SKETCH OF CHARLES R. DARWIN, LL.D. 261 



ber, 1831, and was gone four years and ten months, during which time 

 it visited Brazil, Patagonia, Chili, Peru, the Galapagos and Society- 

 Islands, New Zealand, Australia, Mauritius, St. Helena, and the Cape 

 Verd Islands. The observations taken during this voyage and the pre- 

 vious expedition were published by Captains King and Fitzroy, their 

 commanders, in a voluminous report, to which Mr. Darwin contributed 

 a volume embodying " A Journal of Researches into the Geology and 

 Natural History of the Various Countries visited by his Majesty's 

 Ship Beagle, under the Command of Captain Fitzroy, from 1832 to 

 1836." Of this work Sir Charles Lyell wrote to the author, in Sep- 

 tember, 1838, before it was actually published: "I assure you my 

 father is quite enthusiastic about your journal, which he is reading, 

 and he agrees with me that it would have had a great sale if separately 

 published. The other day he told me that he wished to get a copy 

 bound the moment it was out, and send it as a present to Sir William 

 Hooker, who, more than any one, would be delighted with yours. He 

 was disappointed at hearing that it was to be fettered by the other 

 volumes, for, although he should equally buy it, he feared so many of 

 the public would be checked from doing so." The volume was pub- 

 lished separately in 1845. The ten years which followed Mr. Darwin's 

 return to England were mainly devoted by him to the publication of 

 the numerous and important results that had been obtained during the 

 voyage. He edited the treatises of Professor Owen, Mr. Waterhouse, 

 Mr. Gould, the Rev. J. Jenyns, and Mr. Bell, on the different groups 

 of vertebrate animals as " The Zoology of the Voyage of H. M. S. 

 Beagle " ; and he wrote three separate volumes embodying further 

 fruits of his observations than he had given in the " Report," " On the 

 Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs " (1842) ; " Geologic Obser- 

 vations on Volcanic Islands " (1844) ; and " Geological Observations on 

 South America " (1846). Of the first three works, a reviewer of the 

 second edition in "Nature," in 1874, says : "The rising generation of 

 naturalists and geologists have not had, and most probably will never 

 have, such feelings of intellectual pleasure as fell to the lot of the 

 readers of Charles Darwin's book on ' Coral Reefs,' which was offered 

 to science more than thirty years ago. The recent researches into the 

 nature of the deposits of the deep-sea, and the discoveries of bathy- 

 metrical zones of water of very different temperatures, are certainly 

 full of vast interest, and will afford the data for the development of 

 many a theory ; but the clear exposition of facts, and the bold theory 

 which characterized the book on < Coral Reefs,' came unexpectedly and 

 with overpowering force of conviction. The natural history of a zo- 

 ophyte was brought into connection with the grandest phenomena of 

 the globe with the progressive subsidence of more or less submerged 

 mountains, and with the distribution of volcanic foci." And this re- 

 viewer adds that "even at this period of Darwin's life the importance 

 of the struggle for existence had been recognized by him, and had in- 



