Around this island extends, with few interruptions, an encircling coral reef about a quarter of a mile from the shore, visible as a stripe of pale green water, but only at very lowest ebb-tides showing any rock above the surface. There are several deep entrances through this reef, and inside it there is hood anchorage in all weathers. The land rises gradually to a moderate height, and numerous small streams descend on all sides. The mere existence of these streams would prove that the island was not entirely coralline, as in that case all the water would sink through the porous rock as it does at Manowolko and Matabello; but we have more positive proof in the pebbles and stones of their beds, which exhibit a variety of stratified crystalline rocks. About a hundred yards from the beach rises a wall of coral rock, ten or twenty feet high, above which is an undulating surface of rugged coral, which slopes downward towards the interior, and then after a slight ascent is bounded by a second wall of coral. Similar walls occur higher up, and coral is found on the highest part of the island.
This peculiar structure teaches us that before the coral was formed land existed in this spot; that this land sunk gradually beneath the waters, but with intervals of rest, during which encircling reef's were formed around it at different elevations; that it then rose to above its present elevation, and is now again sinking. We infer this, because encircling reefs are a proof of subsidence; and if the island were again elevated about a hundred feet, what is now the reef and the shallow sea within it would form a wall of coral rock, and an undulating coralline plain, exactly similar to those that still exist at various altitudes up to the summit of the island. We learn also that these changes have taken place at a comparatively recent epoch, for the surface of the coral has scarcely suffered from the action of the weather, and hundreds of sea-shells, exactly resembling those still found upon the beach, and many of them retaining their gloss and even their colour, are scattered over the surface of the island to near its summit.
Whether the Goram group formed originally part of New Guinea or of Ceram it is scarcely possible to determine, and its productions will throw little light upon the question, if, as I suppose, the islands have been entirely submerged within the epoch of existing species of animals, as in that case it must owe its present fauna and flora to recent immigration from surrounding lands; and with this view its poverty in species very well agrees. It possesses much in common with East Ceram, but at the same time has a good deal of resemblance to the Ke Islands and Banda. The fine pigeon, Carpophaga concinna, inhabits Ke, Banda, Il-Iatabello, and Goram, and is replaced by a distinct species, C. neglecta, in Ceram. The insects of these four islands have also a common facies--facts which seem to indicate that some more extensive land has recently disappeared from the area they now occupy, and has supplied them with a few of its peculiar productions.