468 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



Church Sabbath-school, lightened the way by his narratives 

 of storm and wreck, and not a few interesting snatches of 

 natural history. There is no member of the commoner pro- 

 fessions with whom I better like to meet than with a sensi- 

 ble fisherman, who makes a right use of his eyes. The his- 

 tory of fishes is still, very much what the history of almost 

 all animals was little more than half a century ago, a mat- 

 ter of mere external description, heavy often and dry, and of 

 classification founded exclusively on anatomical details. We 

 have still a very great deal to learn regarding the character, 

 habits, and instincts of these denizens of the deep, much, in 

 short, respecting that faculty which is in them through which 

 their natures are harmonized to the inexorable laws, and they 

 continue to live wisely and securely, in consequence, within 

 their own element, when man, with all his reasoning ability, 

 is playing strange vagaries in his ; a species of knowledge 

 this, by the way, which constitutes by far the most valuable 

 part, the mental department of natural history ; and the 

 notes of the intelligent fisherman, gleaned from actual ob- 

 servation, have frequently enabled me to fill portions of the 

 wide hiatus in the history of fishes which it ought of right 

 to occupy. In passing, as we toiled along the Grsemsay 

 coast, the ruins of a solitary cottage, the boatman furnished 

 us with a few details of the history and character of its last 

 inmate, an Orkney fisherman, that would have furnished ad- 

 mirable materials for one of the darker sketches of Crabbe. 

 He was, he said, a resolute, unsocial man, not devoid of a 

 dash of reckless humour, and remarkable for an extraordi- 

 nary degree of bodily strength, which he continued to retain 

 unbroken to an age considerably advanced, and which, as he 

 rarely admitted of a companion in his voyages, enabled him 

 to work his little skiff alone, in weather when even better 

 equipped vessels had enough ado to keep the sea. He had 

 been married in early life to a religiously-disposed woman, a 



