What lifted it up?
Your companions, if you have any who know the island, have no
difficulty in telling you. It was hove up, they say, in the
earthquake in such and such a year; and they will tell you, perhaps,
that if you will go on shore to the main island which rises inside
the reef, you may see dead coral beds just like these lying on the
old rocks, and sloping up along the flanks of the mountains to
several hundred feet above the sea. I have seen such many a time.
Thus you find the coral being converted gradually into a limestone
rock, either fine and homogeneous, composed of coral grown into pulp,
or filled with corals and shells, or with angular fragments of older
coral rock. Did you never see that last? No? Yes, you have a
hundred times. You have but to look at the marbles commonly used
about these islands, with angular fragments imbedded in the mass, and
here and there a shell, the whole cemented together by water holding
in solution carbonate of lime, and there see the very same phenomenon
perpetuated to this day.
Thus, I think, we have got first from the known to the unknown; from
a tropic coral island back here to the limestone hills of Great
Britain; and I did not speak at random when I said that I was not
leading you away as far as you fancied by several thousand miles.
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