This was owing to frequently recurring unwellness, and to
one long and serious illness. The greater part of my time, when
I could do anything, was devoted to my work on 'Coral Reefs,'
which I had begun before my marriage, and of which the last
proof-sheet was corrected on May 6th, 1842. This book, though a
small one, cost me twenty months of hard work, as I had to read
every work on the islands of the Pacific and to consult many
charts. It was thought highly of by scientific men, and the
theory therein given is, I think, now well established.
No other work of mine was begun in so deductive a spirit as this,
for the whole theory was thought out on the west coast of South
America, before I had seen a true coral reef. I had therefore
only to verify and extend my views by a careful examination of
living reefs. But it should be observed that I had during the
two previous years been incessantly attending to the effects on
the shores of South America of the intermittent elevation of the
land, together with denudation and the deposition of sediment.
This necessarily led me to reflect much on the effects of
subsidence, and it was easy to replace in imagination the
continued deposition of sediment by the upward growth of corals.
To do this was to form my theory of the formation of barrier-
reefs and atolls.
Besides my work on coral-reefs, during my residence in London, I
read before the Geological Society papers on the Erratic Boulders
of South America ('Geolog.
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