THE REEF

The romance of coral has still to be written. There still exists a
widespread opinion that the coral reef and the coral island are the
work of an "insect." This fabulous insect, accredited with the genius
of Brunel and the patience of Job, has been humorously enough held up
before the children of many generations as an example of industry--a
thing to be admired, a model to be followed.

As a matter of fact, nothing could be more slothful or slow, more given
up to a life of ease and degeneracy, than the "reef-building
polypifer"--to give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the
animal world, but, unlike the hobo, he does not even tramp for a
living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm; he attracts to
himself calcareous elements from the water to make himself a
house--mark you, the sea does the building--he dies, and he leaves his
house behind him--and a reputation for industry, beside which the
reputation of the ant turns pale, and that of the bee becomes of little
account.

On a coral reef you are treading on rock that the reef-building
polypifers of ages have left behind them as evidences of their idle and
apparently useless lives. You might fancy that the reef is formed of
dead rock, but it is not: that is where the wonder of the thing comes
in--a coral reef is half alive. If it were not, it would not resist the
action of the sea ten years. The live part of the reef is just where
the breakers come in and beyond. The gelatinous rock-building
polypifers die almost at once, if exposed to the sun or if left
uncovered by water.

Sometimes, at very low tide, if you have courage enough to risk being
swept away by the breakers, going as far out on the reef as you can,
you may catch a glimpse of them in their living state--great mounds and
masses of what seems rock, but which is a honeycomb of coral, whose
cells are filled with the living polypifers. Those in the uppermost
cells are usually dead, but lower down they are living.

Always dying, always being renewed, devoured by fish, attacked by the
sea--that is the life of a coral reef. It is a thing as living as a
cabbage or a tree. Every storm tears a piece off the reef, which the
living coral replaces; wounds occur in it which actually granulate and
heal as wounds do of the human body.

There is nothing, perhaps, more mysterious in nature than this fact of
the existence of a living land: a land that repairs itself, when
injured, by vital proc