9.30 and sit half an hour with you? Pray have no scruple to send a line
to Queen Anne Street to say "No" if it will take anything out of you. If
I do not hear, I will come.

LETTER 531. TO J. PRESTWICH. Down, January 3rd, 1880.

You are perfectly right. (531/1. Prof. Prestwich's paper on Glen Roy was
published in the "Phil. Trans. R. Soc." for 1879, page 663.) As soon as
I read Mr. Jamieson's article on the parallel roads, I gave up the ghost
with more sighs and groans than on almost any other occasion in my life.

2.IX.IV. CORAL REEFS, FOSSIL AND RECENT, 1841-1881.

LETTER 532. TO C. LYELL. Shrewsbury, Tuesday, 6th [July, 1841].

Your letter was forwarded me here. I was the more glad to receive it, as
I never dreamed of your being able to find time to write, now that you
must be so very busy; and I had nothing to tell you about myself, else I
should have written. I am pleased to hear how extensive and successful
a trip you appear to have made. You must have worked hard, and got your
Silurian subject well in your head, to have profited by so short an
excursion. How I should have enjoyed to have followed you about the
coral-limestone. I once was close to Wenlock (532/1. The Wenlock
limestone (Silurian) contains an abundance of corals. "The rock seems
indeed to have been formed in part by massive sheets and bunches of
coral" (Geikie, "Text-book of Geology," 1882, page 678.), something such
as you describe, and made a rough drawing, I remember, of the masses of
coral. But the degree in which the whole mass was regularly stratified,
and the quantity of mud, made me think that the reefs could never have
been like those in the Pacific, but that they most resembled those on
the east coast of Africa, which seem (from charts and descriptions)
to confine extensive flats and mangrove swamps with mud, or like some
imperfect ones about the West India Islands, within the reefs of which
there are large swamps. All the reefs I have myself seen could be
associated only with nearly pure calcareous rocks. I have received a
description of a reef lying some way off the coast near Belize (terra
firma), where a thick bed of mud seems to have invaded and covered a
coral reef, leaving but very few islets yet free from it. But I can
give you no precise information without my notes (even if then) on these
heads...

Bermuda differs much from any other island I am acquainted with. At
first sight of a chart it resembles an atoll; but it