the recent reef, while to me the Tertiary 

 beds meant a succession of events which in no way af- 

 fected the structure or mode of formation of the thin 

 crust of the recent coral reef forming the fringing reef 

 of Oahu, of Pearl Harbor, or of Kaneohe Bay." 



Agassiz's study of the Fijis but strengthened his con- 

 viction that there is no general theory of the formation 

 of coral reefs of universal application; each district 

 must be studied by itself. In the Fijis, he considered 

 elevation and subsequent erosion to be the causes that 

 have fashioned the steep slopes of the islands and reefs, 

 and not the thin crust of corals which thrive upon the 

 reef flats forming the substratum of the modern reef. 



