a period of which our ordinary standards of chronology give us not the
slightest conception. In other words, the history of these coral reefs,
traced out honestly and carefully, and with the same sort of reasoning
that you would use in the ordinary affairs of life, testifies, like
every fact that I know of, to the prodigious antiquity of the earth
since it existed in a condition in the main similar to that in which it
now is.