Charles Lyell and modern geology

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BONNEY

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THE CENTURY SCIENCE SERIES

Edited by SIR HENRY E. ROSCOB, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.

OHAELES LYELL
AND MODEEN GEOLOGY

The Century Science Series.

EDITED BY

SIR HENRY E. ROSCOE, D.C.L., F.R.S., M.P.
John Dalton and the Rise of Modem Chemistry.

By Sir Henry E. Roscoh, F.R.S.

Major Rennell, F.R.S. , and the Rise of English
Geography.

By Clements R. Markham, C. B., F.R.S., President
of the Royal Geographical Society.

Justus von Liebig : his Life and Work (1803-1873).

By W. A. Shenstone, F.I.C, Lecturer on Chemistry in
Clifton College.

The Herschels and Modern Astronomy.

By Agnes M. Clerke, Author of "A Popular History
of Astronomy during the 19th Century," &c.

Charles Lyell and Modem Geology.

By Rev. Professor T G. Bonney, F.R.S.

Clerk Maxwell and Modem Physics.

By R. T. Glazebrook, F.R.S., Fellow of Trinity College,

Cambridge.

In Preparation.

Michael Faraday: his Life and Work.

By Professor Silvanus P. Thompson, F.R.S.

Humphry Davy.

By T. E. Thorpe, F.R.S., Principal Chemist of the
Government Laboratories.

Pasteur : his Life and Work.

By M. Armand Ruffer, M.D., Director of the British
Institute of Preventive Medicine.

Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species.

By Edward B. Poulton, M.A., F.R.S., Hope Professor
of Zoology in the University of Oxford.

Hermann von Helmholtz.

By A. W. RucKEK, F.R.S., Professor of Physics n the
Royal College of Science, London.

CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited, London; Paris &'Melbottrne

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THE CENTURY SCIENCE SERIES

Charles Lyell

AND MODERN GEOLOGY

PEOF. T. G. BONNEY

D.Sc, LL.D., V.U.S., ETC.

laeto fork
MACMILLAN & CO,

1895

9z

PREFACE.

The life of Charles Lyell is singularly free from
" moving accidents by flood and field." Though he
travelled much, he never, so far as can be ascertained,
was in danger of life or limb, of brigand or beast. At
home his career was not hampered by serious diffi-
culties or blocked by formidable obstacles ; not a few
circumstances were distinctly favourable to success.
Thus his biography cannot offer the reader either the
excitement of adventure, or the interest of an un-
wearied struggle with adverse conditions. But for
all that, as it seems to me, it can teach a lesson of
no little value. Lyell, while still a young man, deter-
mined that he would endeavour to put geology — then
only beginning to rank as a science — on a more sound
and philosophical basis. To accomplish this purpose,
he spared no labour, grudged no expenditure, shrank
from no fatigue. For years he was training himself
by observation and travel ; he was studiously aiming
at precision of thought and expression, till " The
Principles of Geology" had been completed and
published. But even then, though he might have
counted his work done, he spared no pains to make
it better, and went on at the task of improvement till
the close of his long life.

My chief aim, in writing this little volume, has
been to bring out this lesson as strongly and as clearly

Hanover College Library

48227

VI PREFACE.

as possible. I have striven to show how Charles Lyell
studied, how he worked, how he accumulated observa-
tions, how each journey had its definite purposes.
Accordingly, I have often given his words in prefer-
ence to any phrases of my own, and have quoted
freely from his letters, diaries, and books, because I
wished to show exactly how things presented them-
selves to his eyes, and how ideas were maturing in
his mind. Kegarded in this light, Lyell's life becomes
an apologue, setting forth the beneficial results of
concentrating the whole energy on one definite
object, and the moral grandeur of a calm, judicial,
truth-seeking spirit.

In writing the following pages I have, of course,
mainly drawn upon the " Life, Letters, and Journals,"
edited by Mrs. Lyell; but I have also made use of
his books, especially the " Principles of Geology," and
the two tours in North America. I am under occa-
sional obligations to the excellent life, contributed by
Professor G. A. J. Cole to the " Dictionary of National
Biography," and have to thank my friend Professor
J. W. Judd for some important details which he had
learnt through his intimacy with the veteran geolo-
gist. He also kindly lent the engraving (executed in
America from a daguerreotype) which has been copied
for the frontispiece of this volume.

T. G. BONNEY.

CONTENTS

Chapter I. — Childhood and Schooldays

II. — Undergraduate Days

III. — The Growth of a Purpose

IV. — The Purpose Developed and Accomplished

V. — The History and Place in Science of the
"Principles of Geology"

VI. — Eight Years of Quiet Progress

VII. — Geological Work in North America

VIII.— Another Epoch of Work and Travel

IX.— Steady Progress ....

X.— The Antiquity of Man

XI. — The Evening of Life

„ XII. — Summary

PAGE

9

19

73
100
^^T^30\

152
168
184
189
206

Charles Lyell

AND MODEEN GEOLOGY.
CHAPTER I.

CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLDAYS.

Caledonia, stem and wild, may be called " meet
mirse" of geologists as well as of poets. Among
the most remarkable of the former is Charles Lyell,
who was born in Forfarshire on November 14th, 1797,
at Kinnordy, the family mansion. His father, who
also bore the name of Charles,^ was both a lover
of natural history and a man of high culture.
He took an interest at one time in entomology,
but abandoned this for botany, devoting himself
more especially to the study of the cryptogams.
Of these he discovered several new species, besides
some other plants previously unknown in the
British flora, and he contributed the article on Lichens
to Smith's " EngHsh Botany." More than one species
was named after him, as well as a genus of mosses,
Lyellia, which is chiefly found in the Himalayas.
Later in his life, science, on the whole, was supplanted
by literature, and he became engrossed in the study
of the works of Dante, of some of whose poems f he

* Bom 1767, died 1849 (also son of a Charles Lyell); educated at
St. Andrew's and at St. Peter's College, Cambridge, where he pro-
ceeded to the degree of B.A. in 1791 and M.A. in 1794.

t In 1835, the Canzoniere, including the Vita Nuova and Convito ;
a second edition was published in 1842 ; in 1845 a translation of the
Lyrical Poems of Dante.

10 CHARLES LYELL

published translations and notes. Thus the geologist
and author is an instance of " hereditary genius."

Charles was the eldest of a family of ten — three
sons and seven daughters, all of whom grew up. Their
mother was English, the daughter of Thomas Smith,
of Maker Hall in Yorkshire, "a woman of strong
sense and tender anxiety for her children's welfare."
" The front of heaven," as Lyell has written in a frag-
ment of autobiography, was not " full of fiery shapes
at his nativity," but the season was so exceptionally
warm that his mother's bedroom-window was kept
open all the night — an appropriate birth-omen for the
geologist, who had a firmer faith than some of his
successors in the value of work in the open air. He
has put on record only two characteristics of his
infancy, and as these can hardly be personal recollec-
tions, we may assume them to have been sufficiently
marked to impress others. One if not both was
wholly physical. He was very late in cutting his
teeth, not a single one having appeared in the first
twelvemonth, and the hardness of his infant gums
caused an old wife to prognosticate that he would be
edentulous. Also, his lungs were so vigorous and
so habitually exercised that he was pronounced " the
loudest and most indefatigable squaller of all the
brats of Angus."

The geologist who so emphatically affirmed the
necessity of travel, early became an unconscious prac-
tiser of his own precept. When he was three months
old his parents went from Kinnordy to Inveraray,
whence they journeyed to the south of England, as
far as Ilfracombe. From this place they removed
to Weymouth and thence to Southampton. More

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 11

than a year must have been thus spent, for their
second child — also a son — was born at the last-named
town. Mr. Lyell, the father, now took a lease of
Bartley Lodge, on the New Forest — some half-dozen
miles west of Southampton, where the family lived
for twenty-eight years. His mother and sisters also
left Kinnordy, and rented a house in Southampton.
Their frequent excursions to Bartley Lodge, as Lyell
observes, were always welcome to the children, for
they never came empty-handed.

Kinnordy, however, was visited from time to time
in the summer, and on one of these occasions, when
Charles was in his fifth year, some of the family had
a narrow escape. They were about a stage and a half
from Edinburgh; the parents and the two boys in
one carriage ; two nursemaids, the cook, and the two
youngest children, sisters, in a chaise behind. The
horses of this took fright on a narrow part of the
road and upset the carriage over a very steep slope.
Fortunately all escaped unhurt, except one of the
maids, whose arm was cut by the splintered glass.
The parents ran to the rescue. . " Meanwhile, Tom and
I were left in the carriage. We thought it fine
pastime, and I am accused of having prompted Tom
to assist in plundering the pockets of the carriage
of all the buns and other eatables, which we de-
molished with great speed for fear of interruption."^
This adventure, however, was not quite his earliest
reminiscence ; for that was learning the alphabet
when he was about three years old.

Charles was kept at home till he had nearly com-
pleted his eighth year, when he was sent with his

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 3.

12 CHARLES LYELL

brother Tom to a boarding-school at Kingwood. The
master was the Rev. R. S. Davies ; the lads were some
fifty in number, the Lyells being about the youngest.
They seem, however, not to have been ill-treated,
though their companions were rather a rough lot, and
they were petted by the schoolmaster's daughter.
The most sensational incident of his stay at Ring-
wood was a miniature " town and gown " row, a set
fight between the lads of the place and of the school,
from which, however, the Lyells were excluded as too
young to share in the joys and the perils of war.
But the fray was brought to a rather premature con-
clusion by the joint intervention of foreign powers —
the masters of the school and the tradesmen of the
town. In those days smuggling was rife on the south
coast, and acting the part of revenue officers and
contrabandists was a favourite school game ; doubt-
less the more popular because it afforded a legitimate
pretext for something like a fight. The fear of a
French invasion also kept this part of England on
the qui vive, and Lyell well remembered the excite-
ment caused by a false alarm that the enemy had
landed. He further recollected the mingled joy
and sorrow which were caused by the victory of
Trafalgar and the death of Nelson.

