502 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



of the poetic faculty. No assertion could be farther from 

 the truth. There is no science which demands so 

 frequently the highest efforts of the imagination, nor one 

 which is more crowded with those mysterious problems 

 of Nature and so beloved of the poet. The reply given 

 half a century ago to a poet who complained that " the 

 rocks were stratified by geologists as cloths are measured 

 by the mercers, and are in consequence no longer redolent 

 of that emotion of the sublime which was wont to breathe 

 forth of old from broken crags and giddy precipices " 

 remains to-day as true as when it was spoken. — " The poets 

 need be in no degree jealous of geologists. The stony 

 science, with buried creation for its facts and its domains 

 and half an eternity charged with its annals, possesses its 

 realms of dim and shadowy fields, in which troops of 

 fancies already walk like disembodied ghosts on the old 

 fields of Elysium, and which bid fair to be quite dark and 

 uncertain enough for all purposes of poetry for ages to come." 

 Speaking as an old Geological Professor and teacher, I 

 must acknowledge that I hold Liverpool to be an excellent 

 centre for a School of Geology. You have in your College 

 itself already a School of Engineering and a School of 

 Biology. You have in your great city a host of people 

 who are, or who ought to be, interested in knowing all 

 that there is to be known of the natural products of Britain 

 and of foreign countries for the purposes of commerce and 

 of trade, and who ought to be desirous of securing for 

 themselves and their sons that special knowledge which 

 shall enable them to know where to seek for and how to 

 secure those productions wherever they are to be obtained. 

 You must, in addition, have a host of persons of leisure, 

 of travellers to whom the study of geology would be a 

 relief and a means of adding to their enjoyment and to 

 their culture. 



