m the Arenig district
in North Wales, or possibly from a point nearer the Welsh Border. (I
am greatly indebted to the Managers of the Bank at Shrewsbury for kind
assistance in the examination of this interesting memorial: and Mr
H.T. Beddoes, the Curator of the Shrewsbury Museum, has given me some
archaeological information concerning the stone. Mr Richard Cotton was
a good local naturalist, a Fellow both of the Geological and Linnean
Societies; and to the officers of these societies I am indebted for
information concerning him. He died in 1839, and although he does not
appear to have published any scientific papers, he did far more for
science by influencing the career of the school boy!) It was of course
brought to where Shrewsbury now stands by the agency of a glacier--as
Darwin afterwards learnt.

We can well believe from the perusal of these reminiscences that,
at this time, Darwin's mind was, as he himself says, "prepared for a
philosophical treatment of the subject" of Geology. ("L.L." I. page 41.)
When at the age of 16, however, he was entered as a medical student at
Edinburgh University, he not only did not get any encouragement of
his scientific tastes, but was positively repelled by the ordinary
instruction given there. Dr Hope's lectures on Chemistry, it is true,
interested the boy, who with his brother Erasmus had made a laboratory
in the toolhouse, and was nicknamed "Gas" by his schoolfellows, while
undergoing solemn and public reprimand from Dr Butler at Shrewsbury
School for thus wasting his time. ("L.L." I. page 35.) But most of
the other Edinburgh lectures were "intolerably dull," "as dull as the
professors" themselves, "something fearful to remember." In after life
the memory of these lectures was like a nightmare to him. He speaks in
1840 of Jameson's lectures as something "I... for my sins experienced!"
("L.L." I. page 340.) Darwin especially signalises these lectures on
Geology and Zoology, which he attended in his second year, as being
worst of all "incredibly dull. The sole effect they produced on me was
the determination never so long as I lived to read a book on Geology, or
in any way to study the science!" ("L.L." I. page 41.)

The misfortune was that Edinburgh at that time had become the cockpit in
which the barren conflict between "Neptunism" and "Plutonism" was being
waged with blind fury and theological bitterness. Jameson and his
pupils, on the one hand, and the friends and disciples of