lege, Cambridge! Almost simultaneously (on
November 16th, 1835) a second set of extracts from these letters--this
time of a general character--were read to the Philosophical Society at
Cambridge, and these excited so much interest that they were privately
printed in pamphlet form for circulation among the members.

Many expeditions and "scientific missions" have been despatched to
various parts of the world since the return of the "Beagle" in 1836, but
it is doubtful whether any, even the most richly endowed of them, has
brought back such stores of new information and fresh discoveries as
did that little "ten-gun brig"--certainly no cabin or laboratory was the
birth-place of ideas of such fruitful character as was that narrow end
of a chart-room, where the solitary naturalist could climb into his
hammock and indulge in meditation.

The third and most active portion of Darwin's career as a geologist was
the period which followed his return to England at the end of 1836. His
immediate admission to the Geological Society, at the beginning of 1837,
coincided with an important crisis in the history of geological science.

The band of enthusiasts who nearly thirty years before had inaugurated
the Geological Society--weary of the fruitless conflicts between
"Neptunists" and "Plutonists"--had determined to eschew theory and
confine their labours to the collection of facts, their publications to
the careful record of observations. Greenough, the actual founder of the
Society, was an ardent Wernerian, and nearly all his fellow-workers had
come, more or less directly, under the Wernerian teaching. Macculloch
alone gave valuable support to the Huttonian doctrines, so far as they
related to the influence of igneous activity--but the most important
portion of the now celebrated "Theory of the Earth"--that dealing with
the competency of existing agencies to account for changes in past
geological times--was ignored by all alike. Macculloch's influence on
the development of geology, which might have had far-reaching effects,
was to a great extent neutralised by his peculiarities of mind and
temper; and, after a stormy and troublous career, he retired from the
society in 1832. In all the writings of the great pioneers in English
geology, Hutton and his splendid generalisation are scarcely ever
referred to. The great doctrines of Uniformitarianism, which he had
foreshadowed, were completely ignored, and only his extravagances of
"anti-W