5 2 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



Such was his main business in life, and the manner in 

 which he performed it would of itself entitle him to the 

 grateful recollection of his fellow-countrymen. But these 

 occupations did not wholly engross his time or his thoughts. 

 Having early imbibed a taste for scientific investigation, 

 he continued to interest himself in questions that afforded 

 him occupation and solace, even when his fortunes were at 

 the lowest ebb. 



" Eesuming the rustic habits of his boyhood," says his 

 biographer, " he made his journeys on foot, with a little 

 cheese as all his sustenance. No path seemed impracticable 

 to him, no rock inaccessible. He never sought the country 

 mansions, he did not even halt at the inns. To pass the 

 night on the hard ground in some herdsman's hut, was to 

 him only an amusement. He would talk with quarrymen 

 and miners, with blacksmiths and masons, more readily 

 than with men of science. It was thus that he gained 

 that detailed personal acquaintance with the surface of 

 France with which he enriched his writings." 



During these journeyings, he was led into Auvergne in 

 the year 1763, where, eleven years after Guettard's de- 

 scription had been presented to the Academy, he found 

 himself in the same tract of Central France, wandering 

 over the same lava-fields, from Yolvic to the heights of 

 Mont Dore. Among the many puzzles reported by the 

 mineralogists of his day, none seems to have excited his 

 interest more than that presented by the black columnar 

 stone which was found in various parts of Europe, and 

 for which Agricola, writing in the middle of the sixteenth 

 century, had revived Pliny's old name of " basalt." The 

 wonderful symmetry, combined with the infinite variety 