The brothers remained at Ringwood only for
about two years, for neither the society nor the
instruction could be called first-class ; and they were
sent, after a rather long holiday at home, to another
school of about the same size, but much higher
character, in Salisbury. The master, Dr. Radcliffe,
an Oxford man, was a good classical scholar, and his
pupils came from the best families in that part of

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 18

England. In one respect, tlie young Lyells found it
a change for the worse. At Ringwood they had an
ample playground, close to which was the Avon,
gliding clear and cool to the sea, a delightful place for
a bathe. In a few minutes' walk from the town they
were among pleasant lanes ; in a short time they
could reach the border of the New Forest. But at
Salisbury the school was in the heart of the town,
its playground a small yard surrounded by walls, and,
as he says, " we only walked out twice or three times
in a week, when it did not rain, and were obliged to
keep in ranks along the endless streets and dusty
roads of the suburbs of a city. It seemed a kind of
prison by comparison, especially to me, accustomed
to liberty in such a wild place as the New Forest."
One can sympathise with his feehngs, for a procession
of schoolboys, walking two and two along the streets
of a town, is a dreary spectacle.

But an occasional holiday brought some comfort,
for then they were sent on a longer excursion. The
favourite one was to the curious earthworks of Old
Sarum, then in its glory as a " rotten borough," one
alehouse, with its tea-gardens attached, sending two
members to Parliament. On these excursions more
liberty seems to have been permitted. The boys
broke up the large flints that lay all about the
ground, to find in them cavities lined with chalce-
dony or drusy crystals of quartz. But the chief
interest centred around a mysterious excavation in
the earthwork, "a deep, long subterranean tunnel,
said to have been used by the garrison to get water
from a river in the plain below." To this all
new-comers were taken to listen to the tale of its

14 CHARLES LYELL

enormous depth and subterranean pool. Then, when
duly overawed, they felt their hats fly off their heads
and saw them rolling out of sight down the tunnel.
An interval followed of blank dismay, embittered,
no doubt, by dismal anticipations of what would
probably happen when they got back to the school-
house. Then one of the older boys volunteered to
act the sybil and lead the way to the nether world.
Of course they " regained their felt and felt what they
regained" — literally, for the hole was dark enough,
though we may set down the " many hundred
yards " (which Lyell says that he descended before
he recovered his lost hat) as an instance of the
permanent effect of a boyish illusion on even a
scientific mind.

But the restrictions of Salisbury made the liberty
of the New Forest yet more dear. Bartley was an
ideal home for boys. It was surrounded by meadows
and park-like timber. A two-mile walk brought
the lads to Eufus Stone, and on the wilder parts of
the Forest. There they could ramble over undulating
moors, covered with heath and fern, diversified by
marshy tracts, sweet with bog-myrtle, or by patches
of furze, golden in season with flowers ; or they could
wander beneath the shadows of its great woods of
oak and beech, over the rustling leaves, among the
flickering lights and shadows, winding here and there
among tufts of holly scrub, always led on by the hope
of some novelty — a rare insect fluttering by, a lizard
or a snake gliding into the fern, strange birds circling
in the air, a pheasant or even a woodcock springing
up almost under the feet. The rabbits scampered to
their holes among the furze; a fox now and again

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 15

stole silently away to cover, or a stag — for the deer
had not yet been destroyed — was espied among the
tall brake. Those, too, it must be remembered, were
the days when boys got their holidays in the prime
of the summer, at the season of haymaking and of
ripe strawberries. They were not kept stewing in hot
school-rooms all through July, until the flowers are
nearly over and the bright green of the foliage is
dulled, until the romance of the summer's youth has
given place to the dulness of its middle age. In
these days it is our pleasure to do the right thing in
the wrong place — a truly national characteristic. We
all — ^young and old — toil through the heat and the
long days, and take holiday when the autumn is
drawing nigh and Nature writes " Ichabod " on the
beauty of the waning year.

At Salisbury, Lyell had two new experiences — the
sorrows of the Latin Grammar and the joys of a
bolster-fight. But his health was not good ; a severe
attack of measles in the first year was followed in
the second by a general " breakdown," with symptoms
of weakness of the lungs. So he was taken home
for three months to recruit. This was at first a wel-
come change from the restrictions of Salisbury ; but,
as his lessons necessarily were light, he began to
mope for want of occupation ; for, as he says, " I was
always most exceedingly miserable if unemployed,
though I had an excessive aversion to work unless
forced to it." So he began to collect insects — a
pursuit which, as he remarks, exactly suited him, for
it was rather desultory, gave employment to both
mind and body, and gratified the "collecting" in-
stinct, which is strong in most boys. He began with

16 CHARLES LYELL

the lepidoptera, but before long took an interest m
other insects, especially the aquatic. Fortunately his
father had been for a time a collector, and possessed
some good books on entomology, from the pictures in
which Charles named his captures. This was, of
course, an unscientific method, but it taught him to
recognise the species and to know their habits. There
are few better localities for lepidoptera, as every col-
lector knows, than the New Forest, and some of the
schoolboy's " finds " afterwards proved welcome to si
well known an entomologist as Curtis. But when
Charles returned to school he had to lay aside, for a
season, the new hobby ; for in those days a schoolboy's
interest in natural history did not extend beyond
birds'-nesting, and his little world was not less, per-
haps even more frank and demonstrative than now,
in its criticism of any innovation or peculiarity on the
part of one of its members.

The school at Salisbury appears to have been a
preparatory one, so before very long another had to
be sought. Mr. Lyell wished to send his two boys to
Winchester, but found to his disappointment that
there would not be a vacancy for a couple of years ;
so after instructing them at home for six months,
he contented himself with the Grammar School at
Midhurst, in Sussex, at the head of which was one
Dr. Bayley, formerly an under-master at Winchester.
Charles, now in his thirteenth year, found this, at
first, a great change. The school contained about
seventy boys, big as well as little, and its general
system resembled that of one of the great public
schools. He remarks of this period of his life : "What-
ever some may say or sing of the happy recollections

AND MODERN GEOLOGY.

17

of their scliooldays, I believe the generahty, if they
told the truth, would not like to have them over
again, or would consider them as less happy than
those which follow." He was not the kind of boy to
find the life of a public school very congenial.
Evidently he was a quietly-disposed lad, caring more
for a country ramble than for games ; perhaps a little
old-fashioned in his ways ; not pugnacious, but pre-
ferring a quiet life to the trouble of self-assertion.
So, in his second half-year, when he was left to shift
entirely for himself, his life was " not a happy one,"
for a good deal of the primeval savage lingers in the
boys of a civilised race. It required, as he said, a
good deal to work him up to the point of defending
his independence ; thus he was deemed incapable of
resistance and was plagued accordingly. But at last
he turned upon a tormentor, and a fight was the
result. It was of Homeric proportions, for it lasted
two days, during five or six hours on each, the com-
batants being pretty evenly matched; for though
Lyell's adversary was rather the smaller and weaker,
he knew better how to use his fists. Strength at the
end prevailed over science, though both parties were
about equally damaged. The vanquished pugilist
was put to bed, being sorely bruised in the visible
parts. Lyell, whose hurts were mostly hidden, made
light of them, by the advice of friends, but he
owns that he ached in every bone for a week, and
was black and blue all over his body. Still he had not
fought in vain, for, though the combat won him little
honour, it delivered him from sundry tormentors.

The educational system of the school stimulated
his ambition to rise in the classes. " By this feeling/'

18 CHARLES LYELL

lie says, " mucli of my natural antipathy to work, and
extreme absence of mind, was conquered in a great
measure, and I acquired habits of attention which,
however, were very painful to me, and only sustained
when I had an object in view." There was an annual
speech-day, and Charles, on the first occasion, ob-
tained a prize for his performance. "Every year
afterwards," he continues, "I received invariably a
prize for speaking, until high enough to carry off the
prizes for Latin and English original composition.
My inventive talents were not quick, but to have any
is so rare a qualification that it is sure to obtain a boy
at our great schools (and afterwards as an author)
some distinction." Evidently he gave proofs of
originality beyond his fellows ; since he won a prize
for English verse, though he had written in the metre
of the " Lady of the Lake " instead of the ordinary ten-
syllabic rhyme. On another occasion he commemor-
ated, in his weekly Latin copy, the destruction of the
rats in a neighbouring pond, writing in mock heroics,
after the style of Homer's battle of the frogs and mice.
The school, hke all other collections of boys, had
its epidemic hobbies. The game of draughts, coupled
unfortunately with gambling on a small scale, was
followed by chess, and that by music. To each of
these Charles was more or less a victim, and his
progress up the school was not thereby accelerated.
Birds'-nesting also had a turn in its season. His love
for natural history made him so keen in this pursuit
that he became an expert chmber of trees. But his
schooldays on the whole were uneventful, and he went
to Oxford at a rather early age, his brother Tom having
already left Midhurst in order to enter the Navy.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 19

CHAPTER IT.

UNDERGRADUATE DAYS.

Lyell matriculated at Exeter College, and appears to
have begun residence in January, 1816 — that is, soon
after completing his eighteenth year. At Oxford,
though not a "hard reader," he was evidently far
from idle, and wrote for some of the University prizes,
though without success. Several of his letters to his
father have been preserved. In these he talks about
his studies, mathematical and classical; criticises
Coleridge's '' Christabel," and praises Kirke White's
poetry; describes the fritillaries blossoming in the
Christchurch meadows, and refers occasionally to
political matters. The letters are well expressed, and
indicate a thoughtful and observant mind. While
yet a schoolboy he had stumbled upon a copy of
Bakewell's "Geology" in his father's Hbrary, which had
so far awakened his interest that in the earlier part
of his residence at Oxford he attended a course of
Professor Buckland's lectures, and took careful notes.
The new study is briefly mentioned in a letter, dated
July 20th, 1817. This is written from Yarmouth,
where he is visiting Mr. Dawson Turner, the well-
known antiquarian and botanist. He states that, on
his way through London, he went to see the elephant
at Exeter Change, Bullock's Museum, and FranciUon's
collection of insects. At Norwich also he saw more
insects, the cathedral, and some chalk pits, in which he
found an " immense number of belemnites, echinites,

20 CHARLES LYELL

and bivalves." He was also greatly interested by
the fossils in Dr. Arnold's collection at Yarmouth,
particularly by the "alcyonia" found in flints."^ A
few days later he again dwells on geology, and specu-
lates shrewdly on the formation of the lowland around
Yarmouth and the ancient course of the river. In
one paragraph a germ of the future " Principles " may
be detected. It runs thus :

"Dr. Arnold and I examined yesterday the pit which is
dug out for the foundation of the Nelson monument, and
found that the first bed of shingle is eight feet down. Now
this was the last stratum brought by the sea ; all since was
driven up by wind and kept there by the ' llest-harrow ' and other
X)lants. It is mere sand. Therefore, thirty-five years ago the
Deens were nearly as low as the last stratum left by the sea ;
and as the wind would naturally have begun adding from the
very first, it is clear that within fifty years the sea flowed over
that part. This, even Mr. T. allows, is a strong argument in
favour of the recency of the changes. Dr. Arnold surprised
me by telling me that he thought that the Straits of Dover were
formerly joined, and that the great current and tides of the
North Sea being held back, the sea flowed higher over these
parts than now. If he had thought a little more he would
have found no necessity for all this, for all those towns on this
eastern coast, which have no river god to stand their friend,
have necessarily been losing in the same proportion as Yar-
mouth gains — viz. Cromer, Pakefield, Dunwich, Aldbo rough,
etc., etc. With Dunwich I believe it is Fuit Ilium, f

Evidently Lyell by this time had become deeply
interested in geology, for his journal contains several
notes made on the road from London to Kinnordy,
and records, during his stay there, not only the
capture of insects, but also visits to quarries, and
the discovery of crystallised sulphate of barytes at
Kirriemuir and elsewhere.

