THEORY OF CORAL ISLANDS. 293 



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 Cape what he considers the true cause .^ Let any 

 mountain be submerged gradually, and coral grow in the sea 

 in which it is sinking, and there will be a ring of coral, and 

 finally only a lagoon in the centre. Why ? For the same 

 reason that a barrier reef of coral grows along certain coasts : 

 Australia, &c. Coral islands are the last efforts of drowning 

 continents to lift their heads above water. Regions of eleva- 

 tion and subsidence in the ocean may be traced by the state 

 of the coral reefs." There is little to be said as to published 

 contemporary criticism. The book was not reviewed in the 

 'Quarterly Review' till 1847, when a favourable notice was 



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

 vol. ii. p. 12. 



