r a sort, but his best teachers were the
boys with whom he played, the men amongst whom he lived. He read much
and miscellaneously, and picked up odd sorts of knowledge from many
quarters--from workmen, carpenters, fishermen and sailors, and above
all, from the old boulders strewed along the shores of the Cromarty
Firth. With a big hammer which had belonged to his great-grandfather,
an old buccaneer, the boy went about chipping the stones, and
accumulating specimens of mica, porphyry, garnet, and such like.
Sometimes he had a day in the woods, and there, too, the boy's
attention was excited by the peculiar geological curiosities which
came in his way. While searching among the rocks on the beach, he was
sometimes asked, in irony, by the farm-servants who came to load
their carts with sea-weed, whether he "was gettin' siller in the
stanes," but was so unlucky as never to be able to answer in the
affirmative. When of a suitable age he was apprenticed to the trade
of his choice--that of a working stone-mason; and he began his
laboring career in a quarry looking out upon the Cromarty Firth. This
quarry proved one of his best schools. The remarkable geological
formations which it displayed awakened his curiosity. The bar of
deep-red stone beneath, and the bar of pale-red clay above, were
noted by the young quarryman, who even in such unpromising subjects,
found matter of observation and reflection. Where other men saw
nothing, he detected analogies, differences, and peculiarities which
set him a-thinking. He simply kept his eyes and his mind open; was
sober, diligent and persevering; and this was the secret of his
intellectual growth.

His curiosity was excited and kept alive by the curious organic
remains, principally of old and extinct species of fishes, ferns, and
ammonites, which were revealed along the coast by the washings of the
waves, or were exposed by the stroke of his mason's hammer. He never
lost sight of the subject, but went on accumulating observations and
comparing formations, until at length, many years afterward, when no
longer a working mason, he gave to the world his highly interesting
work on the "Old Red Sandstone," which at once established his
reputation as a scientific geologist. But this work was the fruit of
long years of patient observation and research. As he modestly states
in his autobiography, "The only merit to which I lay claim in the
case is that of patient research--a merit in which whoev