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What is this but a modern edition of the prophet's roll, written within and without, with "lamentation, and mourning, and woe?"

The results of our School are to be found in many happy homes, the abodes of those that, once wretched, ragged outcasts, are now honest men and virtuous mothers, useful citizens and heads of families; and we have good reason to believe that some whom we picked from the dust-heap, plucked from the very gutter, are now shining in heaven, gems in a Saviour's crown. But so far as the results are very palpable matters of fact, they may be summed up under these three heads :—

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I. We-and in these results I include the influence of other, though smaller schools have cleared the streets of Edinburgh of juvenile beggars, feat the Magistrates and Police, with cells and prison at their back, were so far from ever being able to achieve, that, when our School was set on foot, their name was Legion. They swarmed through all the town-it was creeping with them.

gentleman in an official position told me the other day, that a large jail in the west of Scotland having been found too large for the common class of prisoners, a part of it had been appropriated to convicts; and having some of that class to find room for, he went to this jail to see whether they could be accommodated there. He knocked-the grim door opened and a very dull, sad, and gruesome-looking man appeared. On my acquaintance telling who he was, and what he called for, the countenance of the jailer instantly lighted up, as when one lets on the full stream of gas,-he was so happy at the prospect of getting something to do-of getting idle time off his hands.

III. The Original Ragged School alone has rescued from great misery and certain ruin not less than five hundred children. They are now blessings to society. This number does not include the many who have received at our school a partial education, nor that considerable number whose parents, finding their circumstances improved, have removed them from ours to higher schools. Í have heard statistics of Ragged Schools of the couleur-derose kind. They were too good to be true; and a cause which needs not the help of exaggeration is only damaged by such displays of imposition or cretrusted. Now, of those five hundred children, who dulity. The statistics I give may be thoroughly are, take them all in all, playing their part well in life, let us suppose that but one-half had run a career in crime. That is a very low supposition, but take it. Since every criminal costs the country on an average £300, the State, before it was done with punishing them, would have incurred an expense of £75,000. What have we saved the public purse by saving these children? Our school, during its twelve years' existence, has been maintained at an

II. We are fast emptying the prisons. If, as they say, "seeing is believing," look at the follow-outlay of some £24,000. Sinking, therefore, all ing tables :

"Our school was opened in the summer of 1847, but could not, of course, tell much on the returns of that year.

In 1847 the centesimal proportion of children (5.6

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under 14 years of age in prison was

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"There has been also a remarkable decrease in the commitments of prisoners from 14 to 16 years of age.

The number of prisoners between 14 and 16 years of age was, in

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I have it from gentlemen, members of Prison Boards, that the most remarkable feature of our time is the steady and even rapid decrease of crime -a most gratifying circumstance, and one which those most competent to judge attribute chiefly to the influence of Ragged and Reformatory Schools. A part of our jails will by and by be to let; and already our jailers are suffering from ennui. A

considerations of a humane, moral, and religious kind, and looking only to the pounds, shillings, and pence view of the case, we have saved the country a sum equal to the difference between £24,000 and £75,000, which is £51,000. And if we make the much more probable supposition, that but for our school-its useful, kind, and holy training-two-thirds of those five hundred children would have developed into full-blown criminals, we have saved the country not less than £72,000.

It is strange and sad that I should have to charge schools they should have fostered, patronized, and our Government with a niggardly treatment of liberally supported as one of the most holy and blessed remedies for evils that it baffled the whole power of the State to cure. What it could not do with its gallows, its prisons, its police, and penal settlements, we have done. The light of education, the knowledge of the gospel, the kindness of Christian hands, and the love of Christian hearts, have conquered those that defied the boasted terrors of the law. The devil-possessed whom chains could not bind, is there-sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind. One would think that those who saved the lost, and helped the neediest, would have shared most largely of the funds the country puts into the hands of the Privy Council for promoting the interests of education. But, strange to say, the rule of the Government seems to be, to give much to educate those that need little help, and

little to educate those who need much. A sum of £1,200,000 is voted by Parliament for the purposes of education; and while hundreds of thousands go to educate children whose parents are in circumstances to give them a fair education at their own expense, all the help we receive is half a farthing per day for each child we save from a life of misery and crime. Mockery, and miserable economy! Surely a Christian country will rise to remonstrate against the State-to use the words of Lord Brougham-abdicating one of its most important duties. Our employment is eminently like His who came to seek and to save the lost; and who put into the mouth of the prodigal's father, words so descriptive of these reclaimed outcasts, "This my son that was dead is alive again, that was lost is found."

