Among these resuscitations, I first note my Madrepores, taking the interest of life, though previously scorned, or unnoticed, as dead stone. When Lamarck collected and explained them at the Museum, they were detected in the mystery of their activity, in their immense creations, and they exemplified how a world is made. That once known, it was at once suspected that if the earth makes the animal, the animal also makes the earth; and that each aids the other in the office of creation. Animality is every where, filling every thing and peopling every thing. We find the remains or the imprint of it even in the minerals, as the statuary marble and alabaster, which have passed through the crucible of the most destructive fires. At every advance, in our knowledge of the existing, we discover an enormous past of animal life. As soon as our improvements in Optics enabled us to discover and to watch the Infusoriæ, we behold them making mountains and paving the ocean. The hard silex is a mass of animalcules, the sponge is an animated silex. Our limestones are all animals; Paris is built with infusoriæ, a part of Germany rests upon a newly buried bed of coral. Infusoriæ, coral, shells, chalk and lime. They are constantly taking from the Ocean, but the fish, which devour the coral, restore it as chalk, and restore it to the waters whence it came. Thus the Coral Sea in its labor of production, of upheaving, in its constructions incessantly augmented or diminished, built, ruined, and rebuilt, is an immense fabric of limestone which is continually oscillating between its two lives;--the _acting_ life of the day--the other life that _will act_ to-morrow. Foster quite justly decides that these circular islands are the craters of volcanoes, raised up by the polypes. He has been contradicted, but wrongly so. Upon no other hypothesis can we account for this identity of figure. There is always the same ring of about a hundred paces in diameter, very low, beaten on the outside by the waves, but enclosing a tranquil basin. A few plants of three or four species, here and there, crown the basin with verdure. The water is of the most beautiful green. The enclosing ring is of white sand, the residue of dissolved coral, contrasting with the blue of the Ocean. Beneath the salt water, our little laborers are at work, the stronger and bolder at the breakers, the weaker and more timid on the smoother sides.