392 THE JOURNEYMAN. 



1 Forgive me the passage in my last by which I was 

 so unfortunate as to give you pain. One is not always 

 master of one's mood ; and there are impatient, unthink- 

 ing moods in which we say and write what afterwards 

 we wish unsaid or unwritten. I merely meant to express 

 how dispiriting a thing I felt it to be to write without 

 the hope of receiving a reply ; a sudden analogy came 

 across me, and I embodied it without noting that it gave 

 a cast of meaning to my w r ords which the thought I 

 meant them to convey did not bear. But I know you 

 will not think harshly of me. 



' For the last fortnight some of my very few leisure 

 hours have been employed in collecting geological speci- 

 mens for my kind friend, Mr George Anderson, one of 

 the most thorough-bred geologists in the north of Scotland. 

 By the way, I see from the newspapers that he has been 

 highly complimented for his labours in this department, 

 at the great scientific meeting at Edinburgh. Some of 

 the specimens I have procured are exceedingly curious ; 

 they contain the petrified remains of animals that now no 

 longer exist except in a fossil state, bits of charcoal, 

 pieces of wood, and nondescript substances which one 

 can hardly refer to either the animal or vegetable world. 

 Of the several animal tribes the very curious shell-fish 

 termed the cornu ammonis abounds most ; but though 

 at one period the most numerous of all the testaceous 

 tribes of the country, it is now no longer to be found 

 except as a fossil, deeply embedded in limestone or 

 bituminous shale, and buried under huge hills of 

 clay and gravel. There are grounds, indeed, for the 

 belief that the race of man, and almost all the tribes of 

 animals with which we are acquainted, have come into 

 being since it ceased to exist ; at least no remains of the 

 living tribes have been found in the beds in which the 



