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CORALS developed along several distinct lines, like modern corals they secreted a calcareous framework, in whose outer portions the polyps lived. In the Ordovician, corals were represented chiefly by the family of the CHOETETES, all species of which are long since extinct. The description of other types of corals will be given under the Silurian, where they first became abundant.
"The only question is how to get them," said I prosaically, for I'm always acting as a drag on Lilly's wheels. "True," she said with a tragic air. "Dear me! I'm tempted to duck my head under the water, and let it stay there, when I think of all the troubles of life." "'You would be a mermaid fair, Sitting alone, sitting alone, and all strung round with corals and pearls.
One might be coming to an oasis in the boundless Sahara. Breakers dash against the outer side of the ring, but the lagoon within is smooth as a mirror in the lea of the corals and palms. Four thousand natives of Polynesian race live on the holms of the "Island Cloud," a couple of hundred on each atoll.
Some light seemed to be thrown upon the subject a few years ago, when it was observed, that the detritus of coral reefs in the present tropical seas gave a powder, undistinguishable, when dried, from ordinary chalk. It then appeared likely that the chalk beds were the detritus of the corals which were in the oceans of that era. Mr.
In some cases they are open, with a level bottom of fine sand; in others they are choked up with reefs of delicately branched corals, which have the same general character as those within the Keeling atoll. These internal reefs either stand separately, or more commonly skirt the shores of the included high islands.
The principal points of difference relate to the reason for the absence of corals from some coasts, and the evidence therefrom as to changes of level, and the distribution of the oceanic regions of elevation and subsidence topics which a wide range of travel over the Pacific brought directly and constantly to my attention."
It is separated from the coast of Australia by a channel of about 25 fathoms deep; while outside, looking toward America, the water is two or three thousand feet deep at a mile from the edge of the reef. This is an accumulation of limestone rock, built up by corals, to which we have no parallel anywhere else.
We can also perceive, that a line drawn perpendicularly down from the outer edge of the new reef, to the foundation of solid rock beneath the old fringing-reef, will exceed by as many feet as there have been feet of subsidence, that small limit of depth at which the effective corals can live: the little architects having built up their great wall-like mass, as the whole sank down, upon a basis formed of other corals and their consolidated fragments.
In the Krauncha island also, the mountain called Maha-krauncha that is a mine of all kinds of gems is, O king, always adored by all the four orders of men. In Kusadwipa, O king of kings, there is another mountain variegated with corals and called after the name of that island itself. This mountain is inaccessible and made of gold.
By this process fossils are of course destroyed. "In some cases," says Sir Charles Lyell, "dark limestones, replete with shells and corals, have been turned into white statuary marble, and hard clays, containing vegetable or other remains, into slates called mica-schist or hornblende-schist; every vestige of the organic bodies having been obliterated."
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