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A wiggling, brainless, slimy atom began it. He and trillions of his kind. He and his tribe lived and died on the sea-bottom, successive generations piling higher on the skeletons and lifework or the life-loafing, for they were lazy atoms of those that went before. At last the coral reef crawled upward until in uncharted waters it was tall enough to smash a wooden ship-keel.
The things were speechless, with no seeming means of communication, and I saw, too, that they could not leave the sea-bottom, but walked upon it as we do upon earth, and could no more rise than we can leap into the air and swim upon it. I tried to push my difficult way through the clinging swarm, who seemed friendly enough in a weird, inhuman way, but I could not pass through.
One sees in a moment that the Sargassos, of which there are several species on Tropical shores, are a genus of themselves and by themselves; and a certain awe may, if the beholder be at once scientific and poetical, come over him at the first sight of this famous and unique variety thereof, which has lost ages since the habit of growing on rock or sea-bottom, but propagates itself for ever floating; and feeds among its branches a whole family of fish, crabs, cuttlefish, zoophytes, mollusks, which, like the plant which shelters them, are found nowhere else in the world.
With a very few exceptions, both the red and the white coral polypes are, in their adult state, firmly adherent to the sea-bottom; nor do their buds naturally become detached and locomotive. But, in addition to budding and division, these creatures possess the more ordinary methods of multiplication; and, at particular seasons, they give rise to numerous eggs of minute size.
"You surely don't believe that I intend to let you eat so much that you will not be able to move?" said the leader, and flapped his wings and started off. Along the outermost sea-weed banks lay a flock of swans. They didn't bother about going on land, but rested themselves by lying and rocking on the water. Now and then they dived down with their necks and brought up food from the sea-bottom.
When we consider that the remains of more than three thousand distinct species of aquatic animals have been discovered among the fossils of the chalk, that the great majority of them are of such forms as are now met with only in the sea, and that there is no reason to believe that any one of them inhabited fresh water the collateral evidence that the chalk represents an ancient sea-bottom acquires as great force as the proof derived from the nature of the chalk itself.
You must know, Mrs Rooney, if your husband hasn't told you already, that we divers, many of us, have our pet schemes for makin' fortunes, and some of us have tried to come across the Spanish dubloons that are said to lie on the sea-bottom off many parts of our coast where the Armada was lost." "It's jokin' ye are," said Mrs Machowl, looking at Joe with a sly twinkle in her pretty eyes.
And the only manner in which the reef could extend outwards, would be by the gradual accumulation, at the foot of its seaward face, of a talus of coral fragments torn off by the violence of the waves, which talus might, in course of time, become high enough to bring its upper surface within the limits of coral growth, and in that manner provide a sort of factitious sea-bottom upon which the coral embryos might perch.
Hence, if a gradual shifting of the deep sea, which at present bars migration between the easternmost of these islands and America, took place to the westward, while the American side of the sea-bottom was gradually upheaved, the palaeontologist of the future would find, over the Pacific area, exactly such a change as I am supposing to have occurred in the North-Atlantic area at the close of the Mesozoic period.
If his view be correct, it is clear that neither atolls, nor encircling reefs, should be found in those portions of the ocean in which we have reason to believe, on independent grounds, that the sea-bottom has long been either stationary, or slowly rising.
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