"Let the hurricane teat up its thousand huge fragments; yet what will that tell against the accumulated labour of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month? Thus do we see the soft and gelatinous body of a polypus, through the agency of the vital laws, conquering the great mechanical power of the waves of an ocean which neither the art of man nor the inanimate works of nature could successfully resist." Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
Darwin is exploring coral atolls (islands of coral) in the southeastern Pacific. Here we see an expression of the the theist philosophy of a world filled with natural laws without the need for supernatural intervention. We see corals growing constantly and recovering from disturbance. The thousands of feet in thickness implies eons of growth.
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