674 MEMOIR OF REV. JOHN FLEMING, D.D. 
a source of grief to him to confess that he knew nothing of its origin after a study 
of upwards of sixty years. He was wont to say, “That he who could unravel 
the history of the boulder clay would be the Newton of geology.” 
«¢On Tuesday the 17th November 1857 he had lectured to his class with his 
usual vigour, and talked to his friends with a lightheartedness which to them 
did not presage any sudden change. Had he known the call was so near, would 
he have been otherwise? Those who knew him best can safely answer, No! 
Seldom has it been our experience, or rather happiness, to meet with one who, 
enjoying life so much, yet talked of death as a most blessed change. 
On his return home, between three and four in the afternoon, he was sud- 
denly seized with severe cramp of the extremities and spasm of the bowels. The 
- pain continued during the night. About 10 a.m., on Wednesday the 18th, the 
pulse became weak and intermitting ; the countenance sunk and anxious; extre- 
mities cold, with hiccup; abdominal pain and tympanitis leading to the sus- 
picion of the rupture of some internal viscus. Two hours afterwards the pain 
ceased, and he appeared to have fallen asleep, and expired at a quarter before 
2 p.m., less than twenty-three hours from the first seizure. On the examination 
of the body after death, a simple penetrating ulcer, at the posterior surface of the 
small curvature of the stomach, near the pylorus, half an inch in diameter, was 
found, permitting the escape of the contents of the stomach into the abdominal 
cavity, and causing peritonitis. At his funeral, which took place on 24th 
November, all the students of the New College were present; and he was in- 
terred in the Dean Cemetery, close to his friend Professor Epwarp Fores, in 
that boulder clay which had been to him of so much interest during all his life. 
I have now endeavoured to give a short, though perhaps meagre memoir 
of one who occupied, for nearly the first fifty years of this century, a most pro- 
minent place among the naturalists of our country. 
The most marked features of FLemine’s mind were his love of truth, his dis- 
trust of speculation, and the force and clearness of his reason. In his contro- 
versies on science (for in ecclesiastical discussions he was no polemic), his love of 
truth was too strong to permit of tenderness in his censures; and the grace of 
indifference, for which he sometimes prayed during the warfare, was so liberally 
granted, and so freely dispensed, as to be seldom pleasing to his opponents. He 
could and did pardon ignorance, but pretension he could not pardon. If profes- 
sions of originality were made, he expected a due performance; but for negligence 
he had no forgiveness. But he nursed his wrath for those who entered not into 
the temple of science by the door, but were helped on the backs or heads of their 
fellows to scale its walls. His keen appreciation of character, which enabled 
him at once to detect the spurious from the true, often subjected him to the 
criticism of singularity in his behaviour, when the fault lay alone with the critic. 
Those who approached him with the ostentatious display of their acquirements, 

