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Updated: June 7, 2025
There were not so many shells, seaweeds, corals, crabs, madrepores, sponges, and flamingoes as we had seen near Sheher, but hundreds of seagulls sitting in the shallow water, and quantities of porpoises. The lobster-shells which lie about are a beautiful blue mixed with red.
The total mass of this chain of rocks appears to me a limestone agglomerate, somewhat analogous to the earthy limestone of the peninsula of Araya, near Cumana, but of much more recent formation. The inequalities of this coral rock are covered by a detritus of shells and madrepores.
In the meantime, the Fuci and Algæ, with the Corallines and Madrepores, would transform themselves into fish, and gradually populate all the submarine portions of the globe. Although the writers of this delicious drollery seem to have had Dr.
They drove a thriving trade among all newcomers: but were somewhat disgusted to find that we, though new to the West Indies, were by no means new to West Indian wares, and therefore not of the same mind as a gentleman and lady who came fresh from the town next day, with nearly a bushel of white branching madrepores, which they were going to carry as coals to Newcastle, six hundred miles down the islands.
Madrepores, which one must guard against confusing with precious coral, clothe their tissue in a limestone crust, and their variations in structure have led my famous mentor Professor Milne-Edwards to classify them into five divisions. The tiny microscopic animals that secrete this polypary live by the billions in the depths of their cells.
The soundings prove that they are rocks rising abruptly from a bottom of between twenty and thirty fathoms. Some are at the water's edge, others one-fourth or one-fifth of a toise above the surface of the sea. Angular fragments of madrepores, and cellularia from two to three cubic inches, are found cemented by grains of quartzose sand.
The beauty of the madrepores and corallines, of which the finest specimens are found in the recesses of the Bay of Tappanuli, is not to be surpassed in any country. Of these a superb collection is in the possession of Mr. In the same volume is also a Paper by Mr.
Small rocks of meandrites, madrepores, and other corals, either ramified or with a rounded surface, rise in this vast plain, and seem to attest the recent retreat of the sea. But these masses, which are the habitations of polypi, are only fragments imbedded in a breccia with a calcareous cement.
When it slept in calm with the sun shining overhead, it was my delight to gaze into the abyss hundreds of feet below me, seeking monsters in the forests of madrepores and coral that were revealed through the limpid blue, enormous serpents that the country folk say leave the forests to dwell in the sea, and there take on frightful forms.
I have now satisfied myself that the madrepores have something analogous to this in the arrangement of their partitions, so that I am tempted to believe that this tendency to a symmetrical arrangement of parts in pairs, is a general character of polyps, disguised by their radiating form. Among the medusae something similar exists in the disposition of the marginal appendages and the ocelli.
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