Murchison was now to change his method of life completely, and the summer of 1824 saw the last of his rambles, wherever the rocks around him made no direct and urgent appeal to him. Bringing his wife to London, they rented a house in Montague Place, and Murchison began to attend scientific lectures, and especially those on geology, which was at that time much talked about. Hutton’s admirable views of the causes of the changes on the surface of the earth, and their possible comparison with those of the present day, was making progress, but was still antagonized by the notions of sudden convulsions and great underground movements. He went to the Geological Society, a young and ardent one, which had sprung into active work in spite of the opposition of the nursing mother of science, the Royal Society. With hearing lectures on science, scientific papers and discussions, attending evening soirées, and the opportunity of hearing and talking to men who had already made themselves famous, Murchison found enough fully to fill up his time, and to make London life a very different thing to him from what it had been in the old days, when he used to escape to town from the monotony of a country barrack. With his characteristic ardour, he had not completed his first winter’s studies in geology before he longed to be off into the field to observe for himself. “My first real field work,” he says, “began under Professor Buckland, who having taken a fancy to me as one of his apt scholars, invited me to visit him at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and attend one or two of his lectures. This was my true launch. Travelling down with him in the Oxford coach, I learned a world of things before we reached the Isis, and, amongst other things, I enjoyed a lecture on crustacea, given whilst he pulled to pieces on his knees, a cold crab, bought at a fishmonger’s shop at Maidenhead, where he usually lunched as the coach stopped. “On repairing from the Star inn to Buckland’s domicile, I never can forget the scene which awaited me. Having, by direction of the janitor, climbed up a narrow staircase, I entered a long corridor-like room (now all destroyed), which was filled with rocks, shells, and bones in dire confusion, and, in a sort of sanctum at the end was my friend, in his black gown, looking like a necromancer, sitting on the sole rickety chair not covered with some fossils, and cleaning out a fossil bone from the matrix.”