From: jdac (jdac@alphalink.com.au)
Date: Tue Jan 28 2003 - 16:51:42 EST
Good one Jack. From his use of "Catrboniferous" Livingstone accepted
the geological time scale, and had no time for folk science
explanations.
Jon
Jack Haas wrote:
> Greetings, I thought that you might get a chuckle from this writings
> of Scottish missionary/explorer/physican David Livingstone
> (1813-1873)Jack Haas ....In reading, every thing that I could lay my
> hands on was devoured except novels. Scientific works and books of
> travels
> were my especial delight; though my father, believing, with many of
> his time who ought to have known better, that the former
> were inimical to religion, would have preferred to have seen me poring
> over the "Cloud of Witnesses", or Boston's "Fourfold State"...In
> recognizing the plants pointed out in my first medical book, that
> extraordinary old work on astrological medicine, Culpeper's "Herbal",
> I had the guidance of a book on the plants of Lanarkshire, by Patrick.
> Limited as my time was, I found opportunities to scour the whole
> country-side, "collecting simples".....On one of these exploring tours
> we entered a limestone quarry --long before geology was so popular as
> it is now. It is impossible to describe the delight and wonder with
> which I began to collect the shells found in the carboniferous
> limestone which crops out in High Blantyre and Cambuslang. A
> quarry-man, seeing a little boy so engaged, looked with that pitying
> eye which the benevolent assume when viewing the insane. Addressing
> him with, "How ever did these shells come into these rocks?" "When
> God made the rocks, he made the shells in them," was the damping
> reply. What a deal of trouble geologists might have saved themselves
> by adopting the Turk-like philosophy of this Scotchman!
>
> From Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa; 1857
> By David Livingstone, LL.D., D.C.L.,
>
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