This led to my becoming an active minister of that denomination after I came to the United States, and for seven years I was as active as I knew how to be in the discharge of this work.

In my desire to make my preaching effective and helpful I studied unweariedly and took up astronomy, buying a three inch telescope, and soon became elected to Fellowship in the Royal Astronomical Society of England.

Then I took up microscopy, buying the fine microscope from Dr.Dallinger, President of the Royal Microscopical Society, with which he had done his great work on bacilli--and which, by-the-way, was later stolen from me--and I was speedily elected a Fellow of that distinguished Society.

A little later Joseph Le Conte, the beloved geologist of the California State University, took me under his wing, and set me to work solving problems in geology, and I was elected, in due time, a Fellow of the Geological Society of England, a society honored by the counsels of such men as Tyndall, Murchison, Lyell, and all the great geologists of the English speaking world.
Just before I left the ministry, in 1889, I took up, with a great deal of zeal, the study of the poet Browning.

I had already yielded to the charm of Ruskin--whom I personally knew--and Carlyle, but Browning opened up a new world of elevated thought to me, in which I am still a happy dweller.