356 Darwin and Geology 



1835, stated that "they were extracted from a series of letters 

 (addressed to Professor Henslow), containing a great mass of informa- 

 tion connected with almost every branch of natural history," and 

 that he (Sedgwick) had made a selection of the remarks which he 

 thought would be more especially interesting to the Geological 

 Society. An abstract of three pages was published in the Pro- 

 ceedings of the Geological Society 1 , but so unknown was the author 

 at this time that he was described as " F. Darwin, Esq., of St John's 

 College, Cambridge'! Almost simultaneously (on November 16th, 

 1835) a second set of extracts from these letters — this time of a 

 general character — were read to the Philosophical Society at Cam- 

 bridge, and these excited so much interest that they were privately 

 printed in pamphlet form for circulation among the members. 



Many expeditions and " scientific missions " have been despatched 

 to various parts of the world since the return of the Beagle in 



1836, but it is doubtful whether any, even the most richly endowed 

 of them, has brought back such stores of new information and 

 fresh discoveries as did that little "ten-gun brig" — certainly no 

 cabin or laboratory was the birth-place of ideas of such fruitful 

 character as was that narrow end of a chart-room, where the 

 solitary naturalist could climb into his hammock and indulge in 

 meditation. 



The third and most active portion of Darwin's career as a 

 geologist was the period which followed his return to England at the 

 end of 1836. His immediate admission to the Geological Society, 

 at the beginning of 1837, coincided with an important crisis in the 

 history of geological science. 



The band of enthusiasts who nearly thirty years before had 

 inaugurated the Geological Society — weary of the fruitless conflicts 

 between " Neptunists " and " Plutonists " — had determined to eschew 

 theory and confine their labours to the collection of facts, their 

 publications to the careful record of observations. Greenough, 

 the actual founder of the Society, was an ardent Wernerian, and 

 nearly all his fellow-workers had come, more or less directly, under 

 the Wernerian teaching. Macculloch alone gave valuable support to 

 the Huttonian doctrines, so far as they related to the influence of 

 igneous activity — but the most important portion of the now cele- 

 brated Theory of the Earth — that dealing with the competency of 

 existing agencies to account for changes in past geological times — 

 was ignored by all alike. Macculloch's influence on the development 

 of geology, which might have had far-reaching effects, was to a great 

 extent neutralised by his peculiarities of mind and temper ; and, 



1 Vol. n. pp. 210—12. 



