158 



Lecturer did not believe he thought anything about the Dolomites, 

 but was speaking solely about the corals. So much then for that 

 identification of Dolomite mountains with coral islands. 



What followed ? If this theory that the Dolomite mountains 

 were formed by the agency of coral polyps held good, then they 

 could draw upon descriptions of the coral islands in the sunny 

 Southern seas for a picture of the beauties and splendours of Tyrol 

 as it was in ancient days. They would see that while these busy 

 builders reared their decorative towers, absorbing the pearly shell 

 and the crystal sand, the palm trees were waving over the land their 

 graceful fronds, all the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics was there 

 ■with its bright flowers and the still brighter plumaged birds and 

 more brilliantly painted insects radiant in their flight. And these, 

 in turn, would give way as the shades of night fell to still more 

 beautiful features ; for all writers said that the chief beauty of the 

 tropics was the beautiful night with the fireflies and the soft, deep, 

 purple distances. All these things had gone, not a trace of them 

 was to be seen in the Dolomite region now. They were gone 

 without a fossil bone or beak. The brilliant birds were dead, and 

 butterflies, the palms, the humming-birds — of them there was no 

 trace left except, he thought, their beauty. That had not gone. 

 It had been stored up for us as Nature stores up a great many 

 other things. Nature is very conservative, no force is lost, no heat 

 is lost, and he thought no beauty was lost either. As we now 

 enjoyed in that room the sunlight bottled up for us ages ago in the 

 coal measures, so travellers in the Dolomite regions now might 

 enjoy the tropical beauties stored up in those coral polyps' 

 castles — those Dolomite strongholds which they saw represented 

 around them. And when the evening sun shone upon them, the 

 curtains, as it were, were drawn from the windows of those castles 

 and unveiled scenes of beauty which were beyond anything else he 

 had seen or imagined to be anywhere on earth, teaching us that 

 there might be something in the conservation of beauty as well 

 as of energy. 



XXXVIII. 



NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE LANDSLIP 

 AT SANDGATE, 



4th and 5th March, 1893. 



JAMES REID, F.R.C.S., Eng., Canterbury. 



As no adequate account has hitherto appeared in the South 

 Eastern Naturalist of the physical causes and conditions of this 

 geological occurrence, so interesting in its nature, and serious in 



