at me for making such an assumption, and would put the growth at
certainly not more than half that amount. But supposing it is so, what
a very curious notion of the antiquity of some of these great living
pyramids comes out by a very simple calculation. There is no doubt
whatever that the sea faces of some of them are fully a thousand feet
high, and if you take the reckoning of an inch a year, that will give
you 12,000 years for the age of that particular pyramid or cone of
coral limestone; 12,000 long years have these creatures been labouring
in conditions which must have been substantially the same as they are
now, otherwise the polypes could not have continued their work. But I
believe I very much understate both the height of some of these masses,
and overstate the amount which these animals can form in the course of a
year; so that you might very safely double the period as the time
during which the Pacific Ocean, the general state of the climate, and
the sea, and the temperature has been substantially what it is now; and
yet that state of things which now obtains in the Pacific Ocean is the
yesterday of the history of the life of the globe. Those pyramids of
coral rock are built upon a foundation which is itself formed by the
deposits which the geologist has to deal with. If we go back in time
and search through the series of the rocks, we find at every age of the
world's history which has yet been examined, accumulations of
limestone, many of which have certainly been built up in just the same
way as those coral reefs which are now forming the bottom of the
Pacific Ocean. And even if we turn to the oldest periods of geologic
history, although the nature of the materials is changed, although we
cannot apply to them the same reasonings that we can to the existing
corals, yet still there are vast masses of limestone formed of nothing
else than the accumulations of the skeletons of similar animals, and
testifying that even in those remote periods of the world's history, as
now, the order of things implies that the earth had already endured for