Governments may turn a deaf ear to our petitions ; though, when we have burst the bands of red tape, and breaking through the outer circle of mere officials, have got our case fairly set before them, I hope better things of men in power. Meanwhile let the prayers and liberality of all baptized into the spirit of Jesus support us; this be the picture of their life :

"I live for those that love me,

For those that know me true,
For the heaven that smiles above me,
And waits my coming too,
"For the cause that lacks assistance,
For the wrongs that need resistance,
For the future in the distance,
For the good that I can do."

A GEOLOGIST'S FIRST EXCURSION.

A CHAPTER FOR BOYS.

THOMAS GUTHRIE

THE finding of a little piece of stone, which | by means of paddles, to be worked by a couple of most men would have passed unnoticed, and men, or, failing them, by a horse; but though I which, but for certain accompanying circum- found (if my memory serve me) that my friend, stances, the writer would have passed unnoticed the old Marquis of Worcester, had anticipated the himself, was the means of changing wholly the invention by almost 200 years, I could not succeed pursuits of his boyhood, and eventually fashioning even with the results of his experience, in getting the tenor of his later life. The experiences of an the paddles to move except when the boat was out old boy may be useful to the younger ones, possibly, of the water, and so the grand contrivance, that even to some who are older than himself, and, was to make me famous in every harbour in the perhaps, I could not better begin a series of chapters kingdom, fell to the ground. upon stones than by telling the reader what set me to think about stones at all.

'Tis an old story now, so far back, indeed, that I hardly like to reckon up the years that have since passed away. But clear and bright does it stand in my memory, notwithstanding, that gay autumnal afternoon, with its long country ramble to the old quarry, the merry shouts of my comrades, the endless yarns we span by the way, the countless raw turnips that were devoured from the field at the half-way resting-place, and, above all, the priceless load of stones we brought away, and bore homeward over those weary miles, when the sun had sunk, red and fiery, in the west, and the shadows of twilight began to deepen the gloom of the woods. Many a country ramble have I made since then, but none, perhaps, with so deep and hearty an enjoyment, for it opened up a new world, into which a fancy fresh from the Arabian Nights and Don Quixote, could ride forth conquering and to conquer.

Up to that time my leisure hours after schoollessons were learnt, and all customary games were played, had been given to laborious mechanical contrivances, based sometimes on the most preposterous principles. For a while I believed I had discovered perpetual motion. Day and night the vision haunted me of a wheel turning, turning, in endless revolutions; and what was this wheel not to accomplish? It was to be the motive power in every manufactory all through the country. To the end of time, too, it would be called by my name, just as other pieces of mechanism bore the names of other worthies, in that treasure of a book The Century of Inventions. Among various contrivances, I remember striving hard to construct a boat that should go through the water

The Saturday afternoons were always observed by us as a consecrated holiday time, all school preparations being then consigned to a delightful oblivion. To learn a lesson during these hours was regarded as something degenerate and wholly unworthy of the dignity of a school-boy. Besides, we had always plenty of work of some kind to fill up the time, and what the nature of that work was to be for the ensuing Saturday had usually been determined long before the coveted Saturday came. Sometimes if the weather were dull, my comrades repaired to my room (which we dignified as "the workshop") to hear a disquisition on my last invention, or to help if they could in removing some troublesome and apparently insuperable difficulty. Or we planned a glorious game of cricket, or golf, or football, that seldom came to a close until the evening grew too dark for longer play. In spring-time we would sally forth into the country to some well-remembered bank, where the primroses and violets bloomed earliest, and return at dusk, bearing many a posy and garland for the home-circles. The summer afternoons often found us loitering, rod in hand, along the marge of a shady streamlet, in whose deeper pools the silvery troutlet loved to feed. And it fed, truly, with little danger from us. The writhing worm (we never soared to the use of the fly) though ever so skilfully twined round the hook, failed to allure the scaly brood, and we could see them darting up and down the current without so much as a nibble at our tempting bait. Not so, however, with another member of that tribe, to which we had the most determined antipathy.

