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Updated: June 2, 2025
Some of the archipelagoes of low coral-islands are subject to earthquakes: Captain Moresby informs me that they are frequent, though not very strong, in the Chagos group, which occupies a very central position in the Indian Ocean, and is far from any land not of coral formation.
The existence of coral rock, or of raised beaches far inland, indicates recent elevation; lagoon coral-islands, and such as have barrier or encircling reefs, have suffered subsidence; while our own islands, whose productions are entirely those of the adjacent continent, have been separated from it.
It is unfortunate that the upraised coral-islands in the Pacific have not been examined by a geologist. The cliffs of Elizabeth Island, in the Low Archipelago, are eighty feet high, and appear, from Captain Beechey's description, to consist of a homogeneous coral-rock.
Couthouy, one of the naturalists in the great Antarctic Expedition of the United States: "Having personally examined a large number of coral-islands and resided eight months among the volcanic class having shore and partially encircling reefs. I may be permitted to state that my own observations have impressed a conviction of the correctness of the theory of Mr. Darwin."
On her homeward voyage, the "Beagle" visited Tahiti, Australia, and some of the coral-islands in the Indian Ocean, and Darwin had an opportunity of testing and verifying the conclusion at which he had arrived by studying the statements of other observers. I well recollect a remarkable conversation I had with Darwin, shortly after the death of Lyell.
While the forms of coral-reefs and coral-islands are sometimes very remarkable and worthy of attentive study, there is no ground, it need scarcely be added, for the suggestion that they afford proofs of design on the part of the living builders, or that, in the words of Flinders, they constitute breastworks, defending the workshops from whence "infant colonies might be safely sent forth."
On May 24th, 1837, Lyell wrote to Sir John Herschel as follows: "I am very full of Darwin's new theory of coral-islands, and have urged Whewell to make him read it at our next meeting. I must give up my volcanic crater forever, though it cost me a pang at first, for it accounted for so much." Dr.
Semper proved that in certain specified cases, subsidence could not have played the chief part in originating the peculiar forms of the coral-islands.
No, he would sail to another world; there he would join a new colony in clearing away the primeval depths of some virgin forest, and tilling the glebes of a rich and untried soil; and, living among them, he would make that place a centre for wide evangelisation the home of religious enthusiasms and equal laws; or he would go as a missionary to the savage and the cannibal, and, sailing from reef to reef, where the coral-islands of the Pacific mirror in the deep waters of their calm lagoon the reed-huts of the savage, and the feathery coronal of tropic trees, he would devote his life to reclaiming from ignorance and barbarism the waste places of a degraded humanity.
In 1872, Dana prepared a work of a more popular character in which some of the chief results of his studies are described; it bore the title of "Corals and Coral-Islands." Of this work, new and enlarged editions appeared in 1874 and 1890 in America, while two editions were published in this country in 1872 and 1875.
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