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



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 had been proposed. 

 After visiting many of them, and examining also coral reefs 

 that fringe islands and continents, he offered a theory which 

 for simplicity and grandeur strikes every reader with astonish- 

 ment. 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 lightly over ; and how, step 

 by step, one was led to the grand conclusion of wide oceanic 

 subsidence. No more admirable example of scientific method 

 was ever given to the world, and even if he had written 

 nothing else, the treatise alone would have placed Darwin in 

 the very front of investigators of nature." 



It is interesting to see in the following extract from one of 

 Lyell's letters* how warmly and readily he embraced the 

 theory. The extract also gives incidentally some idea of the 

 theory itself. 



" I am very full of Darwin's new theory of Coral Islands, 

 and have urged Whewell to make him read it at our next 

 meeting. I must give up my volcanic crater theory for ever, 

 though it cost me a pang at first, for it accounted for so much, 

 the annular form, the central lagoon, the sudden rising of an 

 isolated mountain in a deep sea ; all went so well with the 

 notion of submerged, crateriform, and conical volcanoes, . . . 

 and then the fact that in the South Pacific we had scarcely 

 any rocks in the regions of coral islands, save two kinds, coral 

 limestone and volcanic ! Yet spite of all this, the whole theory 

 is knocked on the head, and the annular shape and central 

 lagoon have nothing to do with volcanoes, nor even with a 

 crateriform bottom. Perhaps Darwin told you when at the 



* To Sir John Herschel, May 24, 1837. 'Life of Sir Charles Lyell,' 

 vol. ii. p. 12. 



