Nothing gives clearer evidence of the power of mind which Darwin had already attained when voyaging round the world than the originality of his views on coral reefs. The lagoon islands, or atolls, he describes as "vast rings of coral rock, often many leagues in diameter, here and there surmounted by a low verdant island, with dazzling white shores, bathed on the outside by the foaming breakers of the ocean; and, on the inside, surrounding a calm expanse of water which, from reflection, is of a bright, but pale, green colour." Keeling atoll, outside which, at less than a mile and a half distance, no bottom was found with a line 7,200 feet in length, having been fully described, and an account given of all other known atoll systems, the peculiarities of the great barrier reef of North-east Australia, and that of New Caledonia, were recounted. Off the latter, no bottom was found, at two ships' length from the reef, with a line 900 feet long. With these were linked the smaller reefs of Tahiti and others, where considerable islands are more or less completely surrounded by them. Next, the fringing or shore reefs, at first sight only a variety of barrier reefs, were clearly distinguished from them by the absence of an interior deep-water channel, and their not growing up from an immense, but from a moderate depth of water. The remarkable fact was pointed out by Darwin that all coral islands are within a little more than 30 degrees of the Equator, but that, at the same time, they are absent over certain larger areas within the tropical seas. There are none on the West Coast of South America, nor on the West Coast of Africa. In this portion of his work we have another significant sentence bearing on the struggle for existence. In discussing the apparently capricious distribution of coral reefs, he remarks that "the study of the terrestrial and better-known half of the world must convince every one that no station capable of supporting life is lost--nay more, that there is a struggle for each station between the different orders of nature." He describes the large fishes and the trepangs (_holothuriæ_) preying upon the coral-polyps, and shows how complex are the conditions which determine the formation of reefs on any shore. Perhaps no part of his work is more important than that in which he collects the evidence proving how rapidly coral masses grow, and that they for the most part cannot flourish in a greater depth of water than fifteen fathoms.