Explore "On Bio-Geology. An Address Given to the Scientific Society of Winchester" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I am not sure that the subject of my address is rightly chosen. I am not / sure that I ought not to have postponed a question of mere natural / history, to speak to you, as scientific men, on the questions of life and / death, which have been forced upon us by the awful warning of an / illustrious personage's illness; of preventible disease, its frightful / prevalency; of the 200,000 persons who are said to have died of fever / alone since the Prince Consort's death, ten years ago; of the remedies; / of drainage; of sewage disinfection and utilisation; and of the / assistance which you, as a body of scientific men, can give to any effort / towards saving the lives and health of our fellow-citizens from those / unseen poisons which lurk like wild beasts couched in the jungle, ready / to spring at any moment on the unsuspecting, the innocent, the helpless. / Of all this I longed to speak: but I thought it best only to hint at it, / and leave the question to your common sense and your humanity; taking for / granted that your minds, like the minds of all right-minded Englishmen, / have been of late painfully awakened to its importance. It seemed to me / almost an impertinence to say more in a city of whose local circumstances / I know little or nothing. As an old sanitary reformer, practical, as / well as theoretical, I am but too well aware of the difficulties which / beset any complete scheme of drainage, especially in an ancient city like / this; where men are paying the penalty of their predecessors' ignorance; / and dwelling, whether they choose or not, over fifteen centuries of / accumulated dirt.
And, therefore, taking for granted that there is energy and intellect / enough in Winchester to conquer these difficulties in due time, I go on / to ask you to consider, for a time, a subject which is growing more and / more important and interesting, a subject the study of which will do much / towards raising the field naturalist from a mere collector of / specimens -- as he was twenty years ago -- to a philosopher elucidating some / of the grandest problems. I mean the infant science of Bio-geology -- the / science which treats of the distribution of plants and animals over the / globe, and the causes of that distribution.