My life : a record of events and opinions - Wallace-online.org

SURVEYING IN BEDFORDSHIRE 59lay them out perfectly straight. We started workafter an early breakfast, and usually took with us agood supply of bread-and-cheese and half a gallonof beer, and about one o'clock sat down under theshelter of a hedge to enjoy our lunch. My brotherwas a great smoker, and always had his pipe afterlunch (and often before breakfast), and, of course, thechain-bearer smoked too. It therefore occurred tome that I might as well learn the art, and for somedays I tried a few whiffs. Then, going a little too far,I had such a violent attack of headache and vomitingthat I was cured once and for ever from any desireto smoke, and although I afterwards lived for someyears among Portuguese and Dutch, almost all ofwhom are smokers, I never felt any inclination to tryagain.It was while living at Barton that I obtained myfirst information that there was such a science asgeology, and that chalk was not everywhere foundunder the surface, as I had hitherto supposed. Mybrother, like most land-surveyors, was something of ageologist, and he showed me the fossil oysters of thegenus Gryphaea and the Belemnites, which we hadhitherto called "thunderbolts," and several otherfossils which were abundant in the chalk and gravelaround Barton. While here I acquired the rudimentsof surveying and mapping, as well as calculating areason the map by the rules of trigonometry. This Ifound very interesting work, and it was renderedmore so by a large volume belonging to my brothergiving an account of the great Trigonometrical Surveyof England, with all the angles and the calculatedlengths of the sides of the triangles formed by thedifferent stations on hilltops, and by the variouschurch spires and other conspicuous objects. The