i 94 REMINISCENCES OF 



use of these preparations, they were put away in a 

 drawer of the cabinet and almost forgotten. 



About the same time I had instructed a working 

 joiner to fit up for me a small horizontal grinding- 

 wheel, worked by a pedal, and which was now com- 

 plete. Somehow this little transaction gave the 

 joiner the idea that I was interested in stones ; and 

 one evening he called upon me, bringing in his apron 

 a number of rough fragments of sandstone. He had 

 been working at a stone quarry near Oldham, and 

 had picked up from the refuse of the quarry a 

 basketful of stones which appeared new to him, and 

 he concluded that they might be interesting to me. 

 They were in the main the merest rubbish, but 

 amongst them I detected a fragment which was 

 equally elegant and remarkable. How it had escaped 

 destruction from the unprotected way in which it 

 had travelled in such rough company was to me an 

 absolute mystery. The specimen looked like the 

 base of one Calamite within the interior of a single 

 joint of another and much larger one; but at that 

 time I was wholly unable to construct any reason- 

 able hypothesis explaining how the two parts had 

 been brought into mutual relationship. 



In later days, when the specimen so oddly and 

 accidentally obtained, came to be intelligently studied, 

 its history became clear enough, and the priceless 

 fragment is now one of the most precious gems in 

 my cabinet. Some time after the occurrence of the 

 above event Sir Charles Lyell happened to be at my 



