At Edinburgh University 341 



the age of 16, however, he was entered as a medical student at 

 Edinburgh University, he not only did not get any encouragement 

 of his scientific tastes, but was positively repelled by the ordinary 

 instruction given there. Dr Hope's lectures on Chemistry, it is true, 

 interested the boy, who with his brother Erasmus had made a 

 laboratory in the toolhouse, and was nicknamed "Gas" by his school- 

 fellows, while undergoing solemn and public reprimand from Dr Butler 

 at Shrewsbury School for thus wasting his time \ But most of the 

 other Edinburgh lectures were "intolerably dull," "as dull as the 

 professors" themselves, "something fearful to remember." In after 

 life the memory of these lectures was like a nightmare to him. He 

 speaks in 1840 of Jameson's lectures as something "I... for my sins 

 experienced 2 ! " Darwin especially signalises these lectures on Geology 

 and Zoology, which he attended in his second year, as being worst of 

 all "incredibly dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the 

 determination never so long as I lived to read a book on Geology, or 

 in any way to study the science 3 !" 



The misfortune was that Edinburgh at that time had become the 

 cockpit in which the barren conflict between " Neptunism " and "Plu- 

 tonism " was being waged with blind fury and theological bitterness. 

 Jameson and his pupils, on the one hand, and the friends and disciples 

 of Button, on the other, went to the wildest extremes in opposing 

 each other's peculiar tenets. Darwin tells us that he actually heard 

 Jameson "in a field lecture at Salisbury Craigs, discoursing on a 

 trap-dyke, with amygdaloidal margins and the strata indurated on 

 each side, with volcanic rocks all around us, say that it was a fissure 

 filled with sediment from above, adding with a sneer that there were 

 men who maintained that it had been injected from beneath in a 

 molten condition 4 ." "When I think of this lecture," added Darwin, 

 "I do not wonder that I determined never to attend to Geology 5 ." 

 It is probable that most of Jameson's teaching was of the same 

 controversial and unilluminating character as this field-lecture at 

 Salisbury Craigs. 



There can be no doubt that, while at Edinburgh, Darwin must 

 have become acquainted with the doctrines of the Huttonian School. 

 Though so young, he mixed freely with the scientific society of the 

 city, Macgillivray, Grant, Leonard Horner, Coldstreani, Ainsworth 

 and others being among his acquaintances, while he attended and 

 even read papers at the local scientific societies. It is to be feared, 

 however, that what Darwin would hear most of, as characteristic 



1 L. L. i. p. 35. 2 L. L. i. p. 340. 



3 L. L. i. p. 41. 4 L. L. i. pp. 4142. 



6 This was written in 1876 and Darwin had in the summer of 1839 revisited and 

 carefully studied the locality (L. L. i. p. 290). 



