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Those which helped to make this bit of stone are called coral-insects: but they are not really insects, and are no more like insects than you are. Coral-polypes is the best name for them, because they have arms round their mouths, something like a cuttlefish, which the ancients called Polypus. But the animal which you have seen likest to most of them is a sea-anemone.
In the third place, we find that beyond these two great antagonistic agencies, modern Geology recognizes sundry minor ones: those of glaciers and icebergs, those of coral-polypes; those of Protozoa having siliceous or calcareous shells each of which agencies, insignificant as it seems, is found capable of slowly working terrestrial changes of considerable magnitude.
Of course it is: but so is everything when you begin to look into it; and if I were to go on, and tell you what sort of young ones these coral-polypes have, and what becomes of them, you would hear such wonders, that you would be ready to suspect that I was inventing nonsense, or talking in my dreams.
Yet, after all, there are excuses for them. Without our improved microscopes, and while the sciences of comparative anatomy and chemistry were yet infantile, it was difficult to believe what was the truth; and for this simple reason: that, as usual, the truth, when discovered, turned out far more startling and prodigious than the dreams which men had hastily substituted for it; more strange than Ovid's old story that the coral was soft under the sea, and hardened by exposure to air; than Marsigli's notion, that the coral-polypes were its flowers; than Dr.
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