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.
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