the finer trituration
before consolidation into rock. This compact variety is the most common
kind among the coral reef rocks of the present seas; and it often
contains but few distinct fossils, although formed in water that
abounded in life. At the fall of the Ohio, near Louisville, there is a
magnificent display of the old reef. Hemispherical Favosites, five or
six feet in diameter, lie there nearly as perfect as when they were
covered by their flowerlike polypes; and besides these, there are
various branching corals, and a profusion of Cyathophyllia, or
cup-corals."*

* Dana, Manual of Geology, p. 272.

Thus, in all the great periods of the earth's history of which we know
anything, a part of the then living matter has had the form of polypes,
competent to separate from the water of the sea the carbonate of lime
necessary for their own skeletons. Grain by grain, and particle by
particle, they have built up vast masses of rock, the thickness of which
is measured by hundreds of feet, and their area by thousands of square
miles. The slow oscillations of the crust of the earth, producing great
changes in the distribution of land and water, have often obliged
the living matter of the coral-builders to shift the locality of its
operations; and, by variation and adaptation to these modifications of
condition, its forms have as often changed. The work it has done in the
past is, for the most part, swept away, but fragments remain, and, if
there were no other evidence, suffice to prove the general constancy
of the operations of Nature in this world, through periods of almost
inconceivable duration.

NOTES

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

[Footnote 1: Autobiography: Huxley's account of this sketch, written in
1889, is as follows: "A man who is bringing out a series of portraits of
celebrities, with a sketch of their career attached, has bothered me
out of my life for something to go with my portrait, and to escape the
abominable bad taste of some of the notices, I have done that."]

[Footnote 2: pre-Boswellian epoch: the time before Boswell. James
Boswell (1740-1795) wrote the famous Life of Samuel Johnson. Mr. Leslie
Stephen declares that this book "became the first specimen of a new
literary type." "It is a full-length portrait of a man's domestic life
with enough picturesque detail to enable us to see him through the eyes
of private friendship. . . ." A number of biographers since Boswell have
imitated his method;