152 DOWN. [Ch. YHL 



none of the shrubberies or walls that now give shelter ; it was 

 overlooked from the lane, and was open, bleak, and desolate. 

 One of my father's first undertakings was to lower the lane by 

 about two feet, and to build a flint wall along that part of it 

 which bordered the garden. The earth thus excavated was 

 used in making banks and mounds round the lawn : these were 

 planted with evergreens, which now give to the garden its 

 retired and sheltered character. 



The house was made to look neater by being covered with 

 stucco, but the chief improvement effected was the building of 

 a large bow extending up through three storeys. This bow 

 became covered with a tangle of creepers, and pleasantly 

 varied the south side of the house. The drawing-room, with 

 its verandah opening into the garden, as well as the study in 

 which my father worked during the later years of his life, 

 were added at subsequent dates. 



Eighteen acres of land were sold with the house, of which 

 twelve acres on the south side of the house form a pleasant 

 field, scattered with fair-sized oaks and ashes. From this 

 field a strip was cut off and converted into a kitchen garden, in 

 which the experimental plot of ground was situated, and where 

 the greenhouses were ultimately put up. 



During the whole of 1843 he was occupied with geological 

 work, the result of which was published in the spring of the 

 following year. It was entitled Geological Observations on the 

 Volcanic Islands, visited during the voyage of H.N.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 Beefs 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 Sir A. 

 Geikie's words * on these two volumes — which were up to this 

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

 Coral Beefs, 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 had 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, 



* Charles Darwin, Nature Series, 1882. 



