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earning- a sufficient income — for science has been to me com- 

 paratively unremunerative. Once, in 1885, when an endowment 

 fell in for my chair here and I resigned my post at the British 

 Association, I did hope that I could devote myself mainly to science : 

 but the agricultural depression had begun, and in two or three years 

 I found myself, as now, obliged to keep on working for an income. 

 That, however, is not all — my teaching has always been defective, 

 partly from my own imperfections, partly from want of fitting ap- 

 pliances. At Cambridge everything had to be extemporized. In 

 the early days of modern Geology this did not matter much. Now 

 it is a most serious impediment. I believe I occupy a unique 

 position — that I am the only Professor of Geology in the United 

 Kingdom who has no qualified assistant, no funds whatever allotted 

 to him for the necessary expenses of instruction and of practical 

 work. That this state of things exists is not my fault. Standing 

 where I do, I can say no more than ask you to remember, when my 

 career in this college ends in failure, as now seems to me almost 

 certain, that I am not alone to blame. I have been set to make 

 bricks without straw. 



But let me turn to my work apart from teaching, to which you 

 have referred in over eulogistic terms. It may interest some of you 

 to know how I was attracted to those subjects in which such repu- 

 tation as I possess has been made. In a desultory way I had worked 

 at Geology from my school-days, but in 1869 I began, as an experi- 

 ment, lectures on Geology at St. John's College, Cambridge. I had 

 not gone far before I found that the part of the subject which we now 

 call petrology, was in hopeless confusion. I had to tell my students 

 something, and so I tried to teach myself. In order to ascertain 

 facts I began to work tentatively at the microscopic structure of 

 rocks — a study then quite in its infancy. But my earlier papers 

 were on Physical Geology and especially on the action of ice. My 

 method in preparing these was to go and see for myself. At first 

 I had intended to study only the petrology of the igneous rocks, and 

 I made a journey at least once every year to examine into their 

 field relations and to collect specimens for microscopic examination. 

 But 1 had got interested in Charnwood Forest on one side and in 

 the Lizard on the other, and the horizon widened. My first paper 



