MDCCCLVIII.
EDINBURGH: T. CONSTABLE, PRINTER TO HER MAJESTY.
TO
GEORGE WILSON, M.D., F.R.S.E.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH,
THESE PAGES
ARE
AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
PREFACE
The present Volume has been written among the rocks which it seeks to describe, during the intervals of leisure of a field-geologist. Its composition has been carried on by snatches, often short and far apart, some of the descriptions having been jotted down on the spot by streamlet and hill-side, or in the quiet of old quarries; others, again, in railway-carriage or stage-coach. By much the larger portion, however, has been written by the village fireside, after the field-work of the day was over—a season not the most favourable to any mental exercise, for weariness of body is apt to beget lassitude of mind. In short, were I to say that these Chapters have been as often thrown aside and resumed again as they contain paragraphs, the statement would probably not exceed the truth. But the erratic life of an itinerant student of science is attended with yet greater disadvantages. It entails an absence from all libraries, more especially scientific ones, and the number of works of reference admissible into his parva supellex must ever be few indeed. With these hindrances, can the writer venture to hope that what has thus been so disjointed and unconnected to him, will not seem equally so to his readers? Yet if his descriptions, written, as it were, face to face with Nature, are found to have caught some tinge of Nature's freshness, and please the reader well enough to set him in the way of becoming a geologist, he shall have accomplished all his design.