Appendix. 



of the accredited Lyellian agents. And Darwin says him- 

 self elsewhere, of his own Coral Island theory: " No other 

 " work of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this, 

 "for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast 

 "of South America before I had seen a true coral reef. I 

 ' ' had therefore only to verify and extend my views by 

 " a careful examination of living reefs. But it should be 

 " observed that I had during the two previous years been 

 " incessantly attending to the effects on the shores of South 

 "America of the intermittent alteration of the land, to- 

 gether with the denudation and deposition of sediment. 

 " This necessarily led me to reflect much on the effects 

 ' ' of subsidence, and it was easy to replace in imagination 

 " the continued deposition of sediment by the upward 

 ' ' growth of corals. To do this was to form my theory of 

 (( the formation of barrier reefs and atolls* 1 ." 



This is what he calls beginning a work in a deductive 

 spirit ! The naivete with which Darwin shows us his hand 

 here is really delicious. Deduction indeed ! He comes to 

 the Coral Islands with his theory ready made, a theory of 

 gradual subsidence in one place based upon gradual eleva- 

 tion (wholly imaginary) in another : this is what he calls 

 deduction ! Wherever he looks, he sees, because he wishes 

 to see, subsidence, not because it is there, but because he 

 brings it with him : it is in his eye. And for similar 

 reasons, his theory was eagerly caught up by Lyell, Jukes, 

 Dana, and others of the school. Nothing is so curiously 

 astonishing as the blindness of these physical investigators 

 to the necessary corollaries of their own theories. Can 

 any human being in his senses really suppose that con- 



b The Italics are mine. 



