Wharton's and Darwin's theories of coral reefs

Stanley Gardiner J. , “The Coral Reef Problem,” Geog. Journ., lxxii, 1928, 268–71.

The Coral Reef Problem, Amer. Geog. Society, New York, 1928.

Gardiner prefers “oceanic” to “pelagic” for the characterisation of open-ocean islands, because pelagic “is in general use for floating organisms and should be so employed according to the law of priority.” Regarding this word the New Oxford Dictionary notes that, “used technically by naturalists, the term, Pelagic, applied to living things [the italics are mine], denotes those animals and plants which inhabit the surface waters of the seas and oceans”; but the primary definition of the word, given in earlier lines of the same dictionary, is: “of or pertaining to the open or high seas, as distinguished from the shallow water near the coast.” Pelagic is, therefore, quite as properly applicable to inorganic objects, like open-ocean islands, as to organic objects, like open-ocean animals and plants.

Experimentation, by which the deduction of consequences has long been helpfully performed in physics and chemistry and is nowadays coming to be increasingly performed in biology, has only a limited application in geology, largely because of the impossibility of truthfully reproducing the spacial and time elements.

Ramsay A. C. , “On the Glacial Origin of Certain Lakes in Switzerland,” Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc., 18, 1862, 185–204.

Lyell Sir Charles , The Antiquity of Man, 1863, 309–319. See also T. G. Bonney, “Do Glaciers Excavate?” Geog. Journ., 1, 1893, 481–99.

“The Ice Age and its Work,” Fortnightly Review, liv, 1893, 616–33, 750–74.

“Les falaises et les récifs coralliens de Tahiti,” Ann. de Géog., xxvii, 1918, 241–84.

Gardiner writes: “We wonder whether Davis, if he had seen Réunion, would have prophesied about it with such certainty. I would point out that movement of sharp sand along coasts cuts into and destroys seemingly well-established corals.” I could wish that my reviewer had expanded those two sentences in order to state explicitly what facts seen on Réunion and not shown on its chart call for a revision of my explanation of its reeflessness, as his first sentence implies; and also to make clear why the opinion stated in his second sentence is introduced as if it contravened the opinion expressed in my book. I not only agree that the long-shore drift of sands will destroy well-established coral reefs (see my account of the Great Barrier Reef on the Queensland coast at its southern end in The Coral Reef Problem, pp. 353 et seq.), but go farther in believing that such shore drift will prevent the establishment of reefs.

Foye W. G. , “Geological Observations in Fiji,” Proc. Amer. Acad. Arts and Sci., 54, 1918, 1–145.

Daly's theory of atolls assumes that they have grown up from flat platforms of abrasion, cut on old, worn-down, and deeply weathered volcanic islands when the ocean was lowered some 30 or 40 fathoms in the Glacial period; but, if so, there should be, among the many scores of Preglacial islands in the Pacific that now, truncated, serve as atoll foundations, at least a few younger islands which were not so greatly worn down or so deeply weathered as the older islands when the Glacial period arrived; and these younger islands would have been incompletely cut away by low-level abrasion, thus giving them the form of cliffed residuals; but there are, with the exception of Tahiti, no such cliffed islands in the true coral seas; and the Tahitian cliffs cannot be reasonably explained by low-level abrasion because the neighbouring islands of the Society group are not similarly cuffed.

“The Marginal Belts of the Coral Seas,” Amer. Journ. Sci., 6, 1923, 191–5.

See “The Formation of Coral Reefs,” Sci. Monthly, xxvii, 1928, 289–300; also “Die Entstehung von Korallenriffen,” Zeitschr. Ges. f. Erdk., Berlin, 1928, 359–91.