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He thought that daintily mended India muslin exquisite, and also the carved corals, bracelets on the slender wrists, a necklace resting like a spray of flowers on the girlish neck, a comb in the soft hair which Annie had arranged becomingly and covered from her aunt's sight with a lace scarf. She felt deceitful about her hair, but how could she help it?
Nor do I attach any importance to the fact of certain submerged reefs, as those off Tahiti, or those within Diego Garcia not now being nearer the surface than they were many years ago, as an indication of the rate under favourable circumstances of the UPWARD growth of reefs; after it has been shown, that all the reefs have grown to the surface in some of the Chagos atolls, but that in neighbouring atolls which appear to be of equal antiquity and to be exposed to the same external conditions, every reef remains submerged; for we are almost driven to attribute this to a difference, not in the rate of growth, but in the habits of the corals in the two cases.
In such clear and comparatively shallow water there often grow countless myriads of animals, such as mollusks and corals, whose shells and skeletons of carbonate of lime gradually accumulate in beds of limestone.
There were elephants' teeth, with figures of men and women carved on them, very cleverly copied from very coarse prints; and there were shells of many shapes, and lumps of corals, and bits of seaweed, with the small model of a ship, very much battered, and her yards scandalised, as if to mourn for her builder's loss.
The test of fossils is the only one that remains; and with how little strictness this test is applied, one case will show. Of forty-six species of British Devonian corals, only six occur in America; and this, notwithstanding the wide range which the Anthozoa are known to have.
Astraeans, Porites, Maeandrinas, and Madrepores were represented by exactly the same Species seventy thousand years ago as they are now. Were we to classify the Florida Corals from the Reefs of the interior, the result would correspond exactly to a classification founded upon the living Corals of the outer Reef to-day.
These shells, twenty in number, together with a Balanus and two corals, are all recent species, still inhabiting the neighbouring seas. The northern shore of Bahia Blanca is, in main part, formed of immense sand-dunes, resting on gravel with recent shells, and ranging in lines parallel to the shore.
Their harder parts the shells of mollusks, the white framework of corals, the carapaces of crabs and other crustaceans, the shells of sea urchins, the bones and teeth of fishes are gradually buried within the accumulating sheets of sediment, either whole or, far more often, broken into fragments by the waves.
Their growth must have been successive, since, as we have seen, all Corals need the fresh action of the open sea upon them, and if either of the outer Reefs had begun to grow before the completion of the inner one, it would have effectually checked the growth of the latter. The absence of an incipient Reef outside of the outer Reef shows these conclusions to be well founded.
These consist in the inclined ledge terminated by a wall, and sometimes succeeded by a second ledge with a wall, round the shores of certain lagoons and lagoon-channels; a structure which cannot, as I endeavoured to show, be explained by the simple growing powers of the corals, in the ring or basin-like forms of the central reefs, as well as of the separate marginal portions of the northern Maldiva atolls, in the submerged condition of the whole, or of parts of certain barrier and atoll-formed reefs; where only a part is submerged, this being generally to leeward, in the apparent progressive disseverment of some of the Maldiva atolls, in the existence of irregularly formed atolls, some being tied together by linear reefs, and others with spurs projecting from them, and, lastly, in the structure and origin of the Great Chagos Bank.
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