If I were you I would give up consistency (or, at most, only allude in note to your old edition) and bring out the Craters of Denudation as a new view, which it essentially is. You cannot, I think, give it prominence as a novelty and yet keep to consistency and passages in old editions. I should grudge this new view being smothered in your address, and should like to see a separate paper. The one great channel to Santorin and Palma, etc., etc., is just like the one main channel being kept open in atolls and encircling barrier reefs, and on the same principle of water being driven in through several shallow breaches. I of course utterly reprobate my wild notion of circular elevation; it is a satisfaction to me to think that I perceived there was a screw loose in the old view, and, so far, I think I was of some service to you. Depend on it, you have for ever smashed, crushed, and abolished craters of elevation. There must be craters of engulfment, and of explosion (mere modifications of craters of eruption), but craters of denudation are the ones which have given rise to all the discussions. Pray give my best thanks to Lady Lyell for her translation, which was as clear as daylight to me, including "leglessness." LETTER 486. TO C. LYELL. Down [November 20th, 1849]. I remembered the passage in E. de B. [Elie de Beaumont] and have now re-read it. I have always and do still entirely disbelieve it; in such a wonderful case he ought to have hammered every inch of rock up to actual junction; he describes no details of junction, and if I were in your place I would absolutely dispute the fact of junction (or articulation as he oddly calls it) on such evidence. I go farther than you; I do not believe in the world there is or has been a junction between a dike and stream of lava of exact shape of either (1) or (2) Figure 2]. (Figures 2, 3 and 4.)