water and sky for many long months, except the dreary shores of Tierra
del Fuego, these groves appeared like paradise.

They called this Lagoon Island. As night came on soon after they
reached it, however, they were compelled to sail away without attempting
to land.

Not long afterwards another island was discovered. This one was in the
shape of a bow, with the calm lake, or lagoon, lying between the cord
and the bow. It was also inhabited, but Cook did not think it worth his
while to land. The natives here had canoes, and the voyagers waited to
give them an opportunity of putting off to the ship, but they seemed
afraid to do so.

Now, good reader, you must know that these coral islands of the Pacific
are not composed of ordinary rocks, like most other islands of the
world, but are literally manufactured or built by millions of extremely
small insects which merit particular notice. Let us examine this
process of island-making which is carried on very extensively by the
artisans of the great South-Sea Factory!

The coral insect is a small creature of the sea which has been gifted
with the power of "secreting" or depositing a lime-like substance, with
which it builds to itself a little cell or habitation. It fastens this
house to a rock at the bottom of the sea. Like many other creatures the
coral insect is sociable; it is fond of company, and is never found
working except in connection with millions of its friends. Of all the
creatures of earth it shows perhaps the best example of what mighty
works can be accomplished by _union_. One man can do comparatively
little, but hundreds of men, united in their work, can achieve wonders,
as every one knows. They can erect palaces and cathedrals towering to
the skies; they can cover hundred of miles of ground with cities, and
connect continents with telegraphs, but, with all their union, all their
wisdom, and all their power, men cannot build islands--yet this is done
by the coral insect; a thing without hand or brain, a creature with
little more than a body and a stomach. It is not much bigger than a
pin-head, yet hundreds of the lovely, fertile islands of the Pacific
Ocean are formed by this busy animalcule. Many of those islands would
never have been there but for the coral insect!

When corallines (as they are called) set about building an island, they
lay the foundation on the top of a submarine mountain. The ordinary
islands of the sea are neither more nor