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the collective labours of the older workers. Not many men could 

 be found with enthusiasm sufficient to enable them to carry out 

 this object, and of the few that possessed that requisite only a 

 small number possessed also the requisite experience in working 

 out the structures of similar areas elsewhere. All the help that 

 could be gained from the experience of former labourers in the 

 same field was required to be brought to such a task as this ; and 

 Harkness, always ready as he was to compare notes with other 

 workers, was little disposed to neglect any opportunity of making 

 himself master of all the available information bearing upon his 

 subject. It is equally characteristic of Sedgwick that, when he 

 found a worker able and ready to carry on the work beyond the 

 point his own researches had helped to bring it to, should unhesi- 

 tatingly come forward and place the results of his own experience 

 at the disposal of his fellow-worker. 



The following letter from Sedgwick to Harkness will serve to 

 illustrate this point : — 



August 29, 1856. 



My dear Sir, 



Your letter has been long in waiting me, so I fear the information I 

 can send you may come too late to be of any use. 



(i.) I advise you to go to Kendal and to call on John Ruthven, the well- 

 known collector of our northern palaeozoic fossils. He knows the country well, 

 and he is the only person, so far as I know, who has found fossils in the Skiddaw 

 Slates. 



(2.) You may procure Hudson's Guide to the Lakes, and in some letters 

 published in an appendix to it you may see a general account of the several 

 formations, though I am not sure that there is any notice of the Skiddavf Slate 

 fossils and their localities. 



(3.) 11 old Jonathan Otley, author of an excellent Httle book, be still living, 

 (I saw him last year when he was turned ninety,) he can give you good advice 

 as to localities ; and so can Charles Wright, one of the Keswick guides \iffio 

 went with me on some of my excursions in 1824. Since that year I have hardly 

 looked at the Skiddaw Slates. You should look at the new Black Lead works 

 somewhere behind Saddleback, I do not remember the name of the locality 

 [Bannerdale Mine. J.G.G.] though I saw it in 1823 along with Jonathan Otley. 

 These works are I suspect, not in a vein, but in a variety of anthracitic slate, so 

 they will give you a form of comparison you are looking for. 



I found black slates in the Skiddaw Slates group from wliich the dark carbon- 



