24 ATOLLS. Ch. I. 



merits cast on the beach, is certainly very surprising, 

 even on the view that it is the office of occasional gales 

 to pile up fragments, and of the daily tides to wear 

 .them away. On the western side, also, of the atoll, 

 where I have described a bed of sand and fragments 

 with trees growing out of it, in front of an old beach, 

 it struck both Lieut. Sulivan and myself, from the 

 manner in which the trees were being washed down, 

 that the Surf had lately recommenced an attack on this 

 line of coast. Appearances indicating a slight en- 

 croachment of the water on the land, are plainer within 

 the lagoon : I noticed in several places, both on its 

 Windward and leeward shores, old cocoa-nut trees 

 falling With their roots undermined, and the rotten 

 stumps of others on the beach, where the inhabitants 

 assured us the cocoa-nut could not now grow. Capt. 

 FitzEoy pointed out to me, near the settlement, the 

 foundation posts of a shed, now washed by every tide, 

 but which the inhabitants stated, had seven years 

 before stood above high water-mark. In the calm 

 Waters of the lagoon, directly connected with a great, 

 and therefore stable ocean, it seems very improbable 

 that a change in the currents, sufficiently great to 

 cause the water to eat into the land on all sides, should 

 have taken place within a limited period. From these 

 considerations I inferred, that probably the atoll had 

 lately subsided to a small amount ; and this inference 

 was strengthened by the circumstance, that in 1834, 

 two years before our visit, the island had been shaken 

 by a severe earthquake, and by two slighter ones during 



