More interesting to him than school was the British Museum collection of minerals, where he worked occasionally with his Jamieson’s Dictionary.  By this time he had a fair student’s collection of his own, and he increased it by picking up specimens at Matlock, or Clifton, or in the Alps, wherever he went, for he was not short of pocket-money.  He took the greatest pains over his catalogues, and wrote elaborate accounts of the various minerals in a shorthand he invented out of Greek letters and crystal forms.

Grafted on this mineralogy, and stimulated by the Swiss tour, was a new interest in physical geology, which his father so far approved as to give him Saussure’s “Voyages dans les Alpes” for his birthday in 1834.  In this book he found the complement of Turner’s vignettes, something like a key to the “reason why” of all the wonderful forms and marvellous mountain-architecture of the Alps.  He soon wrote a short essay on the subject, and had the pleasure of seeing it in print, in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History for March, 1834, along with another bit of his writing, asking for information on the cause of the colour of the Rhine-water.

He had already some acquaintance with J.C.  Loudon, F.L.S., H.S., etc., and he was on the staff of that versatile editor not long afterwards, and took a lion’s share of the writing in the Magazine of Architecture.  Meanwhile he had been introduced to another editor, and to the publishers with whom he did business for many a year to come.  The acquaintance was made in a curious, accidental manner.  His cousin Charles Richardson, clerk to Smith, Elder, and Co., had the opportunity of mentioning the young poet’s name to Thomas Pringle, editor of the “Friendship’s Offering” which John had admired and imitated.  Mr. Pringle came out to Herne Hill, and was hospitably entertained as a brother Scot, as not only an editor, but a poet himself—­not only a poet, but a man of respectability and piety, who had been a missionary in South Africa.  In return for this hospitality he gave a good report of John’s verses, and, after getting him to re-write two of the best passages in the last tour, carried them off for insertion in his forthcoming number.  He did more:  he carried John to see the actual Samuel Rogers, whose verses had been adorned by the great Turner’s vignettes.

After the pleurisy of April, 1835, his parents took him abroad again, and he made great preparations to use the opportunity to the utmost.  He would study geology in the field, and took Saussure in his trunk he would note meteorology:  he made a cyanometer—­a scale of blue to measure the depth of tone, the colour whether of Rhine-water or of Alpine skies.  He would sketch.  By now he had abandoned the desire to make MS. albums, after seeing himself in print, and so chose rather to imitate the imitable, and to follow Prout, this time with careful outlines on the spot, than to idealize his notes in mimic Turnerism.