The few days spent at Oxford were memorably pleasant. Buckland’s wit and enthusiasm glowed all his scientific sayings and doings, and he had a rare power of description, by which he could make even a dry enough subject fascinatingly interesting. Murchison heard one or two brilliant lectures from him, but what was of still more importance, he accompanied the merry professor and his students, mounted on Oxford hacks, to Shotover Hill, and for the first time in his life had a landscape geologically dissected before him. From that eminence his eye was taught to recognize the broader features of the succession of the oolitic rocks of England up to the far range of the Chalk Hills, and this not in a dull, text-book fashion, for Buckland, in luminous language, brought the several elements of the landscape into connection with each other, and with a few fundamental principles which have determined the sculpturing of the earth’s surface. His audience came to see merely a rich vale in the midst of fertile England, but before they quitted the ground, the landscape had been made to yield up to them, clear notions of the origin of springs and the principles of drainage. This was the very kind of instruction needed to fan the growing flame of Murchison’s zeal for science. He returned to town burning with desire to put his knowledge to some use by trying to imitate, no matter how feebly, the admirable way in which the Oxford professor had applied the lessons of the lecture-room to the elucidation of the history of hills and valleys. Murchison started with his wife in the middle of August, on a tour of nine weeks along the south coast, from the Isle of Wight into Devon and Cornwall. Taking a light carriage and a pair of horses, he made the journey in short stages, lingering for days at some of the more interesting or important geological localities. Driving, boating, walking, or scrambling, the enthusiastic pair signalized their first geological tour by a formidable amount of bodily toil.