Pa.: Chemical Publishing Company. Pp. 28. 50 cents.
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The Origin of Coral Island Forms.—This much-discussed question has been raised again by the boring operation of Professors Sollas and David at the island of Funifuti. Their results, as far as they have been announced, seem to confirm Darwin's theory of subsidence. But now we have a letter (American Journal of Science, February, 1898) from Alexander Agassiz, who is at present with a scientific expedition in the Fiji Islands, announcing observations which seem to point toward elevation rather than subsidence. Professor David's bore hole at Funifuti was carried down six hundred and ninety feet, and a preliminary examination of the core indicated that the reef had been built up in the immediate neighborhood, at any rate, of growing coral. Portions of true reef were found in various positions throughout the whole depth. There seems, however, to be a possibility that the boring was situated on a very steep slope of volcanic rock, covered by a talus of coral débris from a reef on the summit. A further and fuller report from Professor David will no doubt clear up some of these uncertainties. The material received from Mr. Agassiz is only that contained in a private letter. Much to his own surprise, he found the general appearance of the islands to indicate, if not prove, that elevation rather than subsidence had taken place. After recalling Professor Dana's statement of the beautiful illustration which the Fijis gave of the gradual changes brought about by subsidence, he says: "My surprise was great, therefore, to find within a mile from Suva an elevated reef about fifty feet thick and a hundred and twenty feet above the level of the sea, the base of the reef being underlaid by what is locally called soapstone, probably a kind of stratified volcanic mud." Many other traces of extensive elevation were noted. At Tarutha, for instance, the coral limestone bluffs were probably eight hundred feet high. From a series of such observations Mr. Agassiz "is inclined to think that the corals of to day have actually played no part in the shaping of the circular or irregular atolls scattered among the Fiji Islands; furthermore, that they have had nothing to do in our time with the building up of the barrier reefs surrounding either wholly or in part some of the islands. I also believe that their modifying influence has been entirely limited in the present epoch to the formation of fringing reefs, and that the recent corals living upon the reefs, either of the atolls or of the barriers, form only a crust of very moderate thickness upon the underlying base.
