350 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



on the banks of Tweed, I had the following note from 

 him. 



" Edinburgh, 2, Stuart Street, 21st August, 1849. 



" Your kind note reached me as I was engaged 

 on the last article for the Witness which I shall 

 write for at least several weeks. The completion of 

 my book * has at length set me at liberty ; on Thurs- 

 day I leave by the Wick Steamer for the extreme 

 north ; and on the Saturday, to which your kind invita- 

 tion refers, I shall be sauntering, if the voyage be a 

 prosperous one, not along the soft wooded banks of the 

 Tweed, but along the bleak crags that overlord the 

 Pentland Firth. Your river has all the beauty on its 

 side, but the broad Pentland with its roaring eddies is 

 by far the more magnificent river of the two. My book 

 will not be fairly published until Saturday first ; but on 

 Saturday last I did myself the pleasure of forwarding 

 copies to all my lady-pupils, though I am not sure that 

 your copy has got further than C Street. You will, I 

 suspect, find the pure geology of it rather dry ; but in 

 the concluding chapters, more especially in the last taken 

 in connection with the chapter on the degradation 

 principle, you will, I think, find some thoughts that will 

 interest you. A man who merely refutes an error, if it 

 be an ingenious one and suited to fill the imagination, 

 does only half his work. The void created ought to be 

 filled with something as novel and curious as that which 

 has been taken away ; and in the chapters to which I 

 refer I attempt embodying a theory compensating for 

 the development one. I had a note yesterday from Mrs 

 Miller. She was well when it was written, and in 

 spirits, and just emerging from the bustle of a Free- 

 Church-Manse marriage." 



* Footprints of the Creator. 