* Probably they were fossil sponges.

f Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 43.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 21

Towards the end of his first long vacation he
travelled, in company with two friends of his own
age, from Forfarshire across by Loch Tay, Tyndrum,
and Loch Awe, to the western coast at Oban, whence
they visited Staffa and lona. With the caves in the
former island he was greatly impressed ; and he noted
the columns of basalt, which, he said, were "pen-
tagonal " in form, quite different from the " four-
square" jointing of the red granite at the south-west
end of Mull. With the ruins of lona he was a little
disappointed, for he wrote in his diary that "they
are but poor after all." The wonders of Fingal's
Cave appealed to his poetical as well as to his geo-
logical instincts, for in October, after his return to
Oxford, he sent to his father some stanzas on this
subject which are not without a certain merit. But
the covering letter was mostly devoted to geology.

The next year, 1818, marked an important step
in his education as a geologist, for he accompanied
his father, mother, and two eldest sisters on a Con-
tinental tour. Starting early in June, they drove in
a ramshackle carriage, which frequently broke down,
from Calais to Paris, along much the same route as
the railway now takes ; they visited the sights of the
capital, not forgetting either the artistic treasures
of the Louvre or the collections of the Jardin des
Plantes, particularly the fossils of the " Paris basin."
Thence they journeyed by Fontainebleau and Auxerre
to Dole, and he makes careful and shrewd notes on
the geology, for the carriage travelling of those days,
though slow, was not without its advantages — and in
crossing the Jura he observes the nodular flints in
a limestone, and the contrast between these moun-

22 CHARLES LYELL

tains and the Grampians of liis native land. As they
descended the well-known road which leads down
to Gex in Switzerland, they had the good fortune
to obtain a splendid view of Mont Blanc and the
Alps. From Geneva, where he notes the " most
peculiar deep blue colour of the Khone," they visited
Chamouni by the usual route. At this time the
principal glaciers were advancing rather rapidly. The
Glacier des Bossons, he remarks, " has trodden down
the tallest pines with as much ease as an elephant
could the herbage of a meadow. Some trunks are
still seen projecting from the rock of ice, all the heads
being embodied in this mass, which shoots out at the
top into tall pyramids and pinnacles of ice, of beau-
tiful shapes and a very pure white. ... It has
been pressed on not only through the forest, but over
some cultivated fields, which are utterly lost."*

At Chamouni, Lyell made the most of his time,
for in three days he walked up to the Col de Balme,
climbed the Brevent, and made his first glacier expe-
dition, to the well-known oasis among the great fields
of snow and ice which is called the Jardin. Every-
where he notes the flowers, which at that season were
in full beauty; and the insects, capturing "no less
than seven specimens of that rare insect, Papilio
Afolloy\ He feels all the surprise and all the
delight which thrills the entomologist from the
British Isles when he first sets foot on the slopes
of the higher Alps, and sees in abundance the rarities
of his own country, besides not a few new species. But

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 69.

t Now generally called Pamassius Apollo ; but very likely he
captured more than one species of the genus.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 23

Lyell does not neglect the rocks and minerals, or the
red snow, or the wonders of the ice world. Chamouni,
we are told, was then "perfectly inundated with
English," for fifty arrived in one day. The previous
year they had numbered one thousand out of a total
of fourteen hundred visitors. Since then, times and
the village have changed.

Returning to Geneva, the party travelled by
Lausanne and Neuchatel to Bale, and then followed
the picturesque route along the river, by the tu-
multuous rapids of Laufenburg and the grand falls
of the Rhine, to Schaff hausen, whence they turned off
to Zurich. Here he writes of the principal inn that
it " partook more than any of a fault too common
in Switzerland. They have their stables and cow-
houses under the same roof, and the unavoidable con-
sequences may be conceived, till they can fall in with
a man as able — as ' Hercules to cleanse a stable.' "

From Zurich they crossed the Albis to Zug. The
other members of the party went direct to Lucerne,
but Lyell turned aside to visit the spot where twelve
years previously an enormous mass of pudding-stone
had come crashing down from the Rossberg, had
destroyed the village of Goldau, and had converted a
great tract of fertile land into a wilderness of broken
rock. He diagnosed correctly the cause of the
catastrophe, and then ascended the Rigi. Here he
spent a fiea-bitten night at the Kulm Hotel, but was
rewarded by a fine sunset and a yet finer sunrise.

At Lucerne he rejoined his relatives, and they
drove together over the Brunig Pass to Meyringen.
From this place they made an excursion to the
Giessbach Falls, and saw the Alpbach in flood after

24 CHARLES LYELL

a downpour of rain. This, like some other Alpine
streams, becomes at such times a raging mass of
liquid mud and shattered slate, and Lyell carefully
notes the action of the torrent under these novel
circumstances, and its increased power of transport.
Parting from his relatives at the Handeck Falls, he
walked up the valley of the Aar to the Grimsel
Hospice, where he passed the night, and the next
morning crossed over into the valley of the Rhone to
the foot of its glacier, and then walked back again to
Meyringen. He remarks that on the way to the
Hospice " we passed some extraordinary large bare
planks of granite rock above our track, the appearance
of which I could not account for." This is not
surprising, for he had not yet learnt to read the
" handwriting on the wall " of a vanished glacier. Its
interpretation was not to come for another twenty
years, when these would be recognised as perhaps
the finest examples of ice-worn rocks in Switzerland.
Lyell was evidently a good pedestrian ; for the very
next day he walked from Meyringen over the two
Scheideggs to Lauterbrunnen, ultimately joining his
relatives at Thun, from which town they went on to
Berne, where they were so fortunate as to see, from
the well-known terrace, the snowy peaks of the
Oberland in all the beauty of the sunset glow.

Then they journeyed over the pleasant uplands to
Vevay, and so by the shore of the Lake of Geneva
and the plain of the Rhone valley to Martigny,
turning aside to visit the salt mines near Bex. They
reached Martigny a little more than seven weeks
after the lake, formed in the valley of the Dranse by the
forward movement of the Gietroz Glacier, had burst

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 25

its icy barrier, and they saw everywhere the ruins
left by the rush of the flood. The road as they
approached Martigny was even then, in some places,
under water ; in others it was completely buried be-
neath sand. The lower storey of the hotel had been
filled with mud and debris, which was still piled up
to the courtyard. Lyell went up the valley of the
Dranse to the scene of the catastrophe, and wrote in
his journal an interesting description of both the
effects of the flood and the remnants of the ice-
barrier. Before returning to Martigny he also walked
up to the Hospice on the Great St. Bernard, and then
the whole party crossed by the Simplon Pass into
Italy, following the accustomed route and visiting
the usual sights till they arrived at Milan.

The next stage on their tour — and this must have
been in those days a little tedious — brought them to
Venice. The Campanile Lyell does not greatly admire,
and of St. Mark's he says rather oddly, " The form is
very cheerful and gay " ; but on the whole he is much
impressed with the buildings of Venice, and especially
with the pictures. On their return they went to
Bologna, and then crossed the Apennines to Florence.
Everywhere little touches in the diary indicate a
mind exceptionally observant — such as notes on the
first firefly, the fields of millet, the festooned vines
seen on the plain, or the pecuhar sandy zone on the
northern slopes of the hills. He also mentions that
shortly after crossing the frontier of Tuscany they
passed near Coviliajo, " a volcanic fire " which pro-
ceeded from a neighbouring mountain.* This they

♦ Probably it was a bituminous shale which had become ignited,
as was the case at Ringstead Bay, Dorset, with the Kimeridge clay.
The same often happens with the " banks " of coal-pits.

26 CHARLES LYELL

intended to visit on their return. But at Florence
tlie diary ends abruptly, for the note-book which
contained the rest of it was unfortunately lost.

We have given this summary of Ly ell's journal in
some detail, but even thus it barely suffices to convey
an adequate idea of the cultured tastes, wide interests,
and habits of close and accurate observation disclosed
by its pages. It shows, better perhaps than any
other documents, the mental development of the
future author of the " Principles of Geology." Few
things, as he journeys, escape his notice ; he describes
facts carefully and speculates but little. As he
wanders among the Alpine peaks, he makes no
reference to convulsions of the earth's crust ; as he
views the ruin wrought by the Dranse, he says naught
of deluges.

The travellers got back to England in September,
and at the end of the Long Vacation Lyell returned
to Oxford. There he remained till December, 1819,
when he proceeded to the degree of Bachelor of Arts,
obtaining a second class in Classical Honours. Con-
sidering that he had never been a " hard reader," and
that he appears to have spent much of his " longs " in
travel — a practice which, though good for general
education, counts for little in the schools — the position
indicates that he possessed rather exceptional abilities
and a good amount of scholarship. Though Oxford
had been unable to bestow upon him a systematic
training in science, she had given a definite bias to
his inclination, and had fostered and cultivated a
taste for literature which in the future brought forth
a rich fruitage.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 27

CHAPTER III.

THE GROWTH OF A PURPOSE.

Shortly after he had donned the bachelor's hood
Lyell came to London, was entered at Lincoln's Inn,
and studied law in the office of a special pleader.
Science was not forsaken, for in March, 1819, he was
elected a Fellow of the Geological Society, and about
the same time joined the Linnean Society. Before
very long his legal studies were interrupted. \IIis eyes
became so weak that a complete rest was prescribed j;
accordingly, in the autumn of 1820, he accompanied
his father on a journey to Rome. During this but
little was done in geology, for the travellers spent
almost all their time in towns.