The cry of "A beardie! a beardie!" from one of our party was the sign for every rod and stick to be thrown down on the bank, and a general

rush to the spot where the enemy of the trout had been seen. Off went stockings and shoes, and in plunged the wearer, straight to the large stone in mid-channel under which the foe was supposed to be lurking. Cautiously were the fingers passed into the crevices and round the base of the stone, and the little victim fairly caught at last in his den, was thrown in triumph to the bank, where many a stone was at hand to end his torments and his life.

Autumn brought round the corn-fields, and the hedge-rows rich in hip, and haw, and bramble, and then, dear to the heart of school-boy, came winter with his loads of sliding, skating, and snowballing, and his long, merry evenings, with their rounds of sight-seeing, festivity, and plum-cake.

'Tis an old story, truly; but I remember as if it had been yesterday, how my Saturday employments were changed, and how the vagrant, careless fancies of the schoolboy passed into the settled purposes that have moulded the man. I had passed a Saturday afternoon alone, and next day as usual met my comrades at church. On comparing notes, I found that the previous afternoon they had set out for some lime-quarries, about four miles off, and had returned laden with wonders-plants of strange form, with scales, teeth, and bones of uncouth fishes, all imbedded in the heart of the stone, and drawn out of a subterranean territory of almost fabulous extent and gloom. Could anything more marvellous have been suggested to a youthful fancy? The caverns of the Genii, even that of the Wonderful Lamp, seemed not more to be coveted. At least the new cave had this great advantage over the old ones, that I was sure it was really true; a faint suspicion having begun to arise that, possibly, after all, the eastern caverns might have no more tangible existence than on the pages of the story-book. But here, only four miles from my own door, was a real cavern, mysterious, beyond the power of my friends to describe, inhabited by living men who toiled like gnomes, with murky faces and little lamps on their foreheads, driving wagons, and blasting open the rock in vast and seemingly impenetrable galleries, where the sullen reverberations boomed as it were for miles among endless gigantic pillars, and sheets of Stygian water that stretched away deep and dark into fathomless gloom. And in that rock, wrapped up in its substance like mummies in their cerements, lay heaps of plants of wondrous kinds; some resembled those of our woods and streams, but there were many, the like to which my companions declared that even in our longest rambles they had never seen on bank, or brake, or hill;-fishes, too, there were, with strong massive scales, very different from our trouts and minnows. Some of the spiny fins, indeed, just a little resembled our foe the "Beardie." Very likely (thought I), the Genius of the cave being a sensible fellow, has resolved to preserve his trout, and so with a murrain on the beardies has buried them bodily in the rock.

But above all, in these dark subterranean recesses lurked the remains of gigantic reptiles; and one of the quarrymen possessed a terrific tusk and some fragmentary scales, which he would have Hold to my friends could their joint purse have supplied the stipulated price.

My interest in the tale, of course, increased at every new incident; but when they came to talk of reptiles, the exuberant fancy could contain itself no longer. "Dragons! dragons !" I shouted, and rubbed my hands in an ecstasy of delight. "Dragons, boys, be sure they are, that have been turned into stone by the magic of some old necromancer." They had found too, in great abundance, what they had been told were "coprolites ;" that is, as we afterwards learnt, the petrified excrement of ancient fishes. "Copper-lites," thought I, nay, perchance it might be gold; for who ever read of such a famous cavern with petrified forests, fishes, and dragons, that had not besides huge treasures of yellow gold?

