years ago an honorary member of both these Societies, more than
any other similar honour. If I had been told at that time that I
should one day have been thus honoured, I declare that I should
have thought it as ridiculous and improbable, as if I had been
told that I should be elected King of England.

During my second year at Edinburgh I attended --'s lectures on
Geology and Zoology, but they were incredibly dull. The sole
effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as
I lived to read a book on Geology, or in any way to study the
science. Yet I feel sure that I was prepared for a philosophical
treatment of the subject; for an old Mr. Cotton in Shropshire,
who knew a good deal about rocks, had pointed out to me two or
three years previously a well-known large erratic boulder in the
town of Shrewsbury, called the "bell-stone"; he told me that
there was no rock of the same kind nearer than Cumberland or
Scotland, and he solemnly assured me that the world would come to
an end before any one would be able to explain how this stone
came where it now lay. This produced a deep impression on me,
and I meditated over this wonderful stone. So that I felt the
keenest delight when I first read of the action of icebergs in
transporting boulders, and I gloried in the progress of Geology.
Equally striking is the fact that I, though now only sixty-seven
years old, heard the Professor, in a field lecture at Salisbury
Craigs, discoursing on a trapdyke, with amygdaloidal margins and
the strata indurated on each side, with volcanic rocks all around
us, say that it was a fissure filled with sediment from above,
adding with a sneer that there were men who maintained that it
had been injected from beneath in a molten condition. When I
think of this lecture, I do not wonder that I determined never to