The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

I.—A Stone-mason's Researches

My advice to young working men desirous of bettering their circumstances, and adding to the amount of their enjoyment, is to seek happiness in study. Learn to make a right use of your eyes; the commonest things are worth looking at—even stones, weeds, and the most familiar animals. There are none of the intellectual or moral faculties, the exercise of which does not lead to enjoyment; hence it is that happiness bears so little reference to station.

Twenty years ago I made my first acquaintance with a life of labour and restraint. I was but a slim, loose-jointed boy at the time, fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and, woful change! I was now going to work in a quarry. I was going to exchange all my day-dreams for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil!

That first day was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my brother-workmen. That night, arising out of my employment, I found I had food enough for thought without once thinking of the unhappiness of a life of labour.

In the course of the day I picked up a nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture, one of the volutes, apparently, of an Ionic capital. Was there another such curiosity in the whole world? I broke open a few other nodules of similar appearance, and found that there might be. In one of these there were what seemed to be scales of fishes and the impressions of a few minute bivalves, prettily striated; in the centre of another there was actually a piece of decayed wood.

Of all nature's riddles these seemed to me to be at once the most interesting and the most difficult to expound. I treasured them carefully up, and was told by one of the workmen to whom I showed them that there was a part of the shore, about two miles further to the west, where curiously shaped stones, somewhat like the heads of boarding-pikes, were occasionally picked up, and that in his father's day the country people called them thunderbolts. Our first half-holiday I employed in visiting the place where the thunderbolts had fallen so thickly, and found it a richer scene of wonder than I could have fancied even in my dreams.

My first year of labour came to a close, and I found that the amount of my happiness had not been less than in the last of my boyhood. My knowledge had increased in more than the ratio of former seasons; and as I had acquired the skill of at least the common mechanic, I had fitted myself for independence.

My curiosity, once fully awakened, remained awake, and my opportunities of gratifying it have been tolerably ample. I have been an explorer of caves and ravines, a loiterer along sea-shores, a climber among rocks, a labourer in quarries. My profession was a wandering one. I remember passing direct, on one occasion, from the wild western coast of Ross-shire, where the Old Red Sandstone leans at a high angle against the prevailing quartz of the district, to where, on the southern skirts of Midlothian, the Mountain Limestone rises amid the coal. I have resided one season on a raised beach of the Moray Firth. I have spent the season immediately following amid the ancient granite and contorted schists of the central Highlands. In the north I have laid open by thousands the shells and lignites of the oolite; in the south I have disinterred from their matrices of stone or of shale the huge reds and tree ferns of the carboniferous period.

I advise the stone-mason to acquaint himself with geology. Much of his time must be spent amid the rocks and quarries of widely separated localities, and so, in the course of a few years he may pass over the whole geological scale, and this, too, with opportunities of observation at every stage which can be shared with him by only the gentleman of fortune who devotes his whole time to study. Nay, in some respects, his advantages are superior to those of the amateur, for the man whose employments have to be carried on in the same formation for months, perhaps years, enjoys better opportunities of arriving at just conclusions. There are formations which yield their organisms slowly to the discoverer, and the proofs which establish their place in the geological scale more tardily still. I was acquainted with the Old Red Sandstone of Ross and Cromarty for nearly ten years ere I ascertained that it is richly fossiliferous; I was acquainted with it for nearly ten years more ere I could assign its fossils to their exact place in the scale. Nature is vast and knowledge limited, and no individual need despair of adding to the general fund.