On his return, so far as can be inferred from the
few letters which have been published, Lyell continued
to work at geology, and at Christmas, 1821, was
seeking in vain for freshwater fossils in the neighbour-
hood of Bartley. In the spring of 1822 he investi-
gated the Sussex coast from Hastings to Dungeness,
and studied the effects of the sea at Winchelsea and
Rye. In the early summer of 1823 he visited the
Isle of Wight, and in a letter to Dr. Mantell suggested
that the " blue marl ""^ in Compton Chine is identical
with that at Folkestone, and compared the under-
lying strata with those in Sussex, clearing up some
confusions, into which earlier observers had fallen,

* Now recognised as gault. The identification named above was
soon found to be correct.

28 CHARLES LYELL

about the Wealden and Lower Greensand. He was
now evidently beginning to get a firm grip on the
subject — a thing far from easy in days when so Httle
had been ascertained — and this year he read his first
papers to the Geological Society — one, in January,
written in conjunction with Dr. Man tell, " On the Lime-
stone and Clay of the Ironsand in Sussex " ; the other
in June, " On the Sections presented by Some Forfar-
shire Eivers." Also, on February 7 th, he was elected
one of the secretaries of that Society, an office which
he retained till 1826. This is a pretty clear proof that
he had begun to make his mark among geologists,
and was well esteemed by the leaders of the science.

No sooner had he returned from the Isle of Wight
than he started for Paris, going direct from London
to Calais, in the Earl of Liverpool steam packet, " in
11 hours ! 120 miles ! engines 80 horse-power for 240
tons." In the last letter written to his father before
quitting England he refers to our neighbours across
the Channel in the following terms : " My opinion of
the French people is that they are much too corrupt
for a free government and much too enlightened for
a despotic one." That was written full seventy years
ago ; perhaps even now, were he alive, he would not
be disposed to withdraw the words.

At Paris he was well received by Cuvier, Humboldt,
and other men of science, attended lectures at the
Jardin du Roi, and saw a good deal of society. His
letters home often contain interesting references to
matters political and social — such as, for example, the
following remarks which he heard from the mouth of
Humboldt : " You cannot conceive how striking and
ludicrous a feature it is in Parisian society at present

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 29

that every other man one meets is either minister or
ex-minister. So frequent have been the changes.
The instant a new ministry is formed, a body of
sappers and miners is organised. They work indus-
triously night and day. At last the ministers find
that they are supplanted by the very arts by which a
few months ago they raised themselves to power." ^
Lyell more than once expresses a regret, which,
indeed, was generally felt in scientific circles, that
Cuvier had lost caste by "dabbling so much with
the dirty pool of politics"; and himself works away at
geology, studying the fossils of the Paris basin in the
museums, and visiting the most noted sections in
order to add to his own collection and observe the
relations of the strata.

He returned to England towards the end of Sep-
tember, and no^ dpubt spent the next few months in
working at geology as far as his eyes, which were
becoming stronger, permitted. The summer of 1824
was devoted to geological expeditions. In the earlier
part he took Mons. Constant Prevost, one of the leaders
of geology in France, to the west of England. Their
special purpose was to examine the Jurassic rocks, but
they extended their tour as far as Cornwall. After-
wards Lyell went to Scotland, where he was joined by
Professor Buckland ; and the two friends, after spending
a few days in Ross-shire, went to Brora, and then
returned from Inverness by the Caledonian canal.
This gave them the opportunity of examining the
famous " parallel roads " of Glenroy, which were the
more interesting because they had already seen some-

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 127. Some sentences (for
the sake of brevity) are omitted from the quotation.

30 CHARLES LYELL

thing of the kind near Cowl, in Ross-shire. Afterwards
they went up Glen Spean and crossed the mountains
to Blair Athol, visiting the noted locality in Glen Tilt,
where Hutton made his famous discovery of veins
of granite intrusive in the schists of that valley, and
then they made their way to Edinburgh. Here much
work was done, both among collections and in the
field, and it was lightened — as might be expected in a
place so hospitable — by social pleasures and friendly
converse with some of the leading literary and
scientific men.

Four years of comparative rest and frequent change
of scene had produced such an improvement in the
condition of his eyes that he was able to resume his
study of the law, and was called to the Bar in 1825.
For two years he went on the Western Circuit, having
chambers in the Temple and getting a little business.
But, as his correspondence shows, geology still held
the first place in his affections,^ and papers were read
to the Society from time to time. Among them one of
the most important, though it was not printed in their
journal, described a dyke of serpentine which cut
through the Old Red Sandstone on the Kinnordy
estate.t But, as is shown by a letter to his sister,
written in the month of November, he had not lost
his interest in entomology. At that time the collectors
of insects in Scotland were very few in number, and
the English lepidopterists welcomed the specimens

* He was also elected a Fellow of the Eoyal Society in 1826.

t It appeared in the Edin. Journ. Sci., iii. (1825) p. 112, being
his first actual publication. Its importance consisted in proving that
serpentine was, or rather had been, an igneous rock. If proper atten-
tion had been paid to it, fewer mistaken 'statements and hypotheses
would have attained the dignity of appearing in print.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 31

which Lyell and his sister had caught in Forfarshire.
The family had left Bartley Lodge in the earlier part
of the year and had settled in the old home at
Kinnordy. About this time also Lyell began to con-
tribute to the Quarterly Review, writing articles on
educational and scientific topics. This led to a friend-
ship with Lockhart, who became editor at the end of
1825, and gave him an introduction to Sir Walter
Scott. A Christmas visit to Cambridge introduced
him to the social life of that university.

In the spring of 1827 his ideas as to his future
work appear to have begun to assume a definite form.
To Dr. Mantell"^ he writes that he has been reading
Lamarck, and is not convinced by that author's
theories of the development of species, " which would
prove that men may have come from the ourang-
outang," though he makes this admission : " After all,
what changes a species may really undergo ! How
impossible will it be to distinguish and lay down a line,
beyond which some of the so-called extinct species have
never passed into recent ones!" The next sentence is
significant: "That the earth is quite as old as he
[Lamarck] supposes has long been my creed, and I
will try before six months are over to convert the
readers of the Quarterly to that heterodox opinion." f
A few lines further on come some sentences which

* Dr. Gideon A. Mantell, a surgeon by profession, at that time
resident in Lewes, who made valuable contributions to the geology
of South-East England, and was also distinguished for his popular
lectures and books. He died in 1852.

f Probably referring to an article on Scrope's " Geology of Central
Franco," in which he shows that he fully accepted the Huttonian
doctrine of interpreting the geology of past ages by reference to the
causes still at work. It appeai-ed in the Quarterly Review, Oct. 1827,
vol. xxxvi. p. 437.

32 CHARLES LYELL

indicate that the leading idea of the " Principles " was
even then floating in his mind. " I am going to write
in confirmation of ancient causes having been the
same as modern, and to show that those plants and
animals, which we know are becoming preserved now,
are the same as were formerly." Hence, he proceeds
to argue, it is not safe to infer that because the remains
of certain classes of plants or animals are not found in
particular strata, the creatures themselves did not then
exist. " You see the drift of my argument," he con-
tinues ; " ergo, mammalia existed when the oolite and
coal, etc., were formed." ^ The first of these quotations
strikes the keynote of modern geology as opposed to
the older notions of the science; what follows sug-
gests a caution, to which Darwin afterwards drew more
particular attention, though he turned the weapon
against Lyell himself, viz. "the imperfection of the
geological record."

A letter to his father, also written in the month
of April, shows that, while he has an immediate
purpose of opening fire on MacCuUoch,! who had
bitterly attacked in the Westminster Review Scrope's
book upon Volcanoes, he has " come to the conclu-
sion that something of a more scientific character
is wanted, for which the pages of a periodical are
not fitted." He might, he says, write an elemen-
tary book, like Mrs. Marcet's " Conversations on
Chemistry," but something on a much larger scale

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i, p. 169.

t Dr. John MacCulloch, author (among other works) of the
*' Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland." He was an excellent
geologist on the mineralogical side, but had little sympathj^ with
paheontology or with the views to which Lyell inclined. He died
in 1835.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 33

evidently is floating on his mind. In this letter
also he discusses his prospects with his father, who
apparently had suggested that he should cease from
going on circuit; and argues that he gains time by
appearing to be engaged in a profession, for " friends
have no mercy on the man who is supposed to have
some leisure time, and heap upon him all kinds of un-
remunerative duties." Lyell was not devoid of Scotch
shrewdness, and doubtless early learnt that when it is
all work and no pay men see your merits through a
magnifying glass, but when it comes to the question of
a reward, they shift the instrument to your defects.

Gradually the plan of the future book assumed a
more definite shape in his mind, as we can see from
a letter to Dr. Man tell early in 1828. About this
time also Murchison, with whom he was planning
a long visit to Auvergne,^ appears among his corre-
spondents. Herschel f tells him how he and Faraday
had melted in a furnace "granite into a slag-like
lava"; Hooker J begs him to notice the connection
between plants and soils as he travels; his father
urges him to take his clerk with him to act as
amanuensis and save his eyes, which might be
affected by the glare of the sun, and to help him
generally in collecting specimens and carrying the
barometers. Early in the month of May he started
for Paris, where he met Mr. and Mrs. Murchison, and
the party left for Clermont Ferrand in a " light open

* This district had been already explored by Mr. G. P. Scrope,
the first edition of whose classic work, "The Volcanoes of Central
France," was published in 1826.

f Sir John F. W. Herschel, the second of the illustrious
astronomers of that name.

X Sir W. J. Hooker.
0

34 CHARLES LYELL

carriage, with post horses." As far as Mouhns the
roads were bad, but as they receded from Paris and
approached the mountains " the roads and the rates
of posting improved, so that we averaged nine miles
an hour, and the change of horses [was] almost as
quick as in England. The politeness of the people
has much delighted us, and they are so intelligent
that we get much geology from them." Clermont
Ferrand became their headquarters for some time,
and Lyell's letters to his father are full of notes on
the geology of the district, one of the most interesting
in Europe. The great plateau which rises on the
western side of the broad valley of the Allier is
studded with cones and craters — some so fresh that
one might imagine their last eruptions to have
happened during the decline of the Koman empire ; ^
others in almost every stage of dissection by the
scalpels of nature. Streams of lava, still rough and
chnkery, have poured themselves over the plateau
and have run down the valleys till they have reached
the plain of the AUier, while huge fragments of flows
far larger and more ancient have been carved by
the action of rain and rivers into natural bastions,
and now may be seen resting upon stratified marls,
crowded with freshwater shells and other organisms, —
the remnants of deposits accumulated in great lakes,
which had been already drained in ages long before
man appeared on the earth.

