Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 10, 2025
I could buy curiosities from those regions that were ever so much better than any that I had collected; but I could not buy shells that I myself had gathered, nor great seed-pods, like bean-pods two feet long, which I had picked from the trees, nor pieces of rock that I myself had brought up from a coral-reef.
So do I. I believe, if you could find an uninhabited coral-reef island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with plenty of cocoa-palms and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome young fellow, like our Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched there a year afterwards, you would find him walking under the palm-trees arm in arm with a pretty woman. Where would she come from? Oh, that 's the miracle!
Then said Mr. Darwin, "Suppose one of those beautiful South Sea Islands, like Tahiti, the Queen of Isles, with its ring of coral-reef all round its shore, began sinking slowly under the sea.
Every fact in geology proclaims that neither the land, nor the bed of the sea retain for indefinite periods the same level. As well might it be imagined that the British Seas would in time become choked up with beds of oysters, or that the numerous small corallines off the inhospitable shores of Tierra del Fuego would in time form a solid and extensive coral-reef.
Sure enough the opening was found, and the boat once more lowered to investigate and find that the coral-reef still spread out like a barrier, but the coral insects were dead, and as they investigated farther it was to find that there was not a single shell-fish of any kind living in the shoal water, nor any trace of life, but on the highest part of the bleached white coral there were a few blocks of blackish-grey vesicular or cindery-looking stone.
It was not long before the coral-reef theory of Darwin found an able exponent and sturdy champion in the person of the great American naturalist, Professor James D. Dana.
On this beach there was not even a ripple, because of the deep calm which prevailed but on the ring or coral-reef, which completely encircled the island, those great "rollers" which appear never to go down even in calm fell from time to time with a long, solemn roar, and left an outer ring of milk-white foam.
Besides, the men behaved ill the last time we were here, and I wonder the captain is not afraid to venture. But he's afraid o' nothing earthly, I believe." We soon ran inside the barrier coral-reef, and let go our anchor in six fathoms water, just opposite the mouth of a small creek, whose shores were densely covered with mangroves and tall umbrageous trees.
You have often heard those islands in Kenmare Bay talked of, and how some whom you know go to fish round them by night for turbot and conger; and when you hear them spoken of again, you must recollect that they are the last fragments of a great fringing coral-reef, which will in a few thousand years follow the fate of the rest, and be eaten up by the waves, while the mountains of hard rock stand round them still unchanged.
So great was the number of fish thrown on the beach, that it took three weeks of hard work to bury them in a vast trench dug in the sand." Wherever this water touched the growing coral-reef, it was blighted and killed. Darwin saw similar "patches" of dead coral, and attributed them to some great fall of the tide which had left the insects exposed to the light of the sun.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking