The coral zoophyte may be leveled by transported masses swept over by the waters; yet like the trodden sod, it sprouts again, and continues to grow and flourish as before.

Some writers, rejecting the idea which science had reached, that reefs of rocks could be due in any way to "animalcules," have talked of electrical forces, the first and last appeal of ignorance.

A map of the moon... should be in every geological lecture room; for no where can we have a more complete or more magnificent illustration of volcanic operations. Our sublimest volcanoes would rank among the smaller lunar eminences; and our Etnas are but spitting furnaces.

The coral zoophyte may be leveled by transported masses swept over by the waters; yet like the trodden sod, it sprouts again, and continues to grow and flourish as before.

The grand old Book of God still stands; and this old earth, the more its leaves are turned over and pondered, the more it will sustain and illustrate the Sacred word.

For nine miles along a submerged ridge, the corals rise in lumpy hillocks that spread out 100 yards or more, resembling heaped scoops of rainbow sherbet and Neapolitan ice cream. The mounds, some 100 feet tall, sprout delicate treelike gorgonians that sift currents for a plankton meal. Fish, worms and other creatures dart or crawl in every crevice. This description could apply to thousands of coral reefs in shallow, sun-streaked tropical waters from Australia to the Bahamas. But this is the Sula Ridge, 1,000 feet down in frigid darkness on the continental shelf 100 miles off Norway's coast.

The profoundest facts in the earth's history prove that the oceans have always been oceans.