We cannot dismiss this subject without considering the coral-island, or completed atoll, in its relations to life. Upon an area so limited and so uniform, there may be much beauty, but little variety. On many of them there are less than a dozen species of plants, and not an animal higher in the scale than fishes, except a few migratory birds. Twenty-nine species of plants were found upon one island. There, as elsewhere, on the dry rocks, black lichens grow in patches. The germs of this class of plants seem to be present everywhere within the geographical limits of life. On some of the more favored islands are some tropical birds, a few rats and mice, and perhaps other animals introduced by man. The drift of the sea may convey to it various organic germs.
The coral-made land is ocean-born; its palm-groves were planted by the waves; and here too is man, savage, swarthy, unclothed, filthy, barbarous. With him degradation is an inheritance, and physical conditions hold him with relentless grasp. With occasional surfeit, he is in danger daily of starvation. He is driven to infanticide in self-defence. The taste which adorns our New-England landscapes can never develop here. In the land of the elm and the oak, rather than beneath the shade of the pandanus and the cocoa-nut palm, we must look for the conditions which mould manhood in the common struggle for life.
We quote again, and lastly, from Prof. Dana's work: "A coral-island, even in its best condition, is but a miserable place for human development, physical, mental, and moral. There is poetry in every feature, but the natives find this a poor substitute for the bread-fruit and yams of more favored lands. How many of the various arts of civilized life could exist in a land where shells are the only cutting instruments—fresh water barely enough for household purposes—no streams, nor mountains, nor hills? How much of the poetry and literature of Europe would be intelligible to persons whose ideas had expanded only to the limits of a coral-island, who had never conceived of a surface of land above half a mile in breadth—of a slope higher than a beach, or of change in seasons beyond a variation in the prevalence of rain?"
Such are coral-islands—beautiful gems of the ocean; delightful as a subject of study, equally in their aspects and development, their geological importance and in their relations to life.
