292 LIFE AT DOWN. ^TAT. 33-45. 



a favourable notice in No. 12 of the ' Heidelberger Jahr- 

 biicher der Literatur,' 1847 — where the Reviewer speaks of 

 the author's "varied canvas, on which he sketches in Hvely 

 colours the strange customs of those distant regions with their 

 remarkable fauna, flora and geological peculiarities." Alluding 

 to the translation, my father writes — "Dr. Dieffenbach . . . 

 has translated my ' Journal ' into German, and I must, with 

 unpardonable vanity, boast that it was at the instigation of 

 Liebig and Humboldt." 



The geological work of which he speaks in the above letter 

 to Mr. Fox occupied him for the whole of 1843, and was pub- 

 lished in the spring of the following year. It was entitled 

 * Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands, visited 

 during the voyage of H. M. S. Beagle, together with some brief 

 notices on the geology of Australia and the Cape of Good 

 Hope ' : it formed the second part of the ' Geology of the 

 Voyage of the Beagle,' published "with the Approval of the 

 Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury." The 

 volume on ' Coral Reefs ' forms Part I. of the series, and was 

 published, as we have seen, in 1842. For the sake of the 

 non-geological reader, I may here quote Professor Geikie's 

 words ■" on these two volumes — which were up to this time 

 my father's chief geological works. Speaking of the ' Coral 

 Reefs,' he says : — p. 17, " This well-known treatise, the most 

 original of all its author's geological memoirs, has become 

 one of the classics of geological literature. The origin of 

 those remarkable rings of coral-rock in mid-ocean has given 

 rise to much speculation, but no satisfactory solution of the 

 problem has been proposed. After visiting many of them, 

 and examining also coral reefs that fringe islands and con- 

 tinents, he offered a theory which for simplicity and grandeur 

 strikes every reader with astonishment. It is pleasant, after 

 the lapse of many years, to recall the delight with which one 

 first read the ' Coral Reefs ' ; how one watched the facts being 

 marshalled into their places, nothing being ignored or passed 



* Charles Darwin, ' Nature ' Series, 1882. 