* Certain passages in a letter of Sidonius Apollinaris, Bishop of
Clermont, dated about 460 a.d., and in the works of Alcimus Avitus,
Archbishop of Vienne, about half a century later, have been inter-
preted as referring to volcanic eruptions somewhere in Auvergne.
This, however, is disputed by many authorities. (Sec Geological
Magazine^ 1865, p. 241.)

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 35

The two geologists worked hard, for who could be
idle in such a country as this ? They often began at
six in the morning and rested not till evening, though
the summers are hot in Auvergne, and this one was
exceptionally so. Lyell writes home, " I never did
so much real geology in so many days." Mrs.
Murchison also was "very diligent, sketching, label-
ling specimens, and making out shells, in which last
she is a valuable assistant." Sometimes they went
farther afield, visiting Pontgibaud and the gorge of
the Sioul, where they found a section previously
unnoticed, which gave them a clear proof that a lava-
stream had dammed up the course of a river by
flowing down into its valley, and had converted the
part above into a lake. This again had been drained
as the river had carved for itself a new channel,
partly in the basalt, partly in the underlying gneiss.
Here, then, was a clear proof that a river could cut
out a path for itself, and that forces still in operation
were sufficient, given time enough, to sculpture the
features of the earth's crust. Notwithstanding the hard
work, the outdoor life suited Lyell, who writes that his
" eyes were never in such condition before." Murchi-
son, too, was generally in good health, but would have
been better, according to his companion, if he had
been a little more abstemious at table and a worse
customer to the druggist.

From Clermont Ferrand the travellers moved on
to the Cantal, where they investigated the lacustrine
deposits beneath the lava-streams all around Aurillac.
These deposits exhibited on a grand scale the pheno-
mena which Lyell had already observed on a small
one in the marls of the loch at Kinnordy. Thence

36 CHARLES LYELL

they went on througli tlie Ardeche and examined the
" pet volcanoes of the Vivarrais," as they had been
termed by Scrope. The Miirchisons now began to
suffer from the heat, for it was the middle of July.
Nevertheless, they still pushed on southwards, and
after visiting the old towns of Gard and the Bouches
du Rhone, went along the Riviera to Nice, having
been delayed for a time at Frejus, where Murchison
had a sharp attack of malarious fever. It was an
exceptionally dry summer, and the town in con-
sequence was malodorous ; so after a short halt, they
moved on to Milan and at last arrived at Padua,
working at geology as they went along, and con-
stantly accumulating new facts. From Padua they
visited Monte Bolca, noted for its fossil fish, the
Vicentin, with its sheets of basalt, and the Euganean
Hills, where the " volcanic phenomena [were] just
Auvergne over again." Then the travellers parted,
the Murchisons turning northward to the Tyrol,
while Lyell continued on his journey southward to
Naples and Sicily.

Some four months had now been spent, almost
without interruption, in hard work and the daily
questioning of Nature. The results had surpassed
even Lyell's anticipations ; the}^ had thrown light
upon the geological phenomena of the remote past,
and cleared up many difficulties which, hitherto, had
impeded the path of the investigators. On the coast
of the Maritime Alps Lyell had found huge beds
of conglomerate, parted one from another by lami-
nated shales full of fossils, most of which were iden-
tical with creatures still living in the Mediterranean.
These masses attained a thickness of 800 feet, and

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 37

were displayed in the sides of a valley fifteen miles
in length. They supplied a case parallel with that
of the conglomerates and sandstones of Angus, and
indicated that no extraordinary conditions — no de-
luges or earth shatterings — had been needed in
order to form them. If the torrents from the Mari-
time Alps, as they plunged into the Mediterranean,
could build up these masses of stratified pebbles,
why not appeal to the same agency in Scotland,
though the mountains from which they flowed, and
the sheet of water into which they plunged, have
alike vanished ? The great flows of basalt — some
fresh and intact, some only giant fragments of yet
vaster masses — the broken cones of scoria, and the
rounded hills of trachyte in Auvergne, had supphed
him with links between existing volcanoes and the
huge masses of trap with which Scotland had made
him familiar ; while these basalt flows — modern in
a geological sense, but carved and furrowed by the
streams which still were flowing in their gorges —
showed that rain and rivers were most potent, if not
exclusive, agents in the excavation of valleys. " The
whole tour," thus he wrote to his father, " has been
rich, as I had anticipated (and in a manner which
Murchison had not), in those analogies between exist- "7
ing nature and the effects of causes in remote eras
which it will be the great object of my work to
point out. I scarcely despair now, so much do these
evidences of modern action increase upon us as we
go south (towards the more recent volcanic seat of
action) of proving the positive identity of the causes
now operating with those of former times." "^

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 199.

88 CHARLES LYELL

One important result of this journey was a con-
joint paper on the excavation of valleys in Auvergne,
which was written before the friends parted, and was
read at the Geological Society in the later part of
the year. Lyell writes thus to one of his sisters
from Kome, on his return thither, in the following
January "^ : —

" My letters from geological friends are very satis-
factory as to the unusual interest excited in the
Geological Society by our paper on the excavation of
valleys in Auvergne. Seventy persons present the
second evening, and a warm debate. Buckland and
Greenough furious, contra Scrope, Sedgwick, and
Warburton supporting us. These were the first two
nights in our new magnificent apartments at Somerset
House." He adds, "Longman has paid down 500
guineas to Mr. Ure, of Dublin, for a popular work on
geology, just coming out. It is to prove the Hebrew
cosmogony, and that we ought all to be burnt in
Smithfield."

On the way to Naples, Lyell made several halts :
at Parma, Bologna, Florence, Siena, Viterbo, and
Kome ; visiting local geologists, studying their collec-
tions of fossil shells, keeping his eye more especially
on the relations which the species exhibited with the
fauna still existing in the Mediterranean, and losing
no opportunity of examining the ancient volcanic
vents and the crater lakes, which form in places such
remarkable features in the landscape. " The shells in
the travertine," he writes, " are all real species living in
Italy, so you perceive that the volcanoes had thrown
out their ash, pumice, etc., and these had become

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 238.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 39

covered witli lakes, and then the valleys had been
hollowed out, all before Rome was built, 2,500 years
and more ago."

On reaching Naples, he climbed Vesuvius, and
saw for the first time the lava-streams and piles of
scoria of a volcano still active ; while the wonderful
sections of the old crater of Somma furnished a link
between the living present and the remote past —
between Italy and Auvergne. He visited Ischia,
where another delightful surprise awaited him, for
on its old volcano, Monte Epomeo, he found, at a
height of 2,000 feet above the sea, marine shells
which belonged "to the same class as those in the
lower regions of Ischia." They were contained in a
mass of clay, and were quite unaltered. This was
a great discovery, for the existence of these fossils
" had not been dreamt of," and it showed that the land
had been elevated to this extent without any appre-
ciable change in the fauna inhabiting the Mediter-
ranean. Except for this, the island was "an admirable
illustration of Mont Dore." He made an excursion
also to the Temples of Psestum, wonderful from the
weird beauty of their ruins, on the flat plain between
the Apennines and the sea, but with interest geolo-
gical as well as archaeological, because of the blocks of
rough travertine with which their columns are built.
These he studied, and he visited the quarries from
which they were hewn. His letters frequently contain
interesting references to the tyranny of the Govern-
ment, "the inquisitorial suppression of all cultiva-
tion of science, whether moral or physical," the
idle, happy-go-lucky habits of the common people,
the prevalent mendicancy, universal dishonesty, and

40 > CHARLES LYELL

general corruption. One instance may be worth
quoting — it indicates the material with which
" United Italy " has had to deal. He wanted to pre-
pay the postage of a letter to England. The head
waiter at his hotel had said to him, " ' Mind, if it is
to England you only pay fifteen grains' (sous). I
thought the hint a trait of character, as they are all
suspicious of one another. The clerk demanded
twenty-five. I remonstrated, but he insisted, and,
rs he was dressed and had the manners of a gentle-
man, I paid. When I found on my return that I
had been cozened, I asked the head waiter, with
some indignation, ' Is it possible that the Government
officers are all knaves ? ' ' Sono Napolitani, Signer ;
la sua excellenza mi scusera, ma io sono Komano!'"^
The old proverb, what is bred in the bone will out
in the flesh, still holds good; but we may doubt
Avhether the standard of virtue is quite so high as the
speaker intimated in certain other provinces which
Piedmont has acquired at the price of the cradle of the
royal house and some of the best blood of the nation.
At Naples, Lyell was detained longer than he had
expected, waiting for a Government steamer. " There
was," he says, " no other way of going, for the pirates
of Tripoli have taken so many Neapolitan vessels that
no one who has not a fancy to see Africa will venture."
But he arrived in Sicily before the end of November,
and succeeded in reaching the summit of Etna on the
first of December. He was only just in time, for
the next day bad weather set in, snow fell heavily,
and the summit of the mountain became practically
inaccessible for the winter. But as it was, he was

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 215.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 41

able to examine carefully another active volcano,
the phenomena of which corresponded with those of
Vesuvius, though on a grander scale. From Nicolosi,
where he was delayed a day or two by the weather,
Lyell went along the Catanian plain to Syracuse and
southward to the extreme point of the island, Cape
Passaro. From this headland he followed the coast
westward as far as Girgenti, and then struck across the
island in an easterly direction till he came within
about a day's journey of Catania, and then he turned
off in a north-westerly direction through the island to
Palermo. In this zigzag journey, which occupied about
five weeks, he succeeded in obtaining a good general
knowledge of the geology of the eastern part of the
island ; he examined many sections and collected many
fossils, thus obtaining material for an accurate classifi-
cation of the little-known deposits of the Sicilian low-
land, and in addition he lost no opportunity of studying
the relations of the volcanic masses, wherever they oc-
curred, to the sedimentary strata. As his letters show,
bad roads, poor fare, and miserable accommodation
made the journey anything but one of pleasure ; but
its results, as he wrote to Murchison, " exceeded his
warmest expectations in the way of modern analogies."
By December 10th he was once more back in the
Bay of Naples. As he returned through Rome he
availed himself of the opportunity of examining the
travertines of Tivoli, which, as he remarked, presented
more analogies with those of Sicily than of Auvergne,
and welcomed the news that the bones of an elephant
had been found in an alluvial deposit which lay
beneath the lava of an extinct Tuscan volcano. His
notes also prove that he was beginning to see his way

42 CHARLES LYELL

to the classification of the extensive deposits of sand
and marl in Italy and Sicily, which were subsequently
recognised as belonging to the Pliocene era.

