The Coral-Reef Theory 369 
Darwin’s final and very characteristic utterance on the coral-reef 
controversy is found in a letter which he wrote to Professor 
Alexander Agassiz, May 5th, 1881: less than a year before his 
death: “If I am wrong, the sooner I am knocked on the head and 
annihilated so much the better. It still seems to me a marvellous 
thing that there should not have been much, and long-continued, sub- 
sidence in the beds of the great oceans. I wish that some doubly rich 
millionaire would take it into his head to have borings made in some 
of the Pacific and Indian atolls, and bring home cores for slicing 
from a depth of 500 or 600 feet?.” 
Though the “doubly rich millionaire” has not been forthcoming, 
the energy, in England, of Professor Sollas, and in New South Wales 
of Professor Anderson Stuart served to set on foot a project, which, 
aided at first by the British Association for the Advancement of 
Science, and afterwards taken up jointly by the Royal Society, the 
New South Wales Government, and the Admiralty, has led to the 
most definite and conclusive results. 
The Committee appointed by the Royal Society to carry out the 
undertaking included representatives of all the views that had been 
put forward on the subject. The place for the experiment was, with 
the consent of every member of the Committee, selected by the late 
Admiral Sir W. J. Wharton—who was not himself an adherent of 
Darwin’s views—and no one has ventured to suggest that his selec- 
tion, the splendid atoll of Funafuti, was not a most judicious one. 
By the pluck and perseverence of Professor Sollas in the pre- 
liminary expedition, and of Professor T. Edgeworth David and his 
pupils, in subsequent investigations of the island, the rather difficult 
piece of work was brought to a highly satisfactory conclusion. The 
New South Wales Government lent boring apparatus and workmen, 
and the Admiralty carried the expedition to its destination in a 
surveying ship which, under Captain (now Admiral) A. Mostyn Field, 
made the most complete survey of the atoll and its surrounding seas 
that has ever been undertaken in the case of a coral: formation. 
After some failures and many interruptions, the boring was 
carried to the depth of 1114 feet, and the cores obtained were sent 
to England. Here the examination of the materials was fortunately 
undertaken by a zoologist of the highest repute, Dr G. J. Hinde—who 
has a wide experience in the study of organisms by sections—and he 
was aided at all points by specialists in the British Museum of 
Natural History and by other naturalists. Nor were the chemical 
and other problems neglected. 
The verdict arrived at, after this most exhaustive study of a series 
of cores obtained from depths twice as great as that thought 
1 1. L,m. p. 184. 
D. 24 
