The Project Gutenberg EBook of Coral and Coral Reefs, by Thomas H. Huxley

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Title: Coral and Coral Reefs

Author: Thomas H. Huxley

Posting Date: January 6, 2009 [EBook #2937]
Release Date: November, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CORAL AND CORAL REEFS ***

Produced by Amy E. Zelmer

CORAL AND CORAL REEFS

by Thomas H. Huxley

[1]

THE subject upon which I wish to address you to-night is the structure
and origin of Coral and Coral Reefs. Under the head of "coral" there are
included two very different things; one of them is that substance which
I imagine a great number of us have champed when we were very much
younger than we are now,--the common red coral, which is used so much,
as you know, for the edification and the delectation of children of
tender years, and is also employed for the purposes of ornament for
those who are much older, and as some think might know better. The other
kind of coral is a very different substance; it may for distinction's
sake be called the white coral; it is a material which most assuredly
not the hardest-hearted of baby farmers would give to a baby to chew,
and it is a substance which is to be seen only in the cabinets of
curious persons, or in museums, or, may be, over the mantelpieces of
sea-faring men. But although the red coral, as I have mentioned to you,
has access to the very best society; and although the white coral is
comparatively a despised product, yet in this, as in many other cases,
the humbler thing is in reality the greater; the amount of work which is
done in the world by the white coral being absolutely infinite compared
with that effected by its delicate and pampered namesake. Each of these
substances, the white coral and the red, however, has a relationship to
the other. They are, in a zoological sense, cousins, each of them being
formed by the same kind of animals in what is substantially the same
way. Each of these bodies is, in fact, the hard skeleton of a very
curious and a very simple animal, more comparable to the bones of such
animals as ourselves than to the shells of oysters or creatures of that
kind; for it is the