Part 12

And thus I end my story of the slates in the roof, and these papers on Town Geology. I do so, well knowing how imperfect they are: though not, I believe, inaccurate. They are, after all, merely suggestive of the great amount that there is to be learnt about the face of the earth and how it got made, even by the townsman, who can escape into the country and exchange the world of man for the world of God, only, perhaps, on Sundays--if, alas! even then--or only once a year by a trip in a steamer or an excursion train. Little, indeed, can he learn of the planet on which he lives. Little in that direction is given to him, and of him little shall be required. But to him, for that very reason, all that can be given should be given; he should have every facility for learning what he can about this earth, its composition, its capabilities; lest his intellect, crushed and fettered by that artificial drudgery which we for a time miscall civilisation, should begin to fancy, as too many do already, that the world is composed mainly of bricks and deal, and governed by acts of parliament. If I shall have awakened any townsmen here and there to think seriously of the complexity, the antiquity, the grandeur, the true poetry, of the commonest objects around them, even the stones beneath their feet; if I shall have suggested to them the solemn thought that all these things, and they themselves still more, are ordered by laws, utterly independent of man's will about them, man's belief in them; if I shall at all have helped to open their eyes that they may see, and their ears that they may hear, the great book which is free to all alike, to peasant as to peer, to men of business as to men of science, even that great book of nature, which is, as Lord Bacon said of old, the Word of God revealed in facts--then I shall have a fresh reason for loving that science of geology, which has been my favourite study since I was a boy.

Footnotes:

{1} See "Nature," No. XXV. (Macmillan & Co.)

{2} These Lectures were delivered to the members of the Natural Science Class at Chester in 1871.

{3} See a most charming paper on "The Physics of Arctic Ice," by Dr. Robert Brown of Campster, published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, June, 1870. This article is so remarkable, not only for its sound scientific matter, but for the vividness and poetic beauty of its descriptions, that I must express a hope that the learned author will some day enlarge it, and publish it in a separate form.

{4} See Lyell, "Antiquity of Man," p. 294 et seq.