So there and then we planned an excursion for the following Saturday. The days that intervened stretched themselves somehow to an interminable length. It seemed the longest week of my life, even though every sleeping and waking hour was crowded with visions of the wondrous cavern. At length the long-expected morning dawned, and soon brightened up into a clear, calm autumnal day.

We started off about noon; a goodly band of some eight or nine striplings, with two or three hammers, and a few pence amongst us, and no care to be home before dusk. An October sun shone merrily out upon us; the fields, bared of their sheaves, had begun to be again laid under the plough, and long lines of rich brown loam alternated with bands of yellow stubble, up and down which toiled many a team of steaming horses. The neighbouring woods, gorgeous in their tints of green, and gold, and russet, sent forth clouds of rooks, whose noisy jangle, borne onward by the breeze, and mingling with the drone of the bee and the carol of the lark, grew mellow in the distance, as the cadence of a far-off hymn. We were too young to analyse the landscape, but not too young to find in it the intensest enjoyment. Moreover, our path lay through a district rich in historic associations. Watch-peels and castles and towers many a one looked out upon us as we walked, each with its traditionary tales, the recital of which formed one of our chief delights. Or if a castle lacked its story, our invention easily supplied the defect. And thus every part of the way came to be memorable in our eyes for some thrilling event real or imaginary-battles, stern and bloody, fierce encounters in single combat, strange weird doings of antique wizards, and marvellous achievements of steel-clad knights, who rambled restlessly through the world to deliver imprisoned maidens. Thus beguiled, the four hours seemed to shrink into one, and we arrived at length at the quarries. They had been opened, I found, along the slope of a gentle declivity. At the north end stood the kilns where the lime was burnt, the white smoke from which we used to see when miles away. About a quarter of a mile to the south lay the workings where my comrades had seen the subterranean men; and there too stood the engine that drew up the wagons and pumped out the water. Between the engine and the kilns the hill-side had all been mined and exhausted; the quarrymen having gradually made their way south to where we saw the smoking chimney of the engine-house.

This state of matters was explained to me as we ascended the hill towards the quarries. We made for a point midway between the two ends of the excavations; and great indeed was our delight, on climbing a long bank of grass-grown rubbish, to see below us a green hollow, and beyond it a wall of rock, in the centre of which yawned a dark cavern, plunging away into the hill far from the light of day. My companions rushed down the slope with a shout of triumph. For myself, I lingered a moment on the top. With just a tinge of sadness in the thought, I felt that though striking and picturesque beyond anything of the kind I had ever seen, this cavern was after all only a piece of human handiwork. The heaps of rubbish around me, with the smoking kilns at the one end, and the clanking engine at the other, had no connexion with beings of another world, but told only too plainly of ingenious, indefatigable man. The spell was broken at once and for ever, and as it fell to pieces, I darted down the slope and rejoined my comrades.

these questions, pronounced my treasure-trove to be, unmistakably and unequivocally, a fish. True, it seemed to lack head and tail and fins; the liveliest fancy amongst us hesitated as to which were the scales; and in after years I learned that it was really a vegetable-the seed-cone or catkin of a large extinct kind of club-moss; but, in the meantime, Tom had declared it to be a fish, and a fish it must assuredly be.

The halo that broke forth from the Wizard's tomb when William of Deloraine and the Monk of St. Mary's heaved at midnight the ponderous stone, was surely not brighter, certainly not so benign in its results as the light that now seemed to stream into my whole being, as I disinterred from their stony folds these wondrous relics. Like other schoolboys I had, of course, had my lessons on geology in the usual meagre, cut-and-dry form in which physical science is taught in our schools. I could repeat a "Table of Formations," and remembered the pictures of some uncouth monsters on the pages of our text-books-one with goggle-eyes, and a preposterous tail; another with an enormous pot-belly, and no tail at all, for which latter defect I had endeavoured to compensate by inserting a long pipe into his mouth, receiving from our master (Ironsides we called him) a hearty thwack across the knuckles, as a recompense for my attention to the creature's comfort. But the notion that these pictures were the representations of actual, though now extinct monsters, that the ves-matter-of-fact details of our text-books really symbolized living truths, and were not invented solely to distract the brains and endanger the palms of schoolboys; nay, that the statements which seemed so dry and unintelligible in print, were such as could be actually verified by our own eyes in nature, that beneath and beyond the present Creation, in the glories of which we revelled, there lay around us the memorials of other creations not less glorious, and infinitely older, and thus that more, immensely more, than our books or our teachers taught us could be learnt by looking at nature for ourselves-all this was strange to me. It came now for the first time like a new revelation, one that has gladdened my life ever since.

