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They are all composed of blocks of coralline, cemented together with mortar extracted from the same material.
Many marine animals seem to have this power of stinging: besides the Portuguese man-of-war, many jelly-fish, and the Aplysia or sea-slug of the Cape de Verd Islands, it is stated in the "Voyage of the Astrolabe" that an Actinia or sea-anemone, as well as a flexible coralline allied to Sertularia, both possess this means of offence or defence.
Porgy now began to pervade the air with an astringent perfume of the sea: none of your Fulton Market smells of stagnating fish, but a clean, wholesome, coralline odor, such as we may imagine supplied to the Peris "beneath the dark sea" by the scaly fellows in the toilet line down there, who are likely to keep it for sale in conch-shells, quarts and pints.
Suppose that the valve of the Crania upon which a coralline has fixed itself in the way just described, is so attached to the sea-urchin that no part of it is more than an inch above the face upon which the sea-urchin rests.
Quatrefages proposed to destroy the teredo in harbors by impregnating the water with a mineral solution fatal to them. Perhaps the labors of the coralline animals might be arrested over a considerable extent of sea-coast by similar means.
Thus the finest Mediterranean specimens may be successfully transplanted to the coral reefs of these islands, the only requisite to their sustenance seeming to be a coralline shore and limestone surroundings.
On the exact age of the deposits of Monte Mario new light has recently been thrown by a careful study of their marine fossil shells, undertaken by MM. Rayneval, Van den Hecke, and Ponzi. They have compared no less than 160 species with the shells of the Coralline Crag of Suffolk, so well described by Mr.
Strata of the same age as the Red and Coralline Crag of Suffolk have been long known in the country round Antwerp, and on the banks of the Scheldt, below that city; and the lowest division, or Black Crag, there found, is shown by the shells to be somewhat more ancient than any of our British series, and probably forms the first links of a downward passage from the strata of the Pliocene to those of the Upper Miocene period.
A long-continued course of the simple process thus roughly described must of necessity result at last in the elimination of all the most conspicuous pipe-fish, and the survival of all those unobtrusive and retiring individuals which in any respect happen to resemble the fucus or coralline among which they dwell.
They are supposed to have been upheaved from the bottom of the sea by volcanic agency; but they are not themselves volcanic in their nature, neither are they of coral formation. Those of the third class are the low coralline islands, usually having lagoons of water in their midst. They are very numerous.
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