expecting, as another letter shows, to prove the gradual approximation of the fauna preserved in the Tertiary deposits to that which still exists, and to settle, as he hopes "for ever, the question whether species come in all at a batch or are always going out and coming in." Already he is in a position to affirm that the Tertiary formations of Sicily in all probability are more recent than the "crags" of England, for, among the sixty-three species which he had collected from the beds underlying Etna, only three were not known to be still inhabitants of the Mediterranean; and besides this, between these "crags" and the London clay a series of formations can be intercalated. In the same letter (to Scrope)[42] he states that Deshayes has found, at St. Mihiel on the Meuse, three old needles of limestone, like those in the Isle of Wight, round which run three distinct lines of perforations, like those on the columns of the "Temple of Serapis;" these hollows being "sometimes empty, but thousands of them filled with saxicavas." This, of course, was a proof that there had been, in comparatively recent times, important changes in the level of the land and sea. Early in November Lyell is back in London, at his chambers in Crown Office Row, Temple, to find that Scrope's review of the first volume of the "Principles" has been much admired, that the book is selling steadily, and is likely to prove "as good as an annuity"; that it has not been seriously attacked by the "Diluvialists," while it has been highly praised by the bulk of geologists. He is about to move, he writes, into chambers in Raymond Buildings, Gray's Inn, which are "very light, healthy and good, on the same staircase as Broderip." Invitations to dinner are becoming frequent, but he wisely determines to go but little into society. "All my friends," he says, "who are in practice do this all the year and every year, and I do not see why I should not be privileged, now that I have the moral certainty of earning a small but honourable independence if I labour as hard for the next ten years as during the last three. I was never in better health, rarely so good, and after so long a fallow I feel that a good crop will be yielded and that I am in good train for composition."[43] The second volume, he hopes, will be out in six months; this will include the history of the globe to the beginning of the Tertiary era, when the first of existing species appeared.