FUNAFUTI: THE STORY OF A CORAL ATOLL. 1 



By W. J. Sollas, M. A., LL. D., D. Sc., F. R. S. 



(Professor of Geology and Paleontology in the University of Oxford). 



By far the largest portion of the untrodden surface of our planet is 

 formed by the floor of the Pacific Ocean. Submerged at an average 

 depth of over 1,000 fathoms, it lies out of reach of the geologist's 

 hammer for all time, and for the present at least is inaccessible to the 

 diamond drill. 2 The geology of an almost entire hemisphere is thus 

 the secret of the Pacific. 



"It is the nature of a God," Bacon quaintly remarks, "to conceal a 

 thing, it is the glory of a man to find it out," and certainly there would 

 seem to be few secrets in Nature to which a clew has not somewhere 

 been left for those who have virtue to discover it. 



The mountainous margins of the ocean, still young and actively 

 moving, may doubtless furnish us with many precious hints, but it is 

 to the multitudinous islands, which in serried rows like the tops of 

 submerged mountain chains extend across it, that we must turn in 

 search of the true guiding thread. 



Some of these islands, like New Zealand and New Caledonia, are in 

 many important respects similar to our own, and seem to be the sur- 

 viving fragments of a lost continent, which has fallen into ruins and 

 sunk beneath the waves. Others, such as the Sandwich and Fiji islands, 

 are also of a kind long since familiar to us, clusters of volcanic cones 

 which, like Stromboli and Vulcano of the Mediterranean, rise from the 

 depths of the sea. 



In addition to these, however, there exist a third and strange kind 

 of islands, restricted to the torrid zone, and known to the daring mariners 

 of the Elizabethan period as "low" islands, a name well deserved, since 

 few of them attain a greater elevation than many of the pebble beaches 

 which fringe our own coasts; few indeed so great, the loftiest summits 

 of most not exceeding the insignificant height of 10 feet. Owing to 

 this fact they are scarcely visible till a ship is close upon them, and the 



'Being the Friday evening discourse delivered before the British Association at 

 Bristol, 1898. Printed in Natural Science, Edinburgh and London, Vol. XIV, No. 83. 



2 Profs. John Joly and Edge-worth David tliink it may be possible by suitable 

 machinery to bore a hole in the floor of tho deep sea. 



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