Early in February Lyell reached Geneva on his
homeward journey, after crossing the Mont Cenis, and
by the 19 th was back in Paris among his geological
friends, " pumping them," as he says, and being well
pumped in return. Some of them, he finds, " have
come by most opposite routes to the same conclusions as
myself, and we have felt mutually confirmed in our
views, although the new opinions must bring about an
amazing overthrow in the systems which we were
carefully taught ten years ago." The accurate know-
ledge of Deshayes, one of the most eminent concholo-
gists of that day, was especially helpful in bringing his
field work in Italy and Sicily into clear and definite
order, and he obtained from him a promise of tables of
more than 2,000 species of Tertiary shells, from which
(he writes to his sister Caroline, who shared his ento-
mological tastes) " I will build up a system on data
never before obtained, by comparing the contents of
the present with more ancient seas, and the latter with
each other." ^

By the end of February he is back in London and
at the Geological Society, defending his views on the
constancy of Nature's operations — views which seemed
rank heresy to the older school, who sought to solve
every difficulty by a convulsion, and were fettered
in their interpretation of the records of geology by
supposed theological necessities. In April Lyell writes
thus to Dr. Mantell t :—

* Life, Letters, and Journals, voL i. p. 252.
t Ibid.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 43

" A splendid meeting [at the Geological Society] last night,
Sedgwick in the chair. Conybeare's paper on Valley of the
Thames, directed against Messrs. Lyell and Murchison's
former paper, was read in part. Buckland present to defend
the * Dihivialists,' as Conybeare styles his sect ; and us he
terms ' Fluvialists.' Greenough assisted us by making an
ultra speech on the importance of modern causes. . . .
Murchison and I fought stoutly, and Buckland w^as very
piano. Conybeare's memoir is not strong by any means.
He admits three deluges before the Noachian ! and Buck-
land adds God knows how many catastropJies besides ; so
we have driven them out of the Mosaic record fairly."

Again, in the month of June, he writes to the
same correspondent in regard to the second portion
of the same paper "^ : —

" The last discharge of Conybeare's artillery, served by the
great Oxford engineer against the Fluvialists, as they are
pleased to term us, drew upon them on Friday a sharp volley
of musketry from all sides, and such a broadside, at the finale,
from Sedgwick as was enough to sink the 'Reliquiae Dilu-
vianse ' t for ever, and make the second volume shy of venturing
out to sea."

In a third letter, written to Dr. Fleming, he gives
a similar account of the battle between the Dihi-
vialists and Fluviahsts, and concludes with these
words X : —

" I am preparing a general work on the younger epochs of
the earth's history, which I hope to be out with next spring.
I begin with Sicily, which has almost entirely risen from the
sea, to the height of nearly 4,000 feet, since all the present
animals existed in the Mediterranean ! "

* m supra, p. 253.

t " Keliquiiu Diluvianae, or Observations on Organic Eemains
contained in Caves, Fissures, and Diluvial Gravel, and on other
Geological Phenomena attesting the Action of an Universal Deluge."
By Professor Buckland. 1823.

X Ut supra, p. 264.

CHARLES LYELL

CHAPTER IV.

THE PURPOSE DEVELOPED AND ACCOMPLISHED.

The summer of 1829 was spent at Kinnordy, when
tlie quarries of Kirriemuir and the neighbouring dis-
tricts were visited from time to time, the workmen
being encouraged to look out for the remains of
plants and the scales of fishes. Murchison, however,
was again travelling on the Continent, and, in com-
pany with Sedgwick, was exploring the geological
structure of the Eastern Alps and the basin of the
Danube. They appear to have kept up communi-
cation with Ly ell, who hears with satisfaction of the
results of their work, since these cannot fail to keep
Murchison sound in the Uniformitarian faith and to
complete the conversion of Sedgwick."^

" The latter" (Lyell writes to Dr. Fleming) "was astonished
at finding what I had satisfied myself of everywhere, that in
the more recent tertiary groups great masses of rock, like
the different members of our secondaries, are to be found.
They call the grand formation in which they have been work-
ing sub-Apennine. Vienna falls into it. I suspect it is a
shade older, as the sub-Apennines are several shades older
than the Sicilian tertiaries. They have discovered an im-
mensely thick conglomerate, 500 feet of compact marble-like
limestone, a great thickness of oolite, not distinguishable from
Bath oolite, an upper red sand and conglomerate, etc. etc., all
members of that group zoologicallj'^ sub-Apennine. This is
glorious news for me. ... It chimes in well with making
old red transition mountain limestone and coal, and as much
more as we can, one epoch, for when Nature sets about build-
ing in one place, she makes a great batch there. . . . All the

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol, i. p. 255.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 45

freshwater, marine, and other groups of the Paris basin are
one epoch, at the farthest not more separated than the upper
and lower chalk."

A letter to the same correspondent, written nearly
three weeks later, at the end of October, and after
his return to London, refers to the consequences of
this journey.^ ,

"Sedgwick and Miirchison are just returned, the former
full of magnificent views. Throws overboard all the diluvian
hypothesis ; is vexed he ever lost time about such a complete
humbug; says he lost two years by having also started a
Wernerian. He -says primary rocks are not primary, but, as
Button supposed, some igneous, some altered secondary.
Mica schist in Alps lies over organic remains. No rock in the
Alps older than lias.f Much of Buckland's dashing paper on
Alps wrong. A formation (marine) found at foot of Alps,
between Danube and Ehine, thicker than all the English
secondaries united. Munich is in it. Its age probably be-
tween chalk and our oldest tertiaries. I have this moment
received a note from C. Prevost by Murchison. He has heard
with delight and surprise of their Alpine novelties, and, allud-
ing to them and other discoveries, he says : ' Comme nous
allons rire de nos vieilles idees ! Comme nous allons nous
moquer de nous-memes ! ' At the same time he says : 'If in
your book you are too hard on us on this side the Channel,
we will throw at you some of old Brongniart's " metric and
peponary blocks " which float in that general and universal
diluvium, and have been there " depuis le grand jour qui a
separe, d'une manifere si tranchee, les temps ante-des-temps
Post-Diluviens." ' "

* Ut supra, p. 256.

t Further work has not verified some of these statements. There
can be no question that a great deal of rock in the Alps is much
older than even the Trias. The apparent superposition of crystalline
schists to rocks with fossils is due to over-folding or over-thrust
faulting — i.e. the schists are the older rocks. Though the Secondary
rocks of the Alps have undergone, in places, some modification and
mineral changes, these arc very different fi-om the metamorphism of
those crystalline schists which have a stratified origin.

46 CHARLES LYELL

A short time afterwards, in a letter addressed to
Mr. Leonard Horner, Lyell declines to become a

y candidate for the Professorship of Geology and
Mineralogy at the London University,"^ which was
first opened in the autumn of the previous year. Evi-
dently he considers himself to be too fully occupied,
for he writes to Dr. Mantell on December 5th that
his book has taken a definite shape.t " I am bound
hand and foot. In the press on Monday next with my
work, which Murray is going to publish — 2 vols. —
the title, ' Principles of Geology : being an Attempt
to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Sur-
face by Reference to Causes now in Operation.' The
first volume will be quite finished by the end of the
month. The second is, in a manner, written, but will
require great recasting. I start for Iceland by the
end of April, so time is precious." The process of
incubation was continued throughout the winter. On
February 3rd, 1830, he had corrected the press as
far as the eightieth page, getting on slowly, but with

.^ satisfaction to himself. "How much more difficult
it is," he remarks, " to write for general readers
than for the scientific world; yet half our savants
think that to write popularly would be a condescen-
sion to which they might bend if they would." He fully
expects that the publication of his book will bring
a hornet's nest about his head, but he has determined
that, when the first volume is attacked, he will waste
no money on pamphleteering, but will work on
steadily at the second volume, and then, if the book

* Now " University College," London, having been incorporated
by Royal Charter under that title in November, 1836.
t Ut suprdf p. 258.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 47

is a success, at the second edition, for "controversy
is interminable work." He felt now that the facts of
nature were on his side, and his conclusions right in
the main; so, like most strong men, he adopted the
same course as did the founder of Marischal College,
Aberdeen, and wrote over the door of his study,
" Lat them say."

The plan of a summer tour in Iceland fell through ;
so did another for a long journey from St. Petersburg
by Moscow to the Sea of Azof, to be followed by an
examination of the Crimea and the Great Steppe, and. a
return up the Danube to Vienna ; but by the middle
of June the first volume of the " Principles" was nearly
finished ; and in a letter to Scrope,^ to whom advance
sheets of the book had been forwarded, in order that
he might review it in the Qvbartevly, Lyell explains
concisely the position which he has taken in regard to
cosmology and the earth's history.

" Probably there was a beginning — it is a metapliysical
question, worthy a theologian — probably there will be an end.
Species, as you say, have begun and ended — but the analogy is
faint and distant. Perhaps it is an analogy, but all I say is,
there are, as Hutton said, 'no signs of a beginning, no prospect
of an end.' Herschel thought the nebulae became worlds.
Davy said in his last book, ' It is always more probable that
the new stars become visible, and then invisible, and pre-
existed, than that they are created and extinguished.' So I
think. All I ask is, that at any given period of the past, don't
stop inquiry when puzzled by refuge to a beginning, which
is all one with ' another state of nature,' as it appears to me.
But there is no harm in your attacking me, provided you
point out that it is the proof I deny, not the probability of a
beginning. Mark, too, my argument, that we are called upon
to say in each case, ' Which is now most probable, my ignorance

♦ Life, Letters, and Jouraals, vol. i, pp. 269-271^

Hanover College bbrary

4R227

48 CHARLES LYELL

of all possible efifects of existing causes,' or that 'the beginning'
is the cause of this puzzling phenomenon ? "

In other parts of the letter he refers to his theory
of the dependence of the climate of a region upon the
geography, not only upon its latitude, but also upon
the distribution of land and sea, and that of the
coincidence of time between zoological and geographi-
cal changes in the past, as the most novel parts of the
book ; stating also that he has been careful to refer to
all authors from whom he has borrowed, and that to
Scrope himself he is under more obligation, so far as
he knows, than to any other geologist. The con-
cluding words also are interesting : —

" I conceived the idea five or six years ago, that if ever the
Mosaic geology could be set down without giving offence, it
would be in an historical sketch, and you must abstract mine
in order to have as little to say as possible yourself. Let them
feel it, and point the moral."

