For in the western bays, in Clew Bay with its hundred islands, and Galway Bay with its Isles of Arran, and beautiful Kenmare, and beautiful Bantry, you see little blue spots, which are low limestone islands, standing in the sea, overhung by mountains far aloft.

You have often heard those islands in Kenmare Bay talked of, and how some whom you know go to fish round them by night for turbot and conger; and when you hear them spoken of again, you must recollect that they are the last fragments of a great fringing coral-reef, which will in a few thousand years follow the fate of the rest, and be eaten up by the waves, while the mountains of hard rock stand round them still unchanged.
Now look at England, and there you will see patches at least of a great coral-reef which was forming at the same time as that Irish one, and on which perhaps some of your schoolfellows have often stood.

You have heard of St.Vincent's Rocks at Bristol, and the marble cliffs, 250 feet in height, covered in part with rich wood and rare flowers, and the Avon running through the narrow gorge, and the stately ships sailing far below your feet from Bristol to the Severn sea.

And you may see, for here they are, corals from St.Vincent's Rocks, cut and polished, showing too that they also, like the Dudley limestone, are made up of corals and of coral- mud.

Now, whenever you see St.Vincent's Rocks, as I suspect you very soon will, recollect where you are, and use your fancy, to paint for yourself a picture as strange as it is true.