t me, seemed sufficiently chary of
coming in contact with me singly, he learned to seek me out in our
intervals of labour, and to converse on subjects upon which we felt a
common interest. He was not only an excellent operative mechanic, but
possessed also of considerable architectural skill; and in this special
province we found an interchange of idea not unprofitable. He had a
turn, too, for reading, though he was by no means extensively read; and
liked to converse about books. Nor, though the faculty had been but
little cultivated, was he devoid of an eye for the curious in nature. On
directing his attention, one morning, to a well-marked impression of
lepidodendron, which delicately fretted with its lozenge-shaped network
one of the planes of the stone before me, he began to describe, with a
minuteness of observation not common among working men, certain strange
forms which had attracted his notice when employed among the grey
flagstones of Forfarshire. I long after recognised in his description
that strange crustacean of the Middle Old Red Sandstone of Scotland, the
_Pterygotus_--an organism which was wholly unknown at this time to
geologists, and which is but partially known still; and I saw in 1838,
on the publication, in its first edition, of the "Elements" of Sir
Charles Lyell, what he meant to indicate, by a rude sketch which he drew
on the stone before us, and which, to the base of a semi-ellipsis,
somewhat resembling a horse-shoe, united an angular prolongation not
very unlike the iron stem of a pointing trowel drawn from the handle. He
had evidently seen, long ere it had been detected by the scientific eye,
that strange ichthyolite of the Old Red system, the _Cephalaspis_. His
story, though he used to tell it with great humour, and no little
dramatic effect, was in reality a very sad one. He had quarrelled, when
quite a lad, with one of his fellow-workmen, and was unfortunate enough,
in the pugilistic encounter which followed, to break his jawbone, and
otherwise so severely to injure him, that for some time his recovery
seemed doubtful. Flying, pursued by the officers of the law, he was,
after a few days' hiding, apprehended, lodged in jail, tried at the High
Court of Justiciary, and ultimately sentenced to three months'
imprisonment. And these three months he had to spend--for such was the
wretched arrangement of the time--in the worst society in the world. In
sketching, as he sometimes did, for the general