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
hardening of the internal tissue of the creature, of its internal
substance, by the deposit in the body of a material which is exceedingly
common, not only in fresh but in sea water, and which is specially
abundant in those waters which we know as "hard," those waters, for
example, which leave a "fur" upon the bottom of a tea-kettle.
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