A good friend of mine wanted to see me advanced in life, and so sent word to me if I would come and deliver a lecture on geology before the board of their college, he thought I would get a professorship. It was an Old School Presbyterian college. I prepared myself without regard to expense. I went down to Boston, and saw Prof. Hitchcock and Prof. Agassiz, and I hunted through the books, and I made a lecture. You ought to have heard it. [Laughter.] You would not be here now. [Laughter.] It treated of all the cosmogonies; it went through primal chaos, through the azoic, the silurian, the devonian, and the various strata, until it introduced man on the scene. It took me two hours. It was a cold night, and they all shivered, and looked as if they wished I was in some warmer place. I did not get the professorship, and the college died the next year. [Laughter.] Write all you can, it tends to make you accurate and fixes your knowledge, and then do with it as a good old Methodist presiding elder told me once on a time. We had planted some melons and cucumbers, but he did not seem to be pleased with them. He told the folks that we had splendid cucumbers, and he knew how to fix them: slice them up thin, put them in water, turn off the water, and put on pepper and salt, and throw them out of the window. That is what you are to do with the written lectures, read, write, and, as Emerson says, get drunk with your subject. You will not hear anything more of the dryness of your subject. It makes a subject dry because a man has not got enough of it in him to see the great connecting principles in him, so that he is aroused and sees the ultimate of it as well as the details, and the ultimate of it is man. It is for man and made for man. This being created here and being put in the midst of all of these things, is to make him greater, grander, and bring him into relation with the truth, and then by symmetrizing his being and aligning him with God in the great work of God, that is to make of this globe a heaven.