JOHN PHILLIPS, r.R.S. 
121 
" From the tragedies and comedies of school, I passed to a most 
pleasant interlude hy accepting a twelve months' invitation to the 
home of my ever-honoured friend, the Rev. Benjamin Richardson, of 
Fairleigh Castle, near Bath, one of the best naturalists in the West 
of England, a man of excellent education, and a certain generosity 
of mind very rare and very precious. Educated in Christ's Church, 
he retained much of the indefinable air of a gentleman of old 
Oxford, but mixed with this there was a singular attachment to 
rural life and farming operations. Looking back through the vista of 
half-a-century, among the ranks of my many kind and accomplished 
friends I find no such man, and to my daily and hourly inter- 
course with him, to his talk on plants, shells, or fossils, to his 
curiously rich old library, and sympathy with all good knowledge 
I may justly attribute whatever may be thought to have been my 
own success in following pursuits which he opened to my mind. 
" From the rectory at Farleigh, where science and literature 
were seen under colours most attractive to youth, I was transferred 
by the good old Bath coach to my uncle Smith's large house, which 
looked out on the Thames from the eastern end of Buckingham 
Street. Here a kind of life awaited me which, remembered at this 
long distance of time, excites sometimes my wonder, at other times 
my amusement, not seldom regret, but always my thankfulness. 
Here was a man in the exercise of a lucrative and honourable profes- 
sion, who had for many years given every spare moment and every 
spare shilling to the execution of that vast work, ' The Map of the 
Strata of England and Wales.' After that was published in 1815 he 
continued his labours in more detail, and issued twenty-one English 
county maps, coloured geologically after personal examination in each 
district. His home was full of maps, sections, models, and collections 
of fossils ; and his hourly talk was of the laws of stratification, the 
succession of organic life, the practical value of geology, its import- 
ance in agriculture, engineering, and commerce, its connection with 
physical geography, the occupations of different people and the 
distribution of different races. In this happy dream of the future 
expansion of geology his actual professional work was often forgotten, 
until at length he had thrown into the gulf of the strata all his 
M 
