While walking the Coquimbo roads, Darwin had filled his pockets with seashells and, having lived through an earthquake just a few weeks
earlier, concluded reasonably that the Coquimbo roads were ancient beaches of the Pacific Ocean, which was right there, and that they stood at their present level not because the ocean had sunk or
somehow drained away but because the
earth itself had risen, as it practically had just then, right beneath his feet.