'State this with clearness': an introduction to the Santiago
Notebook The Santiago Notebook takes its name from the city of
Santiago (Saint James or 'St Jago'), the capital of Chile.1 It
is probably the most closely studied of all the surviving Beagle
field notebooks. It has been quoted from by many scholars in
connection with the famous passage which until recently was
believed to confirm that Darwin had thought out his coral reef
theory before seeing a coral island, as he claimed in his
Autobiography, p. 98. Partly for this reason, the Santiago
Notebook has been displayed in recent years in some of the
world's great museums. The earlier theoretical pages of the
Santiago Notebook record Darwin's transition from a view of
crustal mobility dominated by his observations of elevation of
the continental mainland, to a literally more balanced view, in
which he came to see the oceans as predominantly areas of
subsidence. By the time Darwin had sailed across the Pacific and
Indian Oceans, and was re-crossing the Atl