386 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



With just knowledge enough of Mr Bremner's peculiar 

 province to appreciate his views, I was much impressed by 

 their broad and practical simplicity ; and bethought me, as 

 we conversed, that the character of the thinking, which, ac- 

 cording to Addison, forms the staple of all writings of genius, 

 and which he defines as " simple but not obvious," is a cha- 

 racter which equally applies to all good thinking, whatever 

 its special department. Power rarely resides in ingenious 

 complexities : it seems to eschew in every walk the elabo- 

 rately attenuated and razor-edged mode of thinking, the 

 thinking akin to that of the old metaphysical poets, and 

 to select the broad and massive style. Hercules, in all the 

 representations of him which I have yet seen, is the broad 

 Hercules. I was greatly struck by some of Mr Bremner's 

 views on deep-sea founding. He showed me how, by a series 

 of simple, but certainly not obvious contrivances, which had 

 a strong air of practicability about them, he could lay down 

 his erection, course by course, in-shore, in a floating caisson 

 of peculiar construction, beginning a little beyond the low- 

 ebb line, and warping out his work piece-meal, as it sank, 

 till it had reached its proper place, in, if necessary, from ten 

 to twelve fathoms water, where, on a bottom previously pre- 

 pared for it by the diving-bell, he had means to make it take 

 the ground exactly at the required line. The difficulty and 

 vast expense of building altogether by the bell would be 

 obviated, he said, by the contrivance, and a solidity given 

 to the work otherwise impossible in the circumstances : the 

 stones could be laid in his floating caisson with a care as de- 

 liberate as on the land. Some of the anecdotes which he 

 communicated to me on this occasion, connected with his nu- 

 merous achievements in weighing up foundered vessels, or in 

 floating off wrecked or stranded ones, were of singular inte- 

 rest ; and I regretted that they should not be recorded in an 

 autobiographical memoir. Not a few of them were humor- 



