HUTTON. 227 



He enjoyed Norfolk life very much, and doubtless 

 it was the very different soil of that county which 

 made the young Scotchman think, for the first time, 

 about the construction of the surface of the earth 

 which he hoped to till and profit by. While his 

 head quarters were thus established in Norfolk, he 

 made journeys, on foot, into different parts of Eng- 

 land ; and though the main object of them was to 

 obtain information in agriculture, yet he never 

 passed a pit, or a cliff, or a river-side, without study- 

 ing the' structure of the soil, so that in 1/53, Hut- 

 ton was incontinently making himself a geologist, 

 a pursuit which his knowledge of chemistry and 

 mineralogy rendered easy to him. What agriculture 

 he learned in Norfolk was of the greatest use to 

 him, and he visited Flanders to learn more. He 

 travelled from Rotterdam through Holland, Bra- 

 bant, Flanders, and Picardy, and was highly 

 delighted with the cultivation of the small holdings 

 of those countries. Though his principal object in 

 this excursion was to acquire information in the 

 practice of husbandry, he appears to have paid 

 much attention to the mineralogy of the countries 

 through which he passed. Then he returned and 

 took up his own farm in Berwickshire, bringing 

 with him a Norfolk ploughman. He set to work 

 and farmed, using every known improvement, and 

 he has the credit of being one of those who intro- 

 duced the new husbandry into a country where 

 it has since made more rapid advances than in 

 any other part of Great Britain. From 1754 to 



