CONTOUR OF THE COUNTRY. 233 
‘In 1596 several towns in Japan were covered by the sea ; 
in 1638 St Euphemia became alake ; in 1692 Port Royal, 
in Jamaica, was submerged ; in 1775 the great earthquake 
of Lisbon sank many parts of the Portugese and African 
shores 100 fathoms under water; in 1819, at the mouth 
of the Indus, a large tract of country, with villages, was 
submerged, while a new tract was elevated, called the 
“Ullah Bund ;” in 1822 about 100 miles of the Chili 
coast was elevated to the height of four or six feet.’* 
*The late Professor Nicol gave the following beautiful illustration of the fact of 
depression and upheaval of land going on over extensive areas of the world’s surface, in 
his work entitled The System of the World :— ' 
‘The vast expanses of the Southern Ocean are peopled near the surface by inconceiv- 
able throngs of creatures of. extreme minuteness, whose continual, incessant, and 
inexplicable activities are, nevertheless, efficient towards building up the coral rocks. 
The chemistry by which the Nautilus elaborates its gorg shell, apprehended 
the instinct of these living molecules, enables them, as they work in myriads, now to 
erect a fabric solid and extensive as a.bed of limestone, now regular and convolved like 
the human brain, and again so delicate in fibre, and of whiteness so snowy, that it equals 
some cherished plant in fragility and beauty. Now when traversing the Pacific, the 
Naturalist meets with a display of this architecture of most peculiar arrangement, and 
which by its magnitude and immense diffusion—for its separate instances are strewn 
along many thousands-of miles—has never failed to fill him with a just astonishment. 
It is an island—if island it may be called—which consists simply of a circular coral reef, 
ofthe average width of a quarter of a mile, enclosing an area varying from a mile to 
fifty or sixty in diameter. ‘The features even of one such object are sufficiently singular. 
The insects, for instance, that formed it cannot live beneath a certain depth, and the 
coral fabric often arises in the midst of waters so deep that we can nowise fancy it !to 
have been built up from the bottom of the ocean. The difficulty was at first apparently 
overcome by the supposition that the creatures had reared their stupendous walls on 
the rim of the erater of a submarine volcano, long probably extinct ; but overlooking 
the improbability of craters existing there of a size that rather likened them to the 
prodigious formations in the Moon than to any exemplar.upon Earth, the explanation 
failed in regard of the two most important and characteristic facts of the ease. In the 
first place, the existence of the coral reef has been recognised at depths quite beyond 
the limit:at which any insect can now carry on its-work: but-inasmuch as this pheno- 
menon might be supposed only to point to a disappearance, in the-course-of the world’s 
history, of species of creatures fitted to live at such profundities, I insist the most on 
another argument, which seems to admit of no reply. The proposed solution takes no 
e t whatever of the tl bers of those islands which stud the Pacific, along 
a.line of upwards of four thousand miles. The question as to the various depths at 
which corals, living or extinct,.could possibly have elaborated these rocks, is doubtful 
only in regard to a number of feet. wholly insignificant in respect of any large elevation ; 
so thatthe foregoing hypothesis would imply the exi over. that i extension 
of ranges or groups of submarine volcanos, or other mountains difering by no appreci- 
able amount in altitude; and this also without regard to the absolute depths of the 
ecean on whose floor they rest. It: were, in fact, as if over some wide continent—irre- 
spective of valley, low land, or table-land— groups and ridges arose, across whose peaks 
a plane might be stretched so as nearly to touch them all; and surely nothing can be 
conceived more.opposite to what. is visible—nothing less analogous to the jagged and 
varying outline of the most regular of ig mC That these coral 
reefs must rest on the tops of submarine elevati, is ifest ; but some new feature 
or-el t.is:thus: clear! ing to render the theory inclusive of -all the phenomena. 
Now this element.is.supplied, if, as suggeated:by the. sagacity of our admirable Darwin, 
we suppose these mountains placed on .an arew of :subsidence. Picture, for instance, 
some island, whose coasts are now encircled by a fringe of coral, gradually sinking 
