And even if we turn to the oldest periods of geologic history, although the nature of the materials is changed, although we cannot apply to them the same reasonings that we can to the existing corals, yet still there are vast masses of limestone formed of nothing else than the accumulations of the skeletons of similar animals, and testifying that even in those remote periods of the world's history, as now, the order of things implies that the earth had already endured for a period of which our ordinary standards of chronology give us not the slightest conception. In other words, the history of these coral reefs, traced out honestly and carefully, and with the same sort of reasoning that you would use in the ordinary affairs of life, testifies, like every fact that I know of, to the prodigious antiquity of the earth since it existed in a condition in the main similar to that in which it now is. [Footnote 1: A Lecture delivered in Manchester, November 4th, 1870.] End of Project Gutenberg's Coral and Coral Reefs, by Thomas H. Huxley