Thomas Henry Huxley

“ You must fancy yourself in the middle of the great ocean, and you will perceive that there is an almost circular island, with a low beach, which is formed entirely of coral sand; growing upon that beach you have vegetation, which takes, of course, the shape of the circular land; and then, in the interior of the circle, there is a pool of water, which is not very deep—probably in this case not more than eight or nine fathoms—and which forms a strange and beautiful contrast to the deep blue water outside. This circular island, or atoll, with a lagoon in the middle, is not a complete circle ”

“ The reef is a timekeeper of a very curious character; and you can easily understand why. The coral polype, like everything else, takes a certain time to grow to its full size; it does not do it in a minute; just as a child takes a certain time to grow into a man so does the embryo polype take time to grow into a perfect polype and form its skeleton. Consequently every particle of coral limestone is an expression of time. ”

“ Geologists would be quite right in maintaining the seeming paradox that the stable thing in the world is the fluid sea and the shifting thing is the solid land. That may sound a very hard saying at first, but the more you look into geology, the more you will see ground for believing that it is not a mere paradox. ”

“ Those pyramids of coral rock are built upon a foundation which is itself formed by the deposits which the geologist has to deal with. If we go back in time and search through the series of the rocks, we find at every age of the world's history which has yet been examined, accumulations of limestone, many of which have certainly been built up in just the same way as those coral reefs which are now forming the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. ”

“ It looks at first quite like a flower in the sea, but if you touch it you find that it exhibits all the peculiarities of a living animal; and if anything which can serve as its prey comes near its tentacles, it closes them round it and sucks the material into its stomach and there digests it and turns it to the account of its own body. ”

“ Darwin's great work upon the coral reefs, you will see a very beautiful chart of the world, which he prepared with great pains and labour, showing the distribution on the one hand of the reefs, and on the other of the volcanoes; you will find that in no case does the atoll accompany the volcano, or the volcano burst up among the atolls. It is most instructive to look at the great area of the Pacific on the map, and see the great masses of atolls forming in one region of it a most enormous belt, running from north-west to south-east ”

“ A bud will grow out of the side of the body (I am not speaking of the common sea anemone, but of allied creatures) just like the bud of a plant, and that will fashion itself into a creature just like the parent. There are some of them in which these buds remain connected together, and you will soon see what would be the result of that. If I make a bud grow out here, and another on the opposite side, and each fashions itself into a new polype, the practical effect will be that before long you will see a single polype converted into a sort of tree or bush of polypes. ”

“ No man who is cautious would dream of trusting to an explanation of this kind simply because it explained one particular set of facts. Before you can possibly be safe in dealing with Nature—who is very properly made of the feminine gender, on account of the astonishing tricks which she plays upon her admirers!—I say before you can be safe in dealing with Nature, you must get two or three kinds of cross proofs, so as to make sure not only that your hypothesis fits that particular set of facts, but that it is not contradicted by some other set of facts which is just as clear and certain. ”

“ The red coral grows principally at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, at very great depths, and the coral fishers, who are very adventurous seamen, take their drag nets, of a peculiar kind, roughly made, but efficient for their purpose, and drag them along the bottom of the sea to catch the branches of the red coral, which become entangled and are thus brought up to the surface. They are then allowed to putrefy, in order to get rid of the animal matter, and the red coral is the skeleton that is left. ”

“ Beside that there are a great many animals that prey upon the coral—fishes, worms, and creatures of that kind, and all these, by their digestive processes, reduce the coral to the same state, and contribute a very important element to this fine mud. The living coral found in the lagoon, is not the reef building coral; it does not give rise to the same massive skeletons. ”

“ But there are certain parts of the world in which the coral polypes which live and grow are of a kind which remain, adhere together, and form great masses. They differ from the ordinary polypes just in the same way as those plants which form a peat-bog or meadow-turf differ from ordinary plants. They have a habit of growing together in masses in the same place ”

“ And even if we turn to the oldest periods of geologic history, although the nature of the materials is changed, although we cannot apply to them the same reasonings that we can to the existing corals, yet still there are vast masses of limestone formed of nothing else than the accumulations of the skeletons of similar animals, and testifying that even in those remote periods of the world's history, as now, the order of things implies that the earth had already endured for a period of which our ordinary standards of chronology give us not the slightest conception. ”

“ And thus, although the polype itself may be a fixed creature unable to move about, it is able to spread its offspring over great areas. For these creatures not only propel themselves, but while swimming about in the sea for many hours, or perhaps days, it will be obvious that they must be carried hither and thither by the currents of the sea, which not unfrequently move at the rate of one or two miles an hour. ”

“ Darwin supplied the cross proofs as well as the immediate evidence. You have all heard of volcanoes, those wonderful vents in the surface of the earth out of which pour masses of lava, cinders and ashes, and the like. Now, it is a matter of observation and experience that all volcanoes are placed in areas in which the surface of the earth is undergoing elevation, or at any rate is stationary; they are not placed in parts of the world in which the level of the land is being lowered. ”

“ The cavity of the mouth leads into a sort of stomach, which is very unlike those of the higher animals, in the circumstance that it opens at the lower end into a cavity of the body, and all the digested matter, converted into nourishment, is thus distributed through the rest of the body. ”

“ Each of these substances, the white coral and the red, however, has a relationship to the other. They are, in a zoological sense, cousins, each of them being formed by the same kind of animals in what is substantially the same way. Each of these bodies is, in fact, the hard skeleton of a very curious and a very simple animal, more comparable to the bones of such animals as ourselves than to the shells of oysters or creatures of that kind ”

“ Such are these wonderful creatures. But they are capable not only of multiplying in this way, but in other ways, by having a more ordinary and regular kind of offspring. Little eggs are hatched and the young are passed out by the way of the mouth, and they go swimming about as little oval bodies covered with a very curious kind of hairlike processes. ”

“ They are all indications of a great subterranean activity, of a something being pushed up, and therefore naturally the land either gives way and lets it come through, or else is raised up by its violence. ”