ISLANDS PRODUCED BY INSECTS.
The whole group of the Thousand Islands, and indeed the greater part of all those whose surfaces are flat, in the neighbourhood of the equator, owe their origin to the labours of that order of marine worms which Linnaeus has arranged under the name of Zoophyta. These little animals, in a most surprising manner, construct their calcareous habitations, under an infinite variety of forms, yet with that order and regularity, each after its own manner, which to the minute inquirer, is so discernable in every part of the creation. But, although the eye may be convinced of the fact, it is difficult for the human mind to conceive the possibility of insects so small being endued with the power, much less of being furnished in their own bodies with the materials of constructing the immense fabrics which, in almost every part of the Eastern and Pacific Oceans lying between the tropics, are met with in the shape of detached rocks, or reefs of great extent, just even with the surface, or islands already clothed with plants, whose bases are fixed at the bottom of the sea, several hundred feet in depth, where light and heat, so very essential to animal life, if not excluded, are sparingly received and feebly felt. Thousands of such rocks, and reefs, and islands, are known to exist in the eastern ocean, within, and even beyond, the limits of the tropics. The eastern coast of New Holland is almost wholly girt with reefs and islands of coral rock, rising perpendicularly from the bottom of the abyss. Captain Kent, of the Buffalo, speaking of a coral reef of many miles in extent, on the south-west coast of New Caledonia, observes, that "it is level with the water's edge, and towards the sea, as steep to as a wall of a house; that he sounded frequently within twice the ship's length of it with a line of one hundred and fifty fathoms, or nine hundred feet, without being able to reach the bottom." How wonderful, how inconceivable, that such stupendous fabrics should rise into existence from the silent but incessant, and almost imperceptible, labours of such insignificant worms!
To buy books, as some do who make no use of them, only because they were published by an eminent printer, is much as if a man should buy clothes that did not fit him, only because they were made by some famous tailor.—Pope.