both in prose and verse, to the "skill," "industry," and "perseverance" of
the "coral-insect" in "building" his "home." As well might we praise men
for their cleverness in making their own skeletons, and laud their assiduity
in filling churchyards with the same. The polyps and other organisms, whose
remains accumulate to form a coral-reef, simply live and perform their
natural functions, and then die, leaving behind them, in the natural course
of events, the hard calcareous portions of their structures to add to the
growing reef.

While the forms of coral-reefs and coral-islands are sometimes very
remarkable and worthy of attentive study, there is no ground, it need
scarcely be added, for the suggestion that they afford proofs of design on
the part of the living builders, or that, in the words of Flinders, they
constitute breastworks, defending the workshops from whence "infant
colonies might be safely sent forth."

It was not till the beginning of the present century that travellers like
Beechey, Chamisso, Quoy and Gaimard, Moresby, Nelson, and others, began to
collect accurate details concerning the forms and structure of coral-masses,
and to make such observations on the habits of reef-forming polyps,
as might serve as a basis for safe reasoning concerning the origin of
coral-reefs and islands. In the second volume of Lyell's "Principles of
Geology," published in 1832, the final chapter gives an admirable summary
of all that was then known on the subject. At that time, the ring-form of
the atolls was almost universally regarded as a proof that they had grown
up on submerged volcanic craters; and Lyell gave his powerful support to
that theory.

Charles Darwin was never tired of acknowledging his indebtedness to Lyell.
In dedicating to his friend the second edition of his "Naturalist's Voyage