The last-named difficulty, to which Lyell refers
in another part of this letter, was undoubtedly one of
the most formidable " rocks ahead" in the path of his
new book. Up to that time the progress of geology
had been most seriously impeded by the supposed
necessity of making its results harmonise with the
Mosaic cosmogony. It was assumed as an axiom that
the opening chapters of Genesis were to be understood
in the strict literal sense of the words, and that to
admit the possibility of misconceptions or mistakes in
matters wholly beyond the cognisance of the writers,
was a denial of the inspiration of Scripture, and was
rank blasphemy. A large number of persons — among
whom are the great mass of amateur theologians, to-
gether with some experts — are always very prone to

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 49

assume tlie meaning of certain fundamental terms to
be exactly that which they desire, and then to pro-
ceed deductively to a conclusion as if their ques-
tionable postulates were axiomatic truths. They
further assume, very commonly, that the possession of
theological knowledge — scanty and superficial though
it may be — enables them to dispense with any study
of science, and to pronounce authoritatively on the
value of evidence which they are incapable of weigh-
ing, and of conclusions which they are too ignorant to
test. Being thus, in their own opinion, infallible, a
freedom of expression is, for them, more than permis-
sible, which, in most other matters, would be gene-
rally held to transgress the limits of courtesy and to
trespass on those of vituperation. Lyell had perceived
that little real progress could be made till geologists
were free to look facts in the face and to follow their
guidance to whatever conclusions these might lead,
irrespective of supposed consequences; or that, in other
words, questions of science must be settled by induc-
tive reasoning from accurate observations, and not by
an appeal to the opinions of the men of olden time,
however great might be the sanctity of their charac-
ters or the honour due to their memories. Wisely,
however, he determined to prefer an indirect to a
direct method of attack, and to avoid, so far as was
possible, giving needlessly any cause of offence by
abruptness of statement or by intemperance of
language.

In deluges, the favourite resort of every " catas-
trophic " geologist, Lyell had long lost faith, and he
laughs in one of his letters at the idea of a French
geologist, that a sudden upheaval of South America

50 CHARLES LYELL

may have been the cause of the Noachian flood. To
the breaks in the succession of strata, a fact upon
which the catastrophists much relied, he attached
comparatively little value, insisting on their more or
less local character. In the records of the rocks he
finds no trace of a clean sweep of living creatures or
of anything like a general clearance of the earth's sur-
face, and no corroboration of the Mosaic cosmogony.
He is bent on interpreting the work of Nature in the
past by the work of Nature in the present, and not
by the writings of the Fathers, or even by the words
of Scripture itself.

Some time in the month of June the last sheet
of the " Principles " must have been sent to press ; for
on the 25th of that month Lyell writes from Havre
on his way to Bordeaux, through part of Normandy^
Brittany, and La Yendee. This journey took him, as
he says, "through some of the finest countries and
most detestable roads he ever saw." On this occasion
he was accompanied by a Captain Cooke, a commander
in the Royal Navy ; a man well informed, acquainted
with Spain (the end of their journey), a botanist, and
not wholly ignorant of geology — in short, an excellent
companion, whose only fault was being " a little too
fond of lagging a day for rest," even in places where
nothing is to be done. Writing from Bordeaux to a
sister, Lyell expresses a hope that at Bagneres de
Luchon he may hear whether his book is out."^ Two
passages in his letter are not without a more general
interest. One repeats a remark made to him by
D'Aubuisson, whom he describes as " a great gun of

* When he left the publisher had not decided whether it should
be issued at once or kept back till October.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 51

the old Wernerian school, who . . . thinks the interest
of the subject greatly destroyed by our new innova-
tion, especially our having almost cut mineralogy and
turned it into a zoological science."^ D'Aubuisson
also said, " We Catholic geologists flatter ourselves
that we have kept clear of the mixing of things sacred
and profane, but the three great Protestants, De Luc,
Cuvier, and Buckland, have not done so ; have they
done good to science or to religion ? No, but some say
they have to themselves by it." The other remark
is interesting in its reference to French politics,
seeing that it is dated on the 9th of July, 1830. It
runs thus t : —

" The quiet and perfect order and calmness that reigned at
Bourbon, Vendee, and Bordeaux and Toulouse during the
heat of the elections, aiford a noble example to us — never
were people in a greater state of excitement on political
grounds than the French at this moment, yet never in our
country towns were Assizes conducted with more seriousness
and quiet. There is no occasion to make the rabble drunk.
All the voters of the little colleges are of the rank of shop-
keepers at least, those of the highest are gentlemen— only
20,000 of them out of the 30 millions of French. They are
too many for such jobbing as in a Scotch county, and too inde-
pendent and rich to have the feelings of a mob."

Yet at the end of this month came the "three
days of July " ; " perfect order and calmness " were at
an end; Charles X. abdicated the throne, and the
Bourbons again became exiles from France.

From Toulouse Lyell and his companion journeyed
by the banks of the Ariege to the picturesque old

* D'Aubuisson, as time has shown, foresaw a real danger. The
neglect of, if not contempt for, mineralogy, which became con-
spicuous between the years 1840 and 1870, or thereabouts, seriously
impeded the progress of geology, at any rate in England,

f Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 276,

52 CHARLES LYELL

town of Foix, and from this place to Ax, a watering-
place on one of the tributaries to that river, in the
heart of the Pyrenees. His keen eye notes at once
the difference between the scenery of this chain and
that of the Alps. Apart from the different character
of the vegetation — the more luxuriant flora, the
extensive forests of beech and oak at elevations
where in Switzerland only the pines and larches
would flourish — the valleys are narrower, the moun-
tains more precipitous — the scenery, in short, is more
like that around Interlaken or in the valley of Lauter-
brunnen, without the lakes of the one or the grand
background of snowy peaks in the other. In the
Pyrenees the inferior height and the more southern
position of the chain diminishes the snowfields and
curtails the glaciers, so that the torrents run with
purer waters, like they do in the Alps about the
birthplace of the Po.

In order to acquire a clear idea of the structure
of the Pyrenees the travellers crossed from Ax to the
southern side of the watershed, though they still
remained on French territory; for here, in the
neighbourhood of Andorre, the frontier cuts off the
heads of one or two valleys which geographically
form part of Spain. Into this country they had
purposed to descend, but the obstacles interposed by
the reactionary jealousy of local Dogberries and the
possible risks from political complications were so great,
that they judged it wiser to abandon the attempt.
So the travellers separated for a time. Captain Cooke,
who feared the heat of the lower country, going east-
wards through the curious little mountain republic
of Andorre to Luchon; while Lyell, who seems to

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 53

have been proof against the sun, recrossed the water-
shed into the valley of the Tet and descended it to
Perpignan. Information obtained in this town en-
couraged him to go direct to Barcelona, where the
Captain-General, the Conde D'Espagne, a distinguished
soldier and diplomatist, gave him a courteous recep-
tion, and did everything in his power to smooth the
way for a visit to Olot, a region of extinct volcanoes,
which had been one of the chief ends of Lyell's
journey. The expedition was successful ; he did not
fall among thieves, and was only annoyed by the
tedious formalities and petty impertinences of the
local functionaries of northern Spain ; and he returned
to France by a pass on the eastern side of the Cani-
gou. He was not a little astonished, as might be
expected from the remarks already quoted, when he
found on arriving in that country that the reign of
the Bourbons and the priests was over, the tricolor flag
was hoisted on all the churches, and the royalist
officials had been replaced by the nominees of the
National Government.

The visit to Olot amply repaid him for the toil
and trouble of the journey. An account of the dis-
trict was inserted in the concluding volume of the
" Principles," which was afterwards incorporated into
the " Elements of Geology." The following summary
is quoted from a letter to Scrope, who had suggested
the visit, which was written from Luchon, where he
arrived a few days after his return into France ^ : —

" Like those of the Vivarais [the volcanoes of Catalonia]
are all, both cones and craters, subsequent to the existence of
the actual hills and dales, or, in other words, no alteration of pre-

♦ Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 283.

S4 CHARLES LYELL

vioiisly existing levels accompanied or has followed the introduc-
tion of the volcanic matter, except such as the matter erupted
necessarily occasioned. The cones, at least fourteen of them
mostly with craters, stand like Monpezat, and as perfect ; the
currents flow down where the rivers would be if not displaced.
But here, as in the Vivarais, deep sections have been cut
through the lava by streams much smaller in general, and at
certain points the lava is fairly cut through, and even in two
or three cases the subjacent rock. Thus at Castel Follet, a
great current near its termination is cut through, and eighty
or ninety feet of columnar basalt laid open, resting on an old
alluvium, not containing volcanic pebbles ; and below that,
nummulitic limestone is eroded to the depth of twenty-five feet,
the river now being about thirty-five feet lower than when the
lava flowed, though most of the old valley is still occupied
by the lava current. There are about fourteen or perhaps twenty
points of eruption without craters. In all cases they burst
through secondary limestone and sandstone, no altered rocks
thrown up, as far as I could learn, not a dike exposed. A
linear direction in the cones and points of eruption from
north to south. Until some remains of quadrupeds are found,
or other organic medals found, no guess can be made as to
their geological date, unless anyone will undertake to say
when the valleys of that district were excavated. As to
historical dates, that is all a fudge ... I can assure you
that there never was an eruption within memory of man."

At Luchon Lyell rejoined Captain Cooke, and
they visited one or two interesting spots in the more
western part of the Pyrenees, such as the Cirque de
Gavarnie and the Breche de Roland. The former
would afford object-lessons on the erosive action of
cascades ; the latter would set him speculating on the
causes which could have fashioned that strange portal
in the limestone crest of the mountain. They de-
scended some distance on the Spanish side of the
Breche, in order to make a more complete investiga-
tion of the structure of the chain, sleeping at a

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 55

shepherd's hut and returning across the snowfields
next day. It is evident that whenever there was a
hope of securing any geological information or of
seeing some remarkable aspect of nature, Lyell was
almost insensible either to heat or to fatigue.

