You know that the mountains on shore are
covered with vegetation at their bases, while their tops are barren or
covered with snow; but these mountains would be perfectly bare at their
bases, and all round their tops they would be covered with a beautiful
vegetation of coral polypes. And not only would this be the case, but
we should find that for a considerable distance down, all the material
of these atoll and encircling reefs was built up of precisely the same
coral rock as the fringing reef. That is to say, you have an enormous
mass of coral rock at a depth below the surface of the water where we
know perfectly well that the coral animals could not have lived to form
it. When those two facts were first put together, naturalists were
quite as much puzzled as I daresay you are, at present, to understand
how these two seeming contradictions could be reconciled; and all sorts
of odd hypotheses were resorted to. It was supposed that the coral did
not extend so far down, but that there was a great chain of submarine
mountains stretching through the Pacific, and that the coral had grown
upon them.
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