HENSLOW, THE FRIEND OF DARWIN 17 



clear, trenchant, and uncompromising. I remember 

 an occasion when Sir Roderick, with tears in his voice, 

 if not in his eyes, declared he would not stay in the 

 room to hear that fossil fishes were discovered in his 

 own special domain the Silurian rocks, where he had 

 long since shown that they did not occur and he left 

 the meeting. Many Silurian fishes have now been 

 found, but we all loved Sir Roderick for the heart 

 and feeling which he threw into his work and his 

 public utterances. 



The aim of geology is to describe accurately the long 

 succession of changes in the crust of " this cooling 

 cinder," the earth, and to assign them in an orderly 

 way to their causes. Hence, it calls upon nearly all 

 other branches of science for help astronomy, physics, 

 chemistry, mineralogy, botany, and zoology. At the 

 same time, it is essentially a recreative pursuit, for, 

 as Mr. Horace Woodward says in his History of the 

 Geological Society of London published by the society 

 "the fulness of the science can never be attained 

 without the vivifying influence of mountain and moor, 

 of valley and sea coast." It is owing to this that 

 the soldiers of the hammer, from Murchison, Sedgwick, 

 Lyell, Ramsay, Etheridge, Salter, onwards to the 

 present generation of " stone-crackers," are amongst 

 the happiest, most genial, and mentally alert of our 

 men of science. 



That word "stone-cracker" I take from a letter 

 addressed to me when I was a boy of twelve by the 

 Rev. J. S. Henslow, Professor of Mineralogy and later 

 of Botany at Cambridge, founder, with Adam Sedgwick, 

 the great Woodwardian Professor of Geology, of the 

 now flourishing Cambridge Philosophical Society, and 

 the teacher, guide, and fateful friend of Charles Darwin. 

 It was he who sent Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle. 

 I had met this wonderful old naturalist at Felixstowe 

 when exploring the marshes for rare plants and insects 



c 



