Volcanic Islands

Excerpt-Only five years before, when listening to poor Professor Jameson's lectures on the effete Wernerianism, which at that time did duty for geological teaching, Darwin had found them "incredibly dull," and he declared that "the sole effect they produced on me was a determination never so long as I lived to read a book on Geology, or in any way to study the science."
What a contrast we find in the expressions which he makes use of in referring to Geological Science, in his letters written home from the "Beagle!" After alluding to the delight of collecting and studying marine animals, he exclaims, "But Geology carries the day!" Writing to Henslow he says, "I am quite charmed with Geology, but, like the wise animal between two bundles of hay, I do not know which to like best; the old crystalline group of rocks, or the softer and more fossiliferous beds." And just as the long voyage is about to come to a close he again writes, "I find in Geology a never-failing interest; as it has been remarked, it creates the same grand ideas respecting this world which Astronomy does for the Universe." In this passage Darwin doubtless refers to a remark of Sir John Herschel's in his admirable "Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy,"--a book which exercised a most remarkable and beneficial influence on the mind of the young naturalist.