Self Help by Samuel Smiles (desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

upwards of ten

thousand miles yearly; and it was amidst this incessant and

laborious travelling, that he contrived to commit to paper his

fast-growing generalizations on what he rightly regarded as a new

science. No observation, howsoever trivial it might appear, was

neglected, and no opportunity of collecting fresh facts was

overlooked. Whenever he could, he possessed himself of records of

borings, natural and artificial sections, drew them to a constant

scale of eight yards to the inch, and coloured them up. Of his

keenness of observation take the following illustration. When

making one of his geological excursions about the country near

Woburn, as he was drawing near to the foot of the Dunstable chalk

hills, he observed to his companion, “If there be any broken ground

about the foot of these hills, we may find SHARK’S TEETH;” and they

had not proceeded far, before they picked up six from the white

bank of a new fence-ditch. As he afterwards said of himself, “The

habit of observation crept on me, gained a settlement in my mind,

became a constant associate of my life, and started up in activity

at the first thought of a journey; so that I generally went off

well prepared with maps, and sometimes with contemplations on its

objects, or on those on the road, reduced to writing before it

commenced. My mind was, therefore, like the canvas of a painter,

well prepared for the first and best impressions.”

 

Notwithstanding his courageous and indefatigable industry, many

circumstances contributed to prevent the promised publication of

William Smith’s ‘Map of the Strata of England and Wales,’ and it

was not until 1814 that he was enabled, by the assistance of some

friends, to give to the world the fruits of his twenty years’

incessant labour. To prosecute his inquiries, and collect the

extensive series of facts and observations requisite for his

purpose, he had to expend the whole of the profits of his

professional labours during that period; and he even sold off his

small property to provide the means of visiting remoter parts of

the island. Meanwhile he had entered on a quarrying speculation

near Bath, which proved unsuccessful, and he was under the

necessity of selling his geological collection (which was purchased

by the British Museum), his furniture and library, reserving only

his papers, maps, and sections, which were useless save to himself.

He bore his losses and misfortunes with exemplary fortitude; and

amidst all, he went on working with cheerful courage and untiring

patience. He died at Northampton, in August, 1839, while on his

way to attend the meeting of the British Association at Birmingham.

 

It is difficult to speak in terms of too high praise of the first

geological map of England, which we owe to the industry of this

courageous man of science. An accomplished writer says of it, “It

was a work so masterly in conception and so correct in general

outline, that in principle it served as a basis not only for the

production of later maps of the British Islands, but for geological

maps of all other parts of the world, wherever they have been

undertaken. In the apartments of the Geological Society Smith’s

map may yet be seen—a great historical document, old and worn,

calling for renewal of its faded tints. Let any one conversant

with the subject compare it with later works on a similar scale,

and he will find that in all essential features it will not suffer

by the comparison—the intricate anatomy of the Silurian rocks of

Wales and the north of England by Murchison and Sedgwick being the

chief additions made to his great generalizations.” {20} The

genius of the Oxfordshire surveyor did not fail to be duly

recognised and honoured by men of science during his lifetime. In

1831 the Geological Society of London awarded to him the Wollaston

medal, “in consideration of his being a great original discoverer

in English geology, and especially for his being the first in this

country to discover and to teach the identification of strata, and

to determine their succession by means of their imbedded fossils.”

William Smith, in his simple, earnest way, gained for himself a

name as lasting as the science he loved so well. To use the words

of the writer above quoted, “Till the manner as well as the fact of

the first appearance of successive forms of life shall be solved,

it is not easy to surmise how any discovery can be made in geology

equal in value to that which we owe to the genius of William

Smith.”

 

Hugh Miller was a man of like observant faculties, who studied

literature as well as science with zeal and success. The book in

which he has told the story of his life, (‘My Schools and

Schoolmasters’), is extremely interesting, and calculated to be

eminently useful. It is the history of the formation of a truly

noble character in the humblest condition of life; and inculcates

most powerfully the lessons of self-help, self-respect, and self-dependence. While Hugh was but a child, his father, who was a

sailor, was drowned at sea, and he was brought up by his widowed

mother. He had a school training after a sort, but his best

teachers were the boys with whom he played, the men amongst whom he

worked, the friends and relatives with 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 Frith. 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 seaweed, 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

stonemason; and he began his labouring career in a quarry looking

out upon the Cromarty Frith. 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 for 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

afterwards, 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 whoever wills may rival or surpass me; and this

humble faculty of patience, when rightly developed, may lead to

more extraordinary developments of idea than even genius itself.”

 

The late John Brown, the eminent English geologist, was, like

Miller, a stonemason in his early life, serving an apprenticeship

to the trade at Colchester, and afterwards working as a journeyman

mason at Norwich. He began business as a builder on his own

account at Colchester, where by frugality and industry he secured a

competency. It was while working at his trade that his attention

was first drawn to the study of fossils and shells; and he

proceeded to make a collection of them, which afterwards grew into

one of the finest in England. His researches along the coasts of

Essex, Kent, and Sussex brought to light some magnificent remains

of the elephant and rhinoceros, the most valuable of which were

presented by him to the British Museum. During the last few years

of his life he devoted considerable attention to the study of the

Foraminifera in chalk, respecting which he made several interesting

discoveries. His life was useful, happy, and honoured; and he died

at Stanway, in Essex, in November 1859, at the ripe age of eighty

years.

 

Not long ago, Sir Roderick Murchison discovered at Thurso, in the

far north of Scotland, a profound geologist, in the person of a

baker there, named Robert Dick. When Sir Roderick called upon him

at the bakehouse in which he baked and earned his bread, Robert

Dick delineated to him, by means of flour upon the board, the

geographical features and geological phenomena of his native

county, pointing out the imperfections in the existing maps, which

he had ascertained by travelling over the country in his leisure

hours. On further inquiry, Sir Roderick ascertained that the

humble individual before him was not only a capital baker and

geologist, but a first-rate botanist. “I found,” said the

President of the Geographical Society, “to my great humiliation

that the baker knew infinitely more of botanical science, ay, ten

times more, than I did; and that there were only some twenty or

thirty specimens of flowers which he had not collected. Some he

had obtained as presents, some he had purchased, but the greater

portion had been accumulated by his industry, in his native county

of Caithness; and the specimens were all arranged in the most

beautiful order, with their scientific names affixed.”

 

Sir Roderick Murchison himself is an illustrious follower of these

and kindred branches of science. A writer in the ‘Quarterly

Review’ cites him as a “singular instance of a man who, having

passed the early part of his life as a soldier, never having had

the advantage, or disadvantage as the case might have been, of a

scientific training, instead of remaining a foxhunting country

gentleman, has succeeded by his own native vigour and sagacity,

untiring industry and zeal, in making for himself a scientific

reputation that is as wide as it is likely to be lasting. He took

first of all an unexplored and difficult district at home, and, by

the labour of many years, examined its rock-formations, classed

them in natural groups, assigned to each its characteristic

assemblage of fossils, and was the first to decipher two great

chapters in the world’s geological history, which must always

henceforth carry his name on their title-page. Not only so, but he

applied the knowledge thus acquired to the dissection of large

districts, both at home and abroad, so as to become the geological

discoverer of great countries which had formerly been ‘terrae

incognitae.’” But Sir Roderick Murchison is not merely a

geologist. His indefatigable labours in many branches of knowledge

have contributed to render him among the most accomplished and

complete of scientific men.