656 MEMOIR OF REV. JOHN FLEMING, D.D. 
on which mineralogy should rest. This subject was indeed his first love, and the 
last effort of his life was devoted to its advancement. When THomson died in 
1852, FLemiInG said that he had lost his best and earliest friend. 
In the year 1805 Fiemine had completed his clerical curriculum, and was 
licensed as a preacher of the gospel by the Presbytery of Linlithgow on the 22d 
April 1806. Fiemtine’s father and mother were attached to the Old Light 
Dissenters, who strove after a higher and more strict observance of the ordi- 
nances of religion (as they thought) than the Church of Scotland at that time. 
He was, however, carried to the parish church to be baptized; and when the 
clergyman gave out the second verse of the forty-seventh paraphrase,— ) 
“When to the sacred font we came, 
Did not the rite proclaim 
That, washed from sin and all its stains, 
New creatures we became ? ”— 
the verse was very repugnant to FLemtne’s father, as he held that it implied the 
doctrine of baptismal regeneration; so the old stern dissenter put on his hat and 
walked out of the church until the offensive paraphrase was sung. This inci- 
dent was of course well known in the family circle; and when FLEminc had been 
licensed to preach, he was requested to officiate in the same church where, 
twenty-one years before, he had been baptized. Among the other relatives who 
came to hear the youthful clergyman was his father; and whether to test his - 
parent’s adherence to his old views, or perhaps to show his independence, 
FieminG chose for his first hymn the same distasteful paraphrase. No sooner 
were the verses announced than old FLEmiIne, as before, put on his hat, and re- 
mained outside until the psalmody was concluded. He inherited from his father 
at least one quality which distinguished him through life—infiexibility of 
purpose. 
Towards the end of 1807 he made a mineralogical tour through Orkney 
and Shetland, the first fruit of which was a paper on Papa Stour, one of the 
Shetland Islands. This paper was communicated to the Wernerian Society, and 
found a place in the first volume of their Transactions. It exhibits considerable 
knowledge of mineralogy, and is worthy of notice on account of his having given 
there, for the first time, the true definition of the term Breccia, which geologists 
had previously applied to denote formations as identical which were very dif- 
ferent in structure. He says,—“ Ihave employed this word (breccia), which is of 
frequent use, to express an aggregated rock of angular fragments, cemented by a 
basis of a different composition. It differs from pudding-stone not only in the 
cement, but in the fragments not being rounded. From conglomerate it likewise 
differs, in the fragments not being the same with the cement.” He also, in this 
paper, indicates his belief that the filling up of cavities in amygdaloidal rocks by 
