CORAL AND CORAL REEFS*

by Thomas H. Huxley




*[Foonote] A Lecture delivered in Manchester, November 4th, 1970.

THE subject upon which I wish to address you to-night is the structure
and origin of Coral and Coral Reefs. Under the head of "coral" there
are included two very different things; one of them is that substance
which I imagine a great number of us have champed when we were very
much younger than we are now,--the common red coral, which is used so
much, as you know, for the edification and the delectation of children
of tender years, and is also employed for the purposes of ornament for
those who are much older, and as some think might know better. The
other kind of coral is a very different substance; it may for
distinction's sake be called the white coral; it is a material which
most assuredly not the hardest-hearted of baby farmers would give to a
baby to chew, and it is a substance which is to be seen only in the
cabinets of curious persons, or in museums, or, may be, over the
mantelpieces of sea-faring men. But although the red coral, as I have
mentioned to you, has access to the very best society; and although the
white coral is comparatively a despised product, yet in this, as in
many other cases, the humbler thing is in reality the greater; the
amount of work which is done in the world by the white coral being
absolutely infinite compared with that effected by its delicate and
pampered namesake. Each of these substances, the white coral and the
red, however, has a relationship to the other. They are, in a