MS. 60.] GEOLOGICAL WORK. 237 



City, and his wife was never more proud of him, 

 never more deeply touched, than when told that the 

 firm who had purchased his business property had 

 simply taken it over on his word. In later years his 

 eyes glistened when reverting to his early life, and to 

 the great kindness which he had received from City 

 friends. 



The hard-earned leisure was won, yet with it no res- 

 pite from close intellectual work, which was to him as 

 a second nature. Deprived of it, he would have been 

 bereft of his greatest happiness ; and now he sat down 

 to grapple with manuscripts, with papers begun on 

 various questions, all geological, and with the vast 

 quantity of material amassed during a long course of 

 years. Perhaps the garden was then of greater service 

 as a distraction than at any other time. The trees and 

 shrubs, being in an early stage of growth, were in need 

 of fostering care ; and the interest and occupation of 

 this wiled him from his desk, and from hours spent in 

 tabulating his observations on Clays or Gravels, and in 

 deciphering the history which they reveal. 



For the first time since moving to Darent - Hulme, 

 he was able to turn his attention to the collections, 

 which were found to have outgrown the space assigned 

 to them. A room originally intended for the library 

 was lined with cabinets, some of them reaching to the 

 ceiling, and with every drawer filled. Cases of rock 

 specimens and fossil bones had to be left unopened in 

 a cellar for lack of space. Prestwich first limited his 

 task of arrangement to the contents of cabinets in the 

 library itself, which contained the specimens of Drift. 

 A folio-book written to his dictation gives the very 

 numerous localities where he had examined Drift and 

 the component parts of each gravel, a work exten- 



