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.
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