Ch. V. 
OF CORAL-REEFS. 
129 
however, can hardly be expected, for it must ever be 
most difficult, excepting in countries long civilized, to 
detect a movement the tendency of which is to conceal 
the part affected. In barbarous and semi-civilized 
nations how long might not a slow movement, even of 
elevation such as that now affecting Scandinavia, have 
escaped attention ! 
Mr. Williams 1 insists strongly that the traditions of 
the natives, which he has taken much pains in collect- 
ing, do not indicate the appearance of any new islands : 
but on the theory of a gradual subsidence, all that would 
be apparent would be, the water sometimes encroaching 
slowly on the land, and the land again recovering by 
the accumulation of detritus its former extent, and 
perhaps sometimes the conversion of an atoll with coral 
islets on it, into a bare or into a sunken annular reef. 
Such changes would naturally take place at the periods 
when the sea rose above its usual limits during a gale 
of more than ordinary strength ; and the effects of the 
two causes would be hardly distinguishable. In Kotze- 
bue’s Voyage there are accounts of islands, both in the 
Caroline and Marshall Archipelagoes, which have been 
partly washed away during hurricanes ; and Kadu, the 
native who w ? as on board one of the Russian vessels, 
said ‘ he saw the sea at Radack rise to the feet of the 
cocoa-nut trees ; but it was conjured in time .’ 2 A storm 
lately entirely swept away two of the Caroline Islands 
and converted them into shoals ; it also partly destroyed 
1 Williams’s Narrative of Missionary Enterprise, n. 31. 
* Kotzebue’s First Voyage, vol. iii. p. 1G8. 
