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In most parts a soft sand overlying hard loam, like work en pise, limestone and coralline; it shows evidences of inundation: water-worn stones of a lime almost as compact as marble, pieces of quartz, selenite, basalt, granite, and syenite in nodules are everywhere sprinkled over the surface.
Then birds visit the spot, and seeds are thus conveyed thither, which take root and spring up and flourish. Thus are commenced those coralline islets of which you have seen so many in these seas. The reefs round the large islands are formed in a similar manner.
Those of the third class are the low coralline islands, usually having lagoons of water in their midst; they are very numerous. "As to the manner in which coral islands and reefs are formed, there are various opinions on this point. I will give you what seems to me the most probable theory a theory, I may add, which is held by some of the good and scientific missionaries.
From the north side of the harbour, a good broad path passes through swamp clearing and forest, over hill and valley, to the farther side of the island; the coralline rock constantly protruding through the deep red earth which fills all the hollows, and is more or less spread over the plains and hill-sides.
It is, for instance, an astonishing fact that a delicate branching coralline, studded with polypi, and attached to a submarine rock, should produce, first by budding and then by transverse division, a host of huge floating jelly-fishes; and that these should produce eggs, from which are hatched swimming animalcules, which attach themselves to rocks and become developed into branching corallines; and so on in an endless cycle.
The foundation of all this calculation is, of course, a knowledge of the length of time the Crania and the coralline needed to attain their full size; and, on this head, precise knowledge is at present wanting.
Although the name of Coral Rag has been appropriated, as we have seen, to a member of the Middle Oolite before described, some portions of the Lower Oolite are equally entitled in many places to be called coralline limestones. Apiocrinites rotundus, or Pear Encrinite; Miller. Fossil at Bradford, Wilts. a. Stem of Apiocrinites, and one of the articulations, natural size. b.
Heavy weather having now set in compelled the flagship to run to Bahia for safety, the outer road of Pernambuco being at this season exceedingly dangerous from the coralline nature of the bottom, as was practically proved by the fact that the Pedro Primiero lost every anchor but one, so that to remain was certain destruction, and there was no alternative but to make for Bahia to procure anchors.
Color one portion with paprika or coralline, pepper; a second part with the sieved yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, and the remainder with rinsed pickled walnuts, also passed through a wire sieve. Pour the red jelly into a small mold with straight sides; when it is almost set pour in the yellow aspic, and when that is cold pour in the black.
The numerous islands, very many of which are uninhabited, have yet their recorded names, more or less characteristic, such as Rum Key, Turk's Island, famous for the export of salt, Bird Rock, Fortune Island, Great and Little Inagua, Crooked Island, and so on, all more or less noted for the disastrous wrecks which have occurred on their low coralline shores.
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