70 NATURAL HISTORY READER, 



diminish, and the continents become less. As a compensa- 

 tion to these destructive forces, the coral-workers take up 

 this solution and reconvert it into a solid form, construct- 

 ing new lands and laying the foundations for new conti- 

 nents. 



CORALS, AND HOW THEY ARE STUDIED. 



1. Not very many years ago naturalists knew little 

 about corals. The reef-building corals have their home in 

 warm tropical seas, and they were chiefly known in Europe 

 through the dried specimens brought home by seafaring 

 men and given to their friends or stored in museums. 

 These were either the solid, rocky masses called coral-heads, 

 or fragments of the lighter branching kinds known as fan- 

 corals and the like. There was a vague idea that these 

 masses were originally inhabited by animals, but no one 

 knew anything of their nature, their process of growth, or 

 their appearance when alive. Even the red Mediterranean 

 coral, so famous on account of the ornaments made from it, 

 was more familiar to the fisherman who brought it up from 

 the sea, and to the jeweler who wrought it into a thousand 

 attractive forms, than to the naturalist. Indeed, there 

 were few naturalists in those days living upon the sea-shore ; 

 their homes were chiefly in the central parts of Europe, in 

 the large cities, where they found occupation as professors 

 and teachers in the universities, and they depended chiefly 

 upon museum collections for their knowledge of marine 

 animals. The existence of the host of minute creatures 

 living singly or in communities along every sea-shore was 

 hardly known to science in those days. 



2. A French physician residing at Montpelier, Peyssonel 

 by name, first discovered the nature of these singular little 

 beings. Having his home near the coast of the Mediter- 



