36 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 



for payment, and I used often to sit with him, for he was a 

 very pleasant and intelligent man, 



Mr. Leonard Horner also took me once to a meeting of 

 the Royal Society of Edinburgh, where I saw Sir Walter 

 Scott in the chair as President, and he apologised to the 

 meeting as not feeling fitted for such a position. I looked at 

 him and at the whole scene with some awe and reverence, 

 and I think it was owing to this visit during my youth, and 

 to my having attended the Royal Medical Society, that I felt 

 the honour of being elected a few years ago an honorary 

 member of both these Societies, more than any other similar 

 honour. If I had been told at that time that I should 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 determi- 

 nation 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 previ- 

 ously 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 



