Corals having calcareous skeletons aggregations of which form reefs and islands

Usage examples of madrepore.

I hastened to the aperture, and under the crustations of coral, covered with fungi, syphonules, alcyons, madrepores, through myriads of charming fish--girelles, glyphisidri, pompherides, diacopes, and holocentres--I recognised certain debris that the drags had not been able to tear up--iron stirrups, anchors, cannons, bullets, capstan fittings, the stem of a ship, all objects clearly proving the wreck of some vessel, and now carpeted with living flowers.

These walls are specially the work of those madrepores known as milleporas, porites, madrepores, and astraeas.

By way of strange contrast in values the pearls were separated from each other by worthless, little, smooth lumps of madrepore, or unfossilized coral.

I hastened to the aperture, and under the crustations of coral, covered with fungi, syphonules, alcyons, madrepores, through myriads of charming fish--girelles, glyphisidri, pompherides, diacopes, and holocentres--I recognised certain debris that the drags had not been able to tear up--iron stirrups, anchors, cannons, bullets, capstan fittings, the stem of a ship, all objects clearly proving the wreck of some vessel, and now carpeted with living flowers.

Looking down the vast promontory of his nose he has beheld everything – the Cordilleras falling away into the Pacific, the history of the Diaspora done in vellum, shutters fluting the froufrou of the beach, the piano curving like a conch, corollas giving out diapasons of light, chameleons squirming under the book press, seraglios expiring in oceans of dust, music issuing like fire from the hidden chromosphere of pain, spore and madrepore fructifying the earth, navels vomiting their bright spawn of anguish… He is a bright sage, a dancing seer who, with a sweep of the brush, removes the ugly scaffold to which the body of man is chained by the incontrovertible facts of life.

These walls are especially the work of those madrepores known as milleporas, porites, and astræas.

In the first group, the tubipores, were gorgones arranged like a fan, soft sponges of Syria, ises of the Moluccas, pennatules, an admirable virgularia of the Norwegian seas, variegated umbellulariæ, alcyonariæ, a whole series of madrepores, which my master Milne-Edwards has so cleverly classified, among which I remarked some wonderful flabellinæ, oculinæ of the island of Bourbon, the "Neptune's car" of the Antilles, superb varieties of corals, in short, every species of those curious polypi of which entire islands are formed, which will one day become continents.