DR. LITTLE’S CORAL THEORY. 
704 
without suffering for the malignant climate which according to the 
theory under consideration should render them deadly and next to 
uninhabitable. 
Here again the theory is contradicted by facts on a field suffici- 
.ently extensive, to test its soundness. Here again we find that 
coral reefs exposed at low water do not exert the malign influence 
atttributed to them! 
“ Again, in the Indian Ocean (writes Darwin) there is a space 
of ocean 1,500 miles in length, including three Archipelagoes, in 
which every island is low and of coral formation.” <L The chain 
of coral reefs and islets called the Maldivas form a chain 480 
geographical miles in length, running due North and South. It is 
composed throughout of a series of circular assemblages of islets, 
the larger groups being from forty to fifty miles in their largest 
diameter. Captain Horsburgh informs me that outside of each 
circle or atoll, as it is termed, there are coral reefs sometimes ex¬ 
tending to the distance of two or three miles.”* The reefs, according 
to Bell’s Geography, are level with the water, and in the 17 groups 
all the larger islands are inhabited, and though the climate is stated 
to be unhealthy for Europeans, the natives do not appear to suffer 
from it, as they should do according to the theory, with exposed 
corals reefs developing putrescent animal effluvia under the burn¬ 
ing sun of the Equator. 
These coral reefs in such a situation ought to exert a deadly 
influence on the climate, whereas we read of a Sultan, and his court, 
and a population of many thousand people, living quietly and 
respectably, where properly speaking, they ought not to be able to 
live at all! 
These facts appear to me conclusive on a large scale, against the 
new theory—if indeed it can be termed a theory at all.f If coral 
reefs, merely because they are coral reefs, cause remittent fever, it is, 
it must be allowed a new and astounding theory, unsupported by 
fact, or experience$ hut if coral reefs cause fever from miasm 
generated by the animal decomposition which takes place on their 
surface—it is no theory at all,! but an acknowledged truth, that the 
effluvia emanating from animal putrescence, is under peculiar 
* Lyell. 
That these reefs are partly dry at low water, may he inferred from what is 
ascertained of the atolls in the Pacific. 
t Dr Little asserts that the “ symptoms and result” of the fever caused from 
marsh miasm and coral miasm are “ identical.” Dr Copeland, on the contrary, 
states, in his Medical Dictionary that they are distinct fevers. “ The effects or 
the diseases (he writes) produced by infection vary with the sources and modes of 
infection.”—vegetable miasm producing remittents, animal miasm adynamic or 
pernicious remittents. 
t Although not bearing directly on the subject under discussion, I may remark 
that the “vital principle ot Malaria” which Dr Little favours, is as old as Avicenna 
the Arabian, and opposed by many of the learned modem Chemists. Liebig says 
that u all the characters of the phenomena of contagion tend to disprove the ex¬ 
istence of life in contagious matters” and he adds™“ It is certain that the action 
of contagions is the result of a f peculiar influence dependent on chemical forces, 
and is no way connected, with the vital principle Mitscherlich and the mi- 
