CORAL is a familiar enough object with us all, whether in the shape of a child’s first plaything, or a girl’s first trinket, or a Museum curiosity. It may be red or pink or white; it may be polished into smoothness or left in its natural state of jagged roughness, dotted over with tiny pits. In any case, it is a thing of interest and beauty. In any case, it is the dead skeleton of a once-living animal.
In the Red Sea alone about one hundred and twenty kinds of Coral are found, and in Ocean waters the numbers rise rapidly.
Perhaps one of the species best known to us is the small red coral of the Mediterranean, usually gathered from shallow parts, though sometimes fished up from a thousand feet deep.
This kind seldom exceeds ten or twelve inches in length; and when alive, the pretty branching skeleton is clothed in a thin tinted jelly-like vesture, which, though in a sense one, is yet no “single individual.” It is formed of many polyps, all united together, while each has its own separate mouth, and each holds out its own tiny feelers for food. Once let the branch be taken from the water, and only one result can follow. Life quickly fades; the enfolding vesture disappears; and a bare red skeleton is left for use in the market, to be made into toy or ornament.
The word Coral has other associations. It carries our thoughts far from home to fair isles in tropical seas—isles connected in our memories with tales of shipwrecked mariners and hair-breadth escapes, of dashing waves and peaceful lagoons, of breadfruit trees and waving palms, of perpetual sunshine and endless holidays, of Robinson Crusoe adventures and interesting islanders, of poisoned arrows and ferocious sharks.
Such islands do exist, and in numbers far greater than we commonly realise.
At this moment I have before me a map of the world, made for the express purpose of showing “Coral Seas,” or the regions where Coral islands are constructed. And the red patches are astonishingly plentiful, dotting a broad belt of ocean all round the world, except where that belt is interrupted by Continents, within the limits, roughly, of 30° north latitude and 30° south latitude.
In the West Indies coral islands abound. Travelling westward from America we come across the same material, in extensive regions to the north-east, the north, and the north-west of Australia. Tahiti, Samoa, the Fijis, the Solomons, the New Hebrides, the Carolines, the Marshall Islands, the Seychelles, and innumerable others, are literally made of coral.
Not made as sandstone and chalk are made, put together by the slow action of the sea, far below the surface. This is another kind of making.
Coral is built by living creatures, near the surface of the water. All that the waves have to do is, firstly, to bring abundance of food to the polyps, when alive, since by reason of their ponderous rock-skeletons they cannot go in search of food; and secondly, after the death of the polyps, to break and grind and heap together the skeleton-remains.