60 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. vii.. 



At this time the importance of organic remains in geological 

 reasoning, as taught by Smith, was not much felt in Cambridge, 

 where a new born mathematical power opened out into various 

 lines of physical research, and encouraged a more scientij&c aspect 

 of mineralogy, and a tendency to consider the pha3nomena of 

 earth-structure in the light of mechanical philosophy. This is 

 very apparent in the early volumes of the Cambridge Philoso- 

 phical Society, established in 1819, with Sedgwick and Lee for 

 secretaries. Accordingly, the earliest memoirs of Sedgwick,. 

 which appear in the Cambridge Transactions for 1820-21, are 

 devoted to unravel the complicated phasnomena of the granite, 

 killas, and serpentine in Cornwall and Devon ; and to these fol- 

 lowed notices of the trap-dykes of Yorkshire and Durham, 1822^ 

 and the stratified and irruptive greenstones of High Teesdale, 

 1823-24. In his frequent excursions to the north he was much 

 interested in the varying mineral characters and fossils of the mag- 

 nesian limestone, and the remarkable nonconformity of this rock to 

 the subjacent coal, millstone grit, and mountain limestone ; and 

 at length his observations became the basis of that large system- 

 atic memoir which is one of the most valuable of the early con- 

 tributions to the Transactions of the Geological Society. Begun 

 in 1822 and finished in 1828, this essay not only cleared the 

 way to a more exact study of the coal formation and New Bed 

 sandstones of England, but connected them by just inference 

 with the corresponding deposits in North Germany, which he 

 visited for the purpose of comparison in 1829. 



To one of the equestrian excursions the writer was indebted 

 for his first introduction to Sedgwick. In the year 1822 I was 

 walking across Durham and North Yorkshire into Westmore- 

 land. It was hot summer-time, and after sketchino; the Hig-h 

 Force, in Teesdale, I was reclining in the shade, reading some 

 easily carried book. There came riding up, from Middleton, a 

 dark-visaged, conspicuous man, with a miner's boy behind. Oppo- 

 site me he stopped, and courteously asked if I had looked at the 

 celebrated waterfall which was near ; adding that though he had 

 previously visited Teesdale, he had not found an occasion for 

 viewing it ; that he would like to stop then and there to do so, 

 but for the boy behind him, " who had him in tow to take him 

 to Cronkley Scar," a high dark hill right ahead, where, he said, 

 *' the limestone was turned into lump-sugar." 



A few days afterwards, on his way to the lakes, he rested for 



