19 



much less fast a hold than between the parts where like has touched 

 like. Consequently, a blow, rightly given, is quite certain to open 

 to you the enclosed fossil, as clean as the oyster-knife does the oyster. 

 Give your blow generally at the end, in the longest diameter of the 

 pebble ; and never with the square head of a hammer, but with the 

 narrow edge, so that your blow shall fall on one line. The following 

 this hint may save many a fossil from hopeless breakage. Though 

 there is no such certain guide in many flints, there is generally some- 

 thing to give a hint ; and you may always be sure that, be it flint or 

 any hard rock, the least hold-fasting, and therefore the most certain 

 line of breakage, is in the direction where a fossil lies. Thus 1 

 found in the middle of a large flint, without any outward mark, one 

 side of a whole jaw, full of teeth. 



How wide the range is where the search has to be made for those 

 facts which this Association hopes to gather together, it were im- 

 possible for me now to enter on. We have already enrolled members 

 in Peru, in Chili, and elsewhere abroad, besides those scattered over 

 England. The variety of kind and condition, both of organic re- 

 mains and of rock, is so great, — while knowledge on every one of 

 them is valuable, — that it is to be hoped that the different loca- 

 lities will be well worked up for what each is capable of yielding. 

 We do not expect to turn up in England the entire body of a mam- 

 moth, with flesh and skin and hair, as was, fifty years ago, dis- 

 played to the marvelling eyes of men in Siberia ; — a discovery that 

 cannot but remind one of that old legend of our forefathers' faith, 

 according to which, long before man lived on the earth, the huge 

 beast Audhumla lived, and sustained her life by licking the rime- 

 frost from the primeval salt rocks. But from the Mammoth and 

 the Mastodon, whose remains, though less complete than in Siberia, 

 are in fact widely found in England, to the numberless but not less 

 wonderful little creatures which can be seen only by aid of the 

 microscope, the variety is wide. 



I remarked, at the beginning, on the need there is to distinguish 

 between false facts and true ones. This can only be done by noting 

 every circumstance in the conditions and relations of each. It is, 

 first of all, necessary for every man who really loves truth, to be 

 firmly persuaded that he has no right to be a quack : he has no 

 right to pretend to search nature, unless he has first mastered the 



