broken at last by Adam Sedgwick, the venerable Professor of Geology, who solemnly raised his clenched fist and brought it down upon the High Table, not with violence but with a concentrated tension of indignation, saying slowly, with an equal solemnity: "Confound their lymphatic souls."[181] As for the Observatory, the blow thoroughly roused it up; and ever since it has remained, both in material and moral equipment, amongst the foremost of the great Observatories of the world, where solid and useful work is continuously being done, while up-to-date instruments, methods, and records are never to seek. On one evening of each week during term time any member of the University may see the practical working of the place, and bring friends with him. [Footnote 181: The discovery of Neptune is by no means the only discovery the honour of which has been lost to Cambridge through that scientific temper of mind which is loth to publish investigations at an early stage of their verification. Months before Marconi introduced wireless telegraphy to the public it had been practised here by Professors Rutherford and Sir J. J. Thomson; the first serious messages being exchanged, over a distance of two miles, between the Cavendish Laboratory and the Observatory. At the same Laboratory the Roentgen rays were being investigated ere yet Roentgen became a household word. And long years before Bunsen and Kirchoff (in 1859) published the true explanation of Fraunhofer's dark lines in the solar spectrum, that explanation had been given to his pupils by yet another Cambridge Professor, Sir George Gabriel Stokes. Such indifference to mere fame reminds us of the old saying that an Oxford man looks as if all the world belonged to him, a Cambridge man as if he did not care whom it belonged to.] A mile further we reach the foot of the chalk slope which bounds the Cam valley. At this point lanes diverge to the right and left. The latter almost immediately brings us to Coton, a tiny village with a tiny, but most picturesque, fourteenth century church, having a (restored) Norman chancel, a pretty spire, and a yet prettier south doorway. There is, too, a massive rood screen, and a curious "palimpsest" Table of Commandments, the original sixteenth century lettering showing beneath repainted characters of the seventeenth century. Altogether the place is well worth the slight divergence needed to visit it, more especially as the lane between it and our road gives a view of Cambridge almost comparable to the prospect of "That sweet City, with her dreaming spires" which the Cumnor slopes (as Matthew Arnold sings) provide for Oxonians. Coton can also be reached from Cambridge by a delightful field path beneath overhanging oaks, which runs straight from Garret Hostel Bridge. Coton spire (as has been already mentioned) is the "objective" of the Trinity avenue, though the view has long been closed out by the growth of the branches.