The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-12-19

lures Represent the Secretion of an | Colonies Through the Wondrous
 Processes of Budding and seif-Di-
 yision-Discredited Theories and
 Darwin's Explanation.
 (By pr. Andrew Wilson in the New York Evening PosD.
 Among all the varied productions of living nature none perhaps can vie in
 respect of interest with those of the
 coral animal. From our boyhood's days
 we have been accustomed to read of ] coral islands, but it is to be feared that
 many of the descriptions given of these 1 structures in the tales we bored over
 in our youth must be ranked more as | successful ventures in the line of fiction 1 than in that of actual science. Yet the I scientific side of the story of coral is | quite as wondrous in it's way as any thing which the fertile brain of the story writer is able to conceive. | Demolition of the Poets Coral Isle. Every one is familiar, from visit to a natural history museum, with the general appearance of coreal. There
 are, of course, very many different spe cies of structures included under this common name. We see great masses of stony hardness assuming fantastic shapes, and constituting in their way vprit Ia h1a rpclSc pf n 1ln delicate description, and may assume
 the form of miniature organ-ppes,
 while the red coral itself, so much val
 ued for the manufacture of articles of
 jewelry, represents the opposite extreme
 from the coarse limy masses referred
 to. l may explode at the outset an er-
 roneous idea regarding the red coral
 This coral is practically confined to the
 Mediterranean Sea, and grows in
 small tree-like form. The idea that is
 lands formed of red coral exist is a
 piece of pure fiction, and those corals
 which more specially concern us here
 as the builders of reefs are represented
 by the coarse stony masses, familiar enough in museums, but also often used in the construction of grottoes and fer
 neries.
 It is not so very long ago in the his tory of science that coral was dlscov- cred to be the work of an animal. The ancients regarded coral, and specially the red coral which they knew best, as the work of the marine plant. Latin poets tell us of the coral plant, which is soft in it's native waters, but becomes hard when drawn up from the sea and exposed to the action of the air A young French student Peysonnel, dis covered the fact that coral was sub stance represented by the secretion of an animal. He accurately enough de- scribed the kind of animal which makes coral He compared this animal to the sea anemone, which we find in every rocky hollow around our own coasts. In so doing he was perfectly correct, for the coral animal is really q kind of in- | sect and familiar deizen of the sea side.
 The Effect of the Budding Process.
 There is, however this difference be- tween the latter and the coral animal. | The former as rule is single animal; the corals are usually compound. That is to say, one coral animal gives rise to
 
 this way a mass of coral is seen to be the work. not of one animal, but of many hundreds or thousands, produced as kind of colony in the way just de- scribed. It is this power of increase by budding which enables corals to con struct reefs of great magnitude. Pos sessing what is practically an unlimited power of increase, they succeed in pro- iucing enormous masses of rocky sub stance, and we must not forget that every coral animal has the power of eggs. Each egg which comes 70 full development settles down, gives origin to one coral animal, and as this n turn buds, like it's forefathers, a lew colony is thus commenced.
 Regarding coral itself, we find that substance to be represented by hard carbonate of lime. The latter which { ve find accumulated in boilers and ket- l les in hard water districts, as nearly IS possible represents the coral sub tance. The material for making this lard secretion, the possession of which | l lso constitutes another difference from ( he sea anemone, is obtained from the ca water. Carbonate of lime exists in Z olution in the water, and the coral ani- ; nals, absorbing this material from the ( ca, build it up either within or with l ut their bodies. In this way, when the oral animals themselves die they leave q ehnd them what a poet has well call i d "the imperishable masonry of the l. ea." The power of building is not of Q curse limited to corals We are famil- i IT enough with it in the case of plants f ut many other animals beside cO7als t row into colonies by the budding pro- t ess, o limits in Which Coral Life Abounds. l. Corals can also ad to the number in [
 colony through another process, V amely, simple division of the body. c Je can see how the body simply divid- f. ] in two gives rise to two individuals u nd thus adds to the numerical strength W the mass. The conditions under ti hich corals live and grow are very r mple. They may be summed up in the if ords-a certain heat and a certain O apth. The question of heat naturally u titles the range of the corals in space, u lat is, determines their geography in a le existing earth. The reef building b 'rals do not flourish in seas where the d ater is below 66 degrees, or thereby e
 Fahrenheit. It will, therefore, be is en that it is only in tropical regions 1C here we may expect to find the full ',