That the waters should assault them is their fate. But they inflict no injury upon them; and in truth it is on their behalf they toil. Their violence does not wear them, but it wears the reef, and detaches in atoms the lime on which they live and with which they build. This lime, absorbed by them and animalized, changes into a hundred sparkling, living, active flowers, which are identical with our polypes, and form quite an analogous world enamelling the ocean-bed.
On the margin of these islands,—which are generally circular, like a ring,—accumulates a layer of vegetable wealth, which speedily grows green, and embellishes itself with the only tree that can endure salt-water, the cocoa-nut palm. This, then, is the humus; the life which will for ever continue to develop. The fresh springs and fountains will next make their appearance, invited and fed by the vegetation.
Such is the original type of a young world which in due time will be inhabited. The cocoa-palm will have its insects; the birds will pause on its boughs; men will gather its fruit. Wrecked ships and floating timbers, propelled by the sea, will bring there after awhile tenants of every kind.
Some of these islands, when extended, enlarged, and solidified, measure not less than twenty-five miles in circumference. Many are larger still; fertile, inhabited, and populous, like the Maldives.
The ambition of their architects might rest contented, you would think, with these vast creations. But to insure their fixity, they have increased their extent. The buttresses by which they strengthen their work at the bottom of the sea being prolonged and elevated, expand into banks, which link the isles to each other over an immense area. Along the line of burning life, in the tropic zone, these indefatigable builders have daringly intersected the sea and worked athwart its currents, and already are arresting the courses of our navigators.
New Caledonia is now surrounded by a reef of 145 leagues in length. The chain of the Maldive Islands measures 480 English miles. To the east of New Holland stretches a bank of polypes over 360 leagues, 127 of these without interruption. Finally, in the Pacific Ocean the mass known as the Dangerous Archipelago is about 400 leagues in length by 150 in breadth.
If they continue after this fashion, incessantly connecting their various piles of submarine masonry, they will perhaps realize the prophecy of Kirby, who discerned in the coral isles and reefs the possibility of a new world—a brilliant and fertile world; and in the course of centuries may accomplish the formation of a causeway, an immense bridge, connecting Asia with America.
