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 have been upheaved since they were formed, yet the sea- bottom, while they were being formed, was sinking and not rising. This is a fact which was first pointed out by Mr. Darwin, from the observations which he made in the world-famous Voyage of the Beagle; and the observations of subsequent great naturalists have all gone to corroborate his theory. It was supposed at first, you must understand, that when a coral island rose steeply to the surface of the sea out of blue water, perhaps a thousand fathoms or more, that fact was plain proof that the little coral polypes had begun at the bottom of the sea, and, in the course of ages, built up the whole island an enormous depth.