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a fringing reef; the land has gone slowly down; the consequence is the lagoon has deepened until its depth is now 25 fathoms and the corals have grown up at the outer edge until you have that prodigious accumulation which forms the barrier reef at present. Now let this process go on further still; let us take the land a further step down, so as to submerge even the peak. The coral, still growing up, will cover the surface of the land, and you will have an atoll reef; that is to say, a more or less circular or oval ring of coral rock with a lagoon in the middle. Thus you see that every peculiarity and phenomenon of these different forms of coral reef was explained at once by the simplest of all possible suppositions, namely, by supposing that the land has gone down at a rate not greater than that at which the coral polypes have grown up. You explain a Fringing Reef as a reef which is formed round land comparatively stationary; an Encircling Reef as one which is formed round land going down; and an Atoll as a reef formed upon land gone down; and the thing is so simple that a child may understand it when it is once explained. But this would by no means satisfy the conditions of a scientific hypothesis. No man who is cautious would dream of trusting to an explanation of this kind simply because it explained one particular set of facts. Before you can possibly be safe in dealing with Nature--who is very properly made of the feminine gender, on account of the astonishing tricks which she plays upon her admirers!--I say before you can be safe in dealing with Nature, you must get two or three kinds of cross proofs, so as to make sure not only that your hypothesis fits that particular set of facts, but that it is not contradicted by some other set of facts which is just as clear and certain. And it so happens, that in this case Mr. Darwin supplied the cross proofs as well as the immediate evidence. You have all heard of volcanoes, those wonderful vents in the surface of the earth out of which pour masses of lava, cinders and ashes, and the like. Now, it is a matter of observation and experience that all volcanoes are placed in areas in which the surface of the earth is undergoing elevation, or at any rate is stationary; they are not placed in parts of the world in which the level of the land is being lowered. They are all indications of a great subterranean activity, of a something being pushed up, and therefore naturally the l
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