They had already entered the cave, which was certainly vast and gloomy enough for whole legions of gnomes. The roof, steep as that of a house, sloped rapidly into the hillside beneath a murky sheet of water, and was supported by pillars of wide girth, some of which had a third of their height, or more, concealed by the lake, so that the cavern, with its inclined roof and pillars, half sunk in the water, looked as though it had been rent and submerged by some old earthquake. Not a tige of vegetation could we see save near the entrance, some dwarfed scolopendriums and pale patches of moss. Not an insect, nor indeed any living thing seemed ever to venture down into this dreary den. Away it stretched to the right hand and the left, in long withdrawing vistas of gloom, broken, as we could faintly see, by the light which, entering from other openings along the hillside, fell here and there on some hoary pillar, and finally vanished into the shade.

It would be a weariness alike to reader and writer to recall what achievements we performed; how, with true boyish hardihood, we essayed to climb the pillars, or crept along the ledges of rock that overhung the murky water, to let a ponderous stone fall plumb into the depths, and mark how long the bubbles continued to rise gurgling to the surface, and how long the reverberations of the plunge came floating back to us from the far-off recesses of the cave. Enough, that having satisfied our souls with the wonders below ground, we set out to explore those above.

"But where are the petrified forests and fishes ?" cried one of the party. "Here!" "Here!" was shouted in reply from the top of the bank by two of the ringleaders on the previous Saturday. We made for the heap of broken stones whence the voices had come, and there, truly, on every block and every fragment the fossils met our eye, sometimes so thickly grouped together that we could barely see the stone on which they lay. I bent over the mound, and the first fragment that turned up (my first-found fossil) was one that excited the deepest interest. The commander-in-chief of the first excursion, who was regarded (perhaps as much from his bodily stature as for any other reason) an authority on

We wrought on at the rubbish heap most lustily, and found an untold sum of wonders. The human mind in its earlier stages dwells on resemblances, rather than on differences. We identified what we found in the stones with that to which it most nearly approached in existing nature, and though many an organism turned up to which we could think of no analogue, we took no trouble to discriminate wherein it differed from others. Hence, to our imagination, the plants, insects, shells, and fishes of our rambles met us again in the rock. There was little that some one of the party could not explain, and thus our limestone became a more extraordinary conglomeration of organic remains, I will venture to say, than ever perturbed the brain of a geologist. It did not occur at the time to any of us to inquire why a perch came to be embalmed among ivy and rose leaves; why a sea-shore whelk lay entwined in the arms of a butterfly; or why a beetle should seem to have been doing his utmost to dance a pirouette round the tooth of a fish. These ques

tions came all to be asked afterwards, and then I saw how egregiously erroneous had been our identifications. But, in the meantime, knowing little of the subject, I believed everything, and with implicit faith piled up dragon-flies, ferns, fishes, beetlecases, violets, sea-weeds, and shells.

Will the reader wonder when he is told that the shadows of twilight had begun to fall while we still bent eagerly over the stones? Yet so it was; the sun, with a fiery glare, had sunk behind the distant hills, and the long lines of ruddy light that mottled the sky as he went down, had crept slowly after him, and left the clouds to come trooping up from the east, cold, lifeless, and grey. The chill of an evening, late in autumn, fell over everything, save the spirits of the treasure-seekers. And yet, they too in the end succumbed. The ring of the hammer became less frequent, and the shout that announced the discovery of each fresh marvel seldomer broke the stillness of the scene. And, as the moanings of the night wind swept across the fields, and rustled fitfully among the withered weeds of the quarry, it was wisely resolved that we should all go home.

