Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In 1831, Charles Darwin sailed aboard the Beagle on a voyage that would take him across the Atlantic and Pacific. Along the way he examined coral reefs at close range, compared their forms from island to island, and considered how they might grow in relation to the changing level of the sea and the land beneath it. This book gathers those observations into a sustained account of coral formations around the world.

Darwin moves between the shape of a reef and the evidence found within it: the living corals at its edge, the lagoon inside, the islets built from fragments, and the soundings that reveal what lies below the surface. His explanations belong to the geology of the nineteenth century. Read them as a careful argument built from the observations available to him, and as a record of how naturalists tried to make distant places answer a common question.

The 45 illustrations in this edition follow that inquiry through maps, reef forms, coral structures, and the evidence Darwin describes. Some open the book’s central subjects; the rest appear as you progress through the text. Let the plates orient you, then return to Darwin’s own words for the measurements, comparisons, and reasoning behind each view.