the Reviewer speaks of the author's "varied canvas, on which he sketches in lively colours the strange customs of those distant regions with their remarkable fauna, flora and geological peculiarities." Alluding to the translation, my father writes—"Dr. Dieffenbach...has translated my 'Journal' into German, and I must, with unpardonable vanity, boast that it was at the instigation of Liebig and Humboldt."
The geological work of which he speaks in the above letter to Mr. Fox occupied him for the whole of 1843, and was published in the spring of the following year. It was entitled 'Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands, visited during the voyage of H.M.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 Reefs' 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 Professor Geikie's words (Charles Darwin, 'Nature' Series, 1882.) on these two volumes—which were up to this time my father's chief geological works. Speaking of the 'Coral Reefs,' he says:—page 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 has 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 astonishment. 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."