still surrounded by my four friends, and still associated with numerous five-fold groups. The creature who had robbed us of our liberty was now no more, but for all that we were unable to move. We were fixed to the rock upon which the organism had nourished; indeed, incredible as the statement may appear, the entire reef, which extended for some hundreds of miles, was composed of atoms that had been snatched from the ocean by innumerable generations of those gelatinous little animals.[1]
“I cannot say how long I existed as a constituent of this marine rock. An atom takes no heed of time, and a few millions of years pass by very quickly. Time affects only those compound entities called plants and animals.
“The surface of the earth underwent some strange mutations while I was a rock atom. The relative position of land and water changed. Mountains were upheaved by the internal fires of the globe, and deep valleys were eroded by rivers. The waters of the ocean receded from the reef to which I belonged, and left it high and dry, as a chain of hills in the interior of a vast continent. None of these changes, however, disturbed my repose. The
- ↑ The barrier reef along the north coast of Australia is composed of a chain of coral rocks, and is more than 1000 miles long, and from 10 to 90 miles in breadth, while it rises from depths which in some places certainly exceed 1800 feet. What a mausoleum for creatures so low in the scale of being!
