CHAPTER IX 



FISHES OF THE CORAL SEAS 



HERE are two classes of men, as we count men 

 of our race : those who have been to the South 

 Seas, and those who have not — those who have 

 felt the fascination of the surf on the coral 

 reefs, the wind in the cocoanut palms, " the wide and starry 

 sky," the deep warm silence of the bush; those who on honey 

 dew have fed ; and those to whom all this life is far away, 

 known only through the stories of traders, the annals of 

 missionaries, the glowing pages of Melville or the witchery 

 of Stevenson. 



In the South Seas are the asteroids of our earthly cosmos 

 — little green worlds, thousands of them, filled with joyous 

 people, who do not care whether there exist other worlds 

 or other people, as innocent of curiosity as to what happens 

 in London or New York as the folks of Vesta and Ceres 

 are careless of the mightier politics of their planetary neigh- 

 bors, Mars and Jupiter. 



The little world may be a ring of broken corals like a 

 pile of scrap iron, fringed with tall cocoa palms, around a 

 blue lagoon, into which breaks the endless white surf of 

 the tropics; or it may be the sharp crest of uplifted vol- 

 canoes over some flaw in the earth's crust. If our island 

 is a volcano's top, it will be velvet-carpeted to the summit 

 with wide-leaved evergreen trees, intertangled with palms 

 and tree ferns, and all inextricably tied together with the 

 meshwork of long lianas. Down through the dense green 



♦The opening paragraphs of this chapter are taken from an 

 article called "Tutuila (U. S.)" in the "Atlantic Monthly" for 

 1903, written by Jordan and Kellogg. 



57 



