Miscellaneous. 45 



no lectures had been delivered by any of its holders until he received 

 the appointment, after a severe contest, in 1818. The science of 

 geology was always looked upon then as dangerous and suspicious, 

 and he mentioned one attempt to lecture which had been nipped in 

 the bud, it was said, by a hint from high quarters. Another difficulty 

 was that the founder of the professorship had decreed in his will 

 that the lectures should be in conformity with his own theory of 

 geology — a theory, said Professor Sedgwick, the most wild and 

 irrational. It amounted to this, that at the deluge the whole earth 

 was melted down into a sort of Irish " stirabout," but that, at the 

 same time, by some inexplicable, unaccountable contrivance, all 

 fossils, even the minutest, were preserved from the general de- 

 struction and handed down to us. Such a theory it was impossible 

 for a man to lecture upon who had anything like a conscience. 

 When he received the professorship, however, a grace of the Senate 

 made lectures a necessary preliminary to receiving the professorial 

 salary ; and in the course he had adopted he had given a liberal 

 interpretation to the spirit of his founder's will, and had endeavoured 

 to adapt his teaching to the progressive state of the science. To his 

 founder, however, he gave all credit for having most religiously pre- 

 served the name of the locality from which every specimen in his 

 collection had been gathered ; and this in geology was of vast im- 

 portance. Still Woodward's collection, as he (the Professor) found 

 it, was not sufficient to lecture upon, and, together with his friend, 

 the late Professor Henslow, he had set to work to increase it ; and it 

 had gone on increasing till at last the difficulty was, not to find 

 sufficient to lecture upon, but to choose from so great abundance 

 what was best. — One very good remark the Professor made in 

 reference to geology and other physical science clashing with 

 religion : he said that those who had any faith worth the name in 

 the revelation on which their religion was founded would never fear 

 that which was impossible, that one truth would contradict another. 

 All truth was in harmony, and nature had this grand characteristic, 

 that she possessed no isolated phenomena — everything in nature was 

 regulated by beautiful fixed laws, and this preserved us from the 

 errors into which solitary phenomena woiild lead us. Taking up a 

 fossil that lay before him, the Professor said we knew that the 

 earth exercised an attraction upon it, tending to draw it to itself, 

 but we also knew this beautiful and wonderful fact that, by that 

 same law of gravitation, it was connected not only with the earth, 

 but with every particle in the universe. In cone] usion the Professor 

 cautioned his hearers not to fall into the error of the so-called positive 

 philosophers, who, with all their boasted worship of Nature, fail to 

 render homage where homage is due. For a man to be profound in 

 his worship of Nature, without being also profound in his worship 

 of the Creator of Nature, seems as irrational as it would be for a man, 

 sitting at one of our grand Norwich festivals and having his soul 

 stirred within him by the almost heavenly harmonies, should feel 

 impelled to give expression to his emotion, and instead of rendering 

 his tribute of praise to the master-mind who had conceived the 



