156 Clayfclc en (Darivin and Geology. 
the varied learning and genial disposition of the professor of 
Botany, and became a constant attendant and later a compan- 
ion of Henslow, whose influence was great and lasting. To 
this accomplished teacher and good man biology is largely in- 
debted for enticing into the paths of science his equally good 
and more gifted pupil. His wisdom and kindness undid the 
mischief that the bigoted Edinburgh professor had done, and 
won over again to geology the mind that had been estranged^ 
Darwin never became a geologist, but in the hands of Henslow 
he soon lost all dislike of the science; it received a due share of 
his attention and has reaped a large harvest from- his labors. 
He was not long in making the acquaintance of Sedgwick, 
and accompanied him in some of his geological excursions. Of 
one of these an account is given in the memoir, and from it we 
gain ant^^ther glimpse no less striking of the state of our science 
in 1S30, or about sixty years ago. 
"Next morning we started for Llangollen, Conway, Bangor 
and Capel Curig," all situated around the central j^eak of 
Snowdon. " Here," he says, " I had a striking instance of how 
easy it is to overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, before 
they have been observed by any one. We spent many 'hours 
in Gwm Idwal, examining iill the rocks with extreme care, as 
Sedgwick was anxious to And fossils in them, but neither of us 
saw a trace of the wonderful phenomena all around us. We 
did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, 
the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are 
so conspicuous that, as I declared in a paper published many 
years later i« the "Philosophical Magazine," a house burnt 
down bv fire did not tell its story more plainly than this val- 
ley." It seems almost incredible, familiar as we are A\ith the 
Glacial Theory of Agassiz, that the professor of geology at 
Cambridge could be so absorbed in the search for fossils as to 
pass through the central domain of south British icedom and see 
nothing and ask himself nothing of the marvellous ice sculpture 
that covers the rocks around Snowdon. But so it was. Sedg- 
wick went through a region where almost every stone and 
rock was covered with inscriptions cut by the ice-chisel, but 
they failed to excite his curiosity or to attract his attention. 
Agassiz had not yet found the Rosetta stone. 
