ropic coral island back here to the limestone hills of Great
Britain; and I did not speak at random when I said that I was not
leading you away as far as you fancied by several thousand miles.

Examine any average limestone quarry from Bristol to Berwick, and you
will see there all that I have been describing; that is, all of it
which is not soft animal matter, certain to decay. You will see the
lime-mud hardened into rock beds; you will see the shells embedded in
it; you will see the corals in every stage of destruction; you will
see whole layers made up of innumerable fragments of Crinoids--no
wonder they are innumerable, for, it has been calculated, there are
in a single animal of some of the species 140,000 joints--140,000
bits of lime to fall apart when its soft parts decay. But is it not
all there? And why should it not have got there by the same process
by which similar old coral beds get up the mountain sides in the West
Indies and elsewhere; namely, by the upheaving force of earthquakes?
When you see similar effects, you have a right to presume similar
causes. If you see a man fall off a house here, and break his neck;
and some years after, in London or New York, or anywhere else, find
another man lying at the foot of another house, with his neck broken
in the same way, is it not a very fair presumption that he has fallen
off a house likewise?

You may be wrong. He may have come to his end by a dozen other
means: but you must have proof of that. You will have a full right,
in science and in common sense, to say--That man fell off the house,
till some one proves to you that he did not.

In fact, there is nothing which you see in the limestones of these
isles--save and except the difference in every shell and coral--which
you would not see in the coral-beds of the West Indies, if such
earthquakes as that famous one at St. Thomas's, in 1866, became
common and periodic, upheaving the land (they needs upheave it a very
little, only two hundred and fifty feet), till St. Thomas's, and all
the Virgin Isles, and the mighty mountain of Porto Rico, which looms
up dim and purple to the west, were all joined into dry land once
more, and the lonely coral-shoal of Anegada were raised, as it would
be raised then, into a limestone table-land, like that of Central
Ireland, of Galway, or of County Clare.

But you must clearly understand, that however much these coralline
limestones hav