theoretical questions, and with dark Africa
around him, he did not see why the brethren at home should split on
them. Missionary influence in South Africa was directed in a wrong
channel. There were three times too many missionaries in the colony, and
vast regions beyond lay untouched. He wrote to Mr. Watt: "If you meet me
down in the colony before eight years are expired, you may shoot me."

Of his employments and studies he gives the following account: "I get
the _Evangelical, Scottish Congregational, Eclectic, Lancet, British and
Foreign Medical Review_. I can read in journeying, but little at home.
Building, gardening, cobbling, doctoring, tinkering, carpentering,
gun-mending, farriering, wagon-mending, preaching, schooling, lecturing
on physics according to my means, beside a chair in divinity to a class
of three, fill up my time."

With all his other work, he was still enthusiastic in science. "I have
written Professor Buckland," he says to Mr. Watt (May, 1845), "and send
him specimens too, but have not received any answer. I have a great lot
by me now. I don't know whether he received my letter or not. Could you
ascertain? I am trying to procure specimens of the entire geology of
this region, and will try and make a sort of chart. I am taking double
specimens now, so that if one part is lost, I can send another. The
great difficulty is transmission. I sent a dissertation on the decrease
of water in Africa. Call on Professor Owen and ask if he wants anything
in the four jars I still possess, of either rhinoceros, camelopard,
etc., etc. If he wants these, or anything else these jars will hold, he
must send me more jars and spirits of wine."

He afterward heard of the fate of one of the boxes of specimens he had
sent home--that which contained the fossils of Bootchap. It was lost on
the railway after reaching England, in custody of a friend. "The thief
thought the box contained bullion, no doubt. You may think of one of the
faces in _Punch_ as that of the scoundrel, when he found in the box a
lot of 'chuckystanes.'" He had got many nocturnal-feeding, animals, but
the heat made it very difficult to preserve them. Many valuable seeds he
had sent to Calcutta, with the nuts of the desert, but had heard nothing
of them. He had lately got knowledge of a root to which the same virtues
were attached as to ergot of rye. He tells his friend about the tsetse,
the fever, the north wind, and other African notabilia. These and m