The demand made upon us would be a lengthened one; restitution impossible. These dead myriads, having nourished with their lime the various articles that form our sustenance, have passed into our very being. Others also would put forth a claim. The very pebble, the hard flint, once lived, and now nourishes life.
Great was the astonishment in Europe when a Berlin professor—Ehrenberg—informed us that the silicious stone, so sharp, rough, and brittle, the tripoli with which metals are polished, is neither more nor less than an aggregation of dead animalcules, an accumulation of the shells of infusoria of a terrible diminutiveness. So small is the creature I speak of, that it takes one hundred and eighty-seven millions to weigh a grain.
The labours of the unseen architects of the globe, admired by our men of science in extinct species, travellers have discovered revived in living species. They have surprised, in our own day, immense laboratories in permanent activity, of beings invisible in themselves, or apparently powerless, but really of boundless capacity of toil, if we judge by its results. What death accomplishes for life, life itself relates. Numbers of tiny organisms become by their present works the interpreters and historians of their vanished predecessors.
These, like the latter, with their structures, or their débris, build up islands in the sea, and construct immense banks of reefs, which, gradually joining together, will become new lands. Without going further than Sicily, we find among the madrepores, that cover its coasts torn by volcanic fires, a little animal, the zoophyte, which has accomplished a task man would never have dared to undertake. He contrives to move forward by protecting his soft body with a shield of stone which he incessantly secretes. Continuously developing the tubes which in succession afford him shelter, he entirely fills up the empty spaces left by the madrepores or corals, bridges over the intervals between the reefs, and connects them with one another; finally, he creates a passage in defiles previously impassable. In due time this builder will have accomplished the colossal task of a causeway all around the island in its circumference of a hundred and eighty leagues.
But it is more particularly in the vast Southern Ocean that these works are prosecuted on a grand scale by the polypes of the lime, the corallines, and madrepores of every kind; an animal vegetation worthy of comparison with the labour of the mosses in a peat-moor, which continue to flourish in their upper growth while the lower are transformed and decomposed. Exactly like these vegetables, the polypes, and even their production, the coral, while still soft and tender, frequently become the nourishment of worms and fishes which feed and browse upon them like our cattle, derive their sustenance from them, and return them in the shape of chalk, without the slightest indication of a previous existence! Recently English seamen have discovered at the bottom of the sea this manufacture of chalk, which is incessantly passing from the living into the inorganic condition.
But these destructive causes do not prevent the polypes from imperturbably carrying on their gigantic labours, incessantly elevating the islands and solid barriers which are so skilfully adapted to resist the oceanic action. They divide the work among themselves according to their species. The idlest execute their share in the quiet waters, or in the great depths, remotest from the light; others, under the sunshine, among the very breakers of which they eventually become the masters.
Soft, gelatinous, elastic, adhering to their support, the stony and porous mass; they deaden the fury of the boiling waters which would wear out the granite, and split the rock into fragments.
Under the mild trade-winds which prevail in the tropic climates, the sea would uniformly flow with a tranquil tide if it did not encounter these living ramparts, which force it back upon itself, scatter its waves in spray, and vex it with everlasting torment.