ys,
in Clew Bay with its hundred islands, and Galway Bay with its Isles of
Arran, and beautiful Kenmare, and beautiful Bantry, you see little blue
spots, which are low limestone islands, standing in the sea, overhung by
mountains far aloft. You have often heard those islands in Kenmare Bay
talked of, and how some whom you know go to fish round them by night for
turbot and conger; and when you hear them spoken of again, you must
recollect that they are the last fragments of a great fringing
coral-reef, which will in a few thousand years follow the fate of the
rest, and be eaten up by the waves, while the mountains of hard rock
stand round them still unchanged.

Now look at England, and there you will see patches at least of a great
coral-reef which was forming at the same time as that Irish one, and on
which perhaps some of your schoolfellows have often stood. You have
heard of St. Vincent's Rocks at Bristol, and the marble cliffs, 250 feet
in height, covered in part with rich wood and rare flowers, and the Avon
running through the narrow gorge, and the stately ships sailing far below
your feet from Bristol to the Severn sea. And you may see, for here they
are, corals from St. Vincent's Rocks, cut and polished, showing too that
they also, like the Dudley limestone, are made up of corals and of coral-
mud. Now, whenever you see St. Vincent's Rocks, as I suspect you very
soon will, recollect where you are, and use your fancy, to paint for
yourself a picture as strange as it is true. Fancy that those rocks are
what they once were, a coral-reef close to the surface of a shallow sea.
Fancy that there is no gorge of the Avon, no wide Severn sea--for those
were eaten out by water ages and ages afterwards. But picture to
yourself the coral sea reaching away to the north, to the foot of the
Welsh mountains; and then fancy yourself, if you will, in a canoe,
paddling up through the coral-reefs, north and still north, up the valley
down which the Severn now flows, up through what is now Worcestershire,
then up through Staffordshire, then through Derbyshire, into Yorkshire,
and so on through Durham and Northumberland, till your find yourself
stopped by the Ettrick hills in Scotland; while all to the westward of
you, where is now the greater part of England, was open sea. You may
say, if you know anything of the geography of England, "Impossible! That
would be to paddle over the tops of high mountains; over the top of the
Peak