And yet, I had carried home with me a strange medley of errors and misconceptions. Nearly every fossil we found was incorrectly named. We | believed ourselves to have discovered in the rock organisms which had really never been found fossil by man alive. So far, therefore, the whole lesson had to be unlearnt, and a hard process the unlearning proved to be. But (what was of infinitely more consequence to me at the time than the correct names, or even the true nature of the fossils) I had now seen fossils with my own eyes, and struck them out of the rock with my own hand. The meaning of the lessons we had been taught at school began to glimmer upon me; the dry bones of our books were touched into life; the idea of creations anterior to man seemed clear as a revealed truth; the fishes and plants of the lime quarry must have lived and died, but when and how? was it possible for me to discover?

Then came the packing up. Each had amassed a pile of specimens, well-nigh as large as himself, and it was of course impossible to carry everything away. A rapid selection had therefore to be made. And oh with how much reluctance were we compelled to relinquish many of the stones, the discovery whereof had made the opposite cavern ring again with our jubilee. Not one of us had shown the foresight to provide himself with a bag, so we stowed away the treasures in our pockets. What would not these appendages of our youthful apparel contain! Surely practical geometry offers ! not a more perplexing problem than to gauge the capacity of a schoolboy's pockets. So we loaded ourselves to the full, and waddled along with the fossils crowded into every available corner of our outer integuments, which were, of course, bulged up, here and there, into the most unsightly and unnatural wens.

Despite our loads we left the quarry in high glee. Arranging ourselves instinctively into a concave phalanx, with the speaker in the centre, we resumed a tale of thrilling interest, that had come to its most tragic part just as we arrived at the quarry, several hours before. It lasted all the way back, beguiling the tedium, darkness, and chill of the four miles that lay between the lime works and our homes; and the final consummation of the story was artfully reached, just as we got to the door of the first of the party, who had to wish us good-night.

Such was my first geological excursion-a simple event enough, and yet it was the turning-point in my life. From that day, onward, the rocks and their fossil treasures formed the chief subject of my every-day thoughts. I might have been a merchant or a banker or a lawyer, as others of the party have successively become, but that day stamped my fate, and I became a geologist.

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Yes, it was possible, and after many an hour of puzzling thought and conjecture, I did discover. what the fossils had to teach. It was a strange lesson when learnt at last, very different from the first impressions obtained at the quarry. But this part of the story must be reserved for a subsequent paper.

In these boyhood recollections, my younger readers will of course see much which their own good sense will teach them to avoid. I have no wish to find them setting out to hunt for caverns and genii, or perilling their lives in subterranean quarries, or nicknaming their master, or scribbling their schoolbooks, or, save with a few exceptions, aiming to become professional geologists. But I do wish to see them, one and all, lovers of nature. If, already, they chance to be botanists, or entomologists, or ornithologists, or malacologists, good and well. But if they have no such pursuits, let me earnestly advise them each to shoulder a hammer, and sally forth to examine all the rocks of their neighbourhood, especially such as contain organic remains. They need not at first trouble themselves with books. I do not ask them to learn to read (their teachers will see to that); but to learn to see, which, as no master can teach it, they must learn for themselves; and they will be surprised when they get older to find how few people there are comparatively who do really see. Neither need they care much at the outset whether they call the fossils by the right names or no; names are man's making; the fossils are God's. Let them strive to look at nature apart from books, and altogether away from man's devices, as a great manifestation of God, which He means us to read and study, that we may know more of it and of ourselves, and thereby more of Him who made us and all things. In such pursuits they will find some of the happiest hours of their life in this world. They will thus increase tenfold the pleasure of their youth, they will acquire habits of observation that shall serve them well in whatever sphere their after years may be spent, and they will eventually, with God's blessing, become nobler and better

men.

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