ly into his confidence to be informed, under the seal of
strict secrecy, that he contemplated producing a great literary work,
whose special character he had not quite determined, but which was to be
begun a few years hence. And when death found him, at an age which did
not fall far short of the allotted threescore and ten, the great unknown
work was still an undefined idea, and had still to be begun.

There were several other branches of my education going on at this time
outside the pale of the school, in which, though I succeeded in amusing
myself, I was no trifler. The shores of Cromarty are strewed over with
water-rolled fragments of the primary rocks, derived chiefly from the
west during the ages of the boulder clay; and I soon learned to take a
deep interest in sauntering over the various pebble-beds when shaken up
by recent storms, and in learning to distinguish their numerous
components. But I was sadly in want of a vocabulary; and as, according
to Cowper, "the growth of what is excellent is slow," it was not until
long after that I bethought me of the obvious enough expedient of
representing the various species of simple rocks, by certain numerals,
and the compound ones by the numerals representative of each separate
component, ranged, as in vulgar fractions, along a medial line, with the
figures representative of the prevailing materials of the mass above,
and those representative of the materials in less proportions below.
Though, however, wholly deficient in the signs proper to represent what
I knew, I soon acquired a considerable quickness of eye in
distinguishing the various kinds of rock, and tolerably definite
conceptions of the generic character of the porphyries, granites,
gneisses, quartz-rocks, clay-slates, and mica-schists, which everywhere
strewed the beach. In the rocks of mechanical origin I was at this time
much less interested; but in individual, as in general history,
mineralogy almost always precedes geology. I was fortunate enough to
discover, one happy morning, among the lumber and debris of old John
Feddes's dark room, an antique-fashioned hammer, which had belonged, my
mother told me, to old John himself more than a hundred years before. It
was an uncouth sort of implement, with a handle of strong black oak, and
a short, compact head, square on the one face and oblong on the other.
And though it dealt rather an obtuse blow, the temper was excellent, and
the haft firmly set; and I went abo