EDINBURGH. 41 



one day have been thus honoured, I declare that I 

 should have thought it as ridiculous and improbable, 

 as if I had been told that I should be elected King 

 of England. 



During my second year at Edinburgh I attended 



's lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they 



were incredibly dull. The sole effect they produced 

 on me was the determination never as long as I lived 

 to read a book on Geology, or in any way to study the 

 science. Yet I feel sure that I was prepared for a 

 philosophical treatment of the subject ; for an old 

 Mr. Cotton in Shropshire, who knew a good deal 

 about rocks, had pointed out to me two or three years 

 previously a well-known large erratic boulder in the 

 town of Shrewsbury, called the " bell-stone" ; he told me 

 that there was no rock of the same kind nearer than 

 Cumberland or Scotland, and he solemnly assured me 

 that the world would come to an end before any one 

 would be able to explain how this stone came where 

 it now lay. This produced a deep impression on me, 

 and I meditated over this wonderful stone. So that 

 I felt the keenest delight when I first read of the 

 action of icebergs in transporting boulders, and I 

 gloried in the progress of Geology. Equally striking 

 is the fact that I, though now only sixty-seven 

 years old, heard the Professor, in a field lecture at 

 Salisbury Craigs, discoursing on a trap-dyke, with 

 amygdaloidal margins and the strata indurated on 

 each side, with volcanic rocks all around us, say 

 that it was a fissure filled with sediment from above, 

 adding with a sneer that there were men who main- 



