UViNGSTONE'S . AUTOBIOGRAPHY. xix 



It seemed perilous ground to tread on farther, for the 

 dark hint seemed to my youthful mind to loom towards 

 " selling soul and body to the devil," as the price of the 

 unfathomable knowledge of the stars. These excursions, 

 often in company with brothers, one now in Canada, and 

 the other a clergyman in the United States, gratified my 

 intense love of nature ; and though we generally returned 

 so unmercifully hungry and fatigued that the embryo 

 parson shed tears, yet we discovered so many to us new 

 and interesting things, that he was always as eager to 

 join us next time as he was the last. 



On one of these exploring tours we entered a limestone 

 quarry — long before geology was so popular as it is now. 

 It is impossible to describe the delight and wonder with 

 which I began to collect the shells found in the carboni- 

 ferous limestone which crops out in High Blantyre and 

 Cambuslang. A quarryman, seeing a little boy so 

 engaged, looked with that pitying eye which the benevolent 

 assume when viewing the insane. Addressing him with, 

 "How ever did these shells come into these rocks ?" 

 " When God made the rocks, he made the shells in them," 

 was the damping reply. What a deal of trouble geologists 

 might have saved themselves by adopting the Turk-like 

 philosophy of this Scotchman ! 



My reading while at work was carried on by placing 

 the book on a portion of the spinning jenny, so that I 

 could catch sentence after sentence as I passed at my 

 work ; I thus kept up a pretty constant study undisturbed 

 by the roar of the machinery. To this part of my educa- 

 tion I owe my present power of completely abstracting 

 the mind from surrounding noises, so as to read and write 

 with perfect comfort amidst the play of children or near 

 the dancing and songs of savages. The toil of cotton- 

 spinning, to which I was promoted in my nineteenth year, 

 was excessively severe on a slim loose- join ted lad, but it 

 was well paid for ; and it enabled me to support myself 

 while attending medical and Greek classes in Glasgow in 

 winter, as also the divinity lectures of Dr. Wardlaw, by 

 working with my hands in summer. I never received a 

 farthing of aid from any one, and should have accom- 

 plished my project of going to China as a medical mis- 

 sionary in the course of time by my own efforts, had not 

 some friends advised my joining the London Missionary 

 Society on account of its perfectly unsectarian character. 