Towards the middle of September he had reached
Bayonne, from which place another very interesting
letter is despatched to Scrope.^ In this he gives
suggestions for making a number of experiments in
order to produce by artificial means such rock-struc-
tures as lamination, ripple-mark, and current-bedding,
and describes briefly a series of observations bearing on
these questions, which had been carried out both during
his late journey and on other occasions. " I have,"
he says, " for a long time been making minute draw-
ings of the lamination and stratification of beds, in
formations of very different ages, first with a view
to prove to demonstration that at every epoch the
same identical causes were in operation. I was next
led in Scotland to a suspicion, since confirmed, that
all the minute regularities and irregularities of strati-
fication and lamination were preserved in primary
clay-slate, mica-slate, gneiss, etc., showing that they
had been subjected to the same general and even
accidental circumstances attending the sedimentary
accumulation of secondary and fossil-bearing forma-
tions.! Lastly, I came to find out that all these

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 296.

f Subsequent experience has shown that, while the above obser-
vations are beyond all question in the case of ordinary sedimentary
rocks, structures cmiously resembling lamination and ripple - mark
may be produced in certain gneisses and crystalline schists by other
causes. Still, in many schists, they have originated in the way
suggested by Lyell, and indicate that the rock formerly was deposited
by water.

56 CHARLES LYELL

various characters were identical with those presented
by the bars, deltas, etc., of existing rivers, estuaries,
etc."

Early in October Lyell is back again in Paris, to find
Louis Philippe seated on the throne in the place of
Charles X., and a war party " praying night and day
for the entry of the Prussians into Belgium in the
hope of the French being drawn into the affair. A
finer opportunity, they say, could not have happened
for resuming our natural limits on the Rhine." In
the midst of political changes and warlike aspirations
geology, he observes, is not making much progress
in Paris. Some of the naturalists have " got their
heads too full of politics "; others are forced to work
as literary hacks in order to live. " Books on natural
history and medicine have no sale ; there is a demand
only for political pamphlets." So Lyell enters into
an engagement with Deshayes, who, like so many
others, has to live by his pen lest he should starve
by science, for " a private course of fossil conchology,"
and for two months' work after Lyell has returned
to England, to be spent in tabulating the species of
Tertiary shells in his own (Deshayes') and the other
great collections of Paris. " I shall thus," Lyell says,
" be giving the subject a decided push by rendering
the greater wealth of the French collectors available
in illustrating the greater experience of the English
geologists in actual observation ; for here they sit
still and buy shells, and work indoors, as much as we
travel." He also remarks to the same correspondent
(a sister) : " I am nearly sure now that my grand
theory of temperature will carry the day. ... I
will treat our geologists with a theory for the newer

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 57

deposits in next volume, which, although not half so
original, will perhaps surprise them more." ^ He
was expecting, as another letter shows, to prove the
gradual approximation of the fauna preserved in the
Tertiary deposits to that which still exists, and to
settle, as he hopes " for ever, the question whether
species come in all at a batch or are always going
out and coming in." Already he is in a position to
affirm that the Tertiary formations of Sicily in all
probability are more recent than the "crags" of
England, for, among the sixty- three species which
he had collected from the beds underlying Etna, only
three were not known to be still inhabitants of the
Mediterranean ; and besides this, between these
" crags " and the London clay a series of formations
can be intercalated. In the same letter (to Scrope)t
he states that Deshayes has found, at St. Mihiel on
the Meuse, three old needles of limestone, like those
in the Isle of Wight, round which run three distinct
lines of perforations, like those on the columns of
the " Temple of Serapis ;" these hollows being " some-
times empty^ but thousands of them filled with
saxicavas." This, of course, was a proof that there
had been, in comparatively recent times, important
changes in the level of the land and sea.

Early in November Lyell is back in London, at
his chambers in Crown Office Row, Temple, to find
that Scrope's review of the first volume of the
" Principles " has been much admired, that the book
is selling steadily, and is likely to prove "as good
as an annuity"; that it has not been seriously

* Life, Letters, and Journals, voL i. p. 303.
t Ut supra, p. 305.

58 CHARLES LYELL

attacked by tlie " Diluvialists," while it has been
highly praised by the bulk of geologists. He is
about to move, he writes, into chambers in Ray-
mond Buildings, Gray's Inn, which are "very light,
healthy and good, on the same staircase as Broderip."
Invitations to dinner are becoming frequent, but he
wisely determines to go but httle into society. " All
my friends," he says, " who are in practice do this all
the year and every year, and I do not see why I should
not be privileged, now that I have the moral
certainty of earning a small but honourable indepen-
dence if I labour as hard for the next ten years as
during the last three. I was never in better health,
rarely so good, and after so long a fallow I feel that a
good crop will be yielded and that I am in good train
for composition." ^ The second volume, he hopes, will
be out in six months ; this will include the history of
the globe to the beginning of the Tertiary era, when
the first of existing species appeared.

The next year, 1831, was an epoch marked by
more than one change. To take the smallest first, he
was made a deputy-lieutenant of the county of Forfar ;
next, in March, he was elected Professor of Geology at
King's College, London, which had been recently
founded by members of the Church of England as an
educational counterpoise to the University of London
(University College). To Lyell himself the appointment
was comparatively unimportant, but it indicated that
wider views on scientific questions and a more tolerant
spirit were gaining ground among the higher ranks ot
the clergy in the Established Church. The appomt-
ment was in the hands, exclusively, of the Archbishop

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 313.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY, 59

of Canterbury, the Bishops of London and of LlandafF,
and two " strictly orthodox doctors." Llandaff, Lyell
was informed, hesitated, but Conybeare,"^ though
opposed to Lyell's theories, vouched for his orthodoxy.
So the prelates declared that they " considered some
of my doctrines startling enough, but could not find
that they were come by otherwise than in a straight-
forward manner, and (as I appeared to think) logically
deducible from the facts; so that whether the facts
were true or not, or my conchisions logical or other-
wise, there was no reason to infer that I had made my
theory from any hostile feeling towards revelation " f
— a conclusion, marked by a wise caution, which re-
presentatives of the Church of England would have
done well to bear in mind on more than one sub-
sequent occasion — such as, for example, when the
question of the antiquity of man or that of the origin
of species was raised. But supporters of the Church
of England may fairly maintain that in difficult crises,
especially in those connected with discoveries in
science or in history, the utterances of her bishops
have been generally cautious and far-seeing ; dis-
plays of confident ignorance and rash denunciations
are more common among the " inferior clergy." As a
comment on the moderation indicated by his election,
Lyell says that a friend in the United States affirms
that there " he could hardly dare to approve of the
doctrines even in a review, such a storm would the
orthodox raise against him. So much for toleration of
Church Establishment and No Church Establishment

* The Rev. W. D. Conybeare, afterwards Dean of Llandaff, an
eminent geologist, rather senior to Lyell.

f Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 316.

60 CHARLES LYELL

countries." A third event of the year — which also
happened in the earher part of it — was destined to
exercise a much more lasting influence upon his life.
This was his engagement to Miss Mary Horner, eldest
daughter of Mr. Leonard Horner, the younger and
hardly less distinguished brother of Francis Horner,
who, while almost as enthusiastic a geologist as his
future son-in-law, took an active interest in educa-
tional questions, and afterwards did public service as
Inspector of Factories.

By the middle of June Lyell had advanced as far
as page 110 in printing the second volume of the
" Principles of Geology," notwithstanding interruptions,
such as a visit to Cambridge, where he took an
ad eundein degree,^ and the presence of his father
and brother, as well as of his friend Conybeare, in Lon-
don, all of whom required to be lionised. The letter t
(to Mantell) which refers to these impediments, passes
abruptly from Fitton's broken arm to the giant femur
of a new reptile, and incidentally mentions the dis-
covery of a section which has since become a centre
of geological controversy. " Murchison and his wife,"
he writes, " are gone to make a tour in Wales, where a
certain Trimmer has found near Snowdon ' crag ' shells
at a height of 1,000 feet, which Buckland and he
convey thither by the deluge." The shells are at an
altitude above sea-level considerably higher than Lyell
supposed. Moel Tryfaen is a massive, rather outlying

* It was formerly conceded by the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge,
and Dublin that a Master of Arts in any one could assume, under
certain conditions, the same position in the others. This carried with
it some privileges, though not the suffrage and the full rights of the
degree. Lyell had proceeded to the degree of M.A. at Oxford in 1821.

t Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 318.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 61

hill, about five miles west of the peak of Snowdon, and
at about the same distance from the nearest part of
the sea-coast. Its bare summit rises gently to a scat-
tered group of projecting crags, the highest of which
is 1,401 feet above the sea. On the eastern side are ex-
tensive slate quarries, and in working these the shell
beds are disclosed a short distance below the summit.
They consist of well-stratified sands, with occasional
gravelly beds, and contain a fair number of shells, both
broken and whole, the fauna being slightly more arctic
than that which still inhabits the neighbouring sea.
The deposit is now recognised as more recent than the
" crags " of East Anglia, for none of the species are
extinct, and is assigned to some part of the so-called
Glacial Epoch. It was before long regarded as an
indication that, at no very remote date after North
Wales had assumed or very nearly assumed its present
outlines, the whole district was depressed for at least
1,380 feet, so that the sea broke over the summit crags
of Moel Tryfaen. For many years this interpretation
passed unquestioned ; but a modern school of geologists
has found it to be such an inconvenient obstacle to
certain hypotheses about the former extent of land-
ice, that they maintain these shells were collected
from the bed of the Irish Sea (then supposed to
be above water) by an ice-sheet as it was on its
way from the north to invade the Principality, and
were conveyed by it, with all care, up the slopes
of Moel Tryfaen, till they were finally deposited on
its summit, in beds which somehow or other were
stratified. One may venture to doubt whether the
hypothesis of a rampant and conchologically-disposed
ice-sheet would have found much more favour with

62 CHARLES LYELL

the cautiously inductive mind of Lyell than that of
a deluge.

Shortly after this letter, Lyell, though all the
manuscript of his second volume had not yet been sent
to the printers, and proof-sheets followed him, refreshed
himself with a tour of four or five weeks in the vol-
canic district of the Eifel. Here the cones, all com-
paratively low, are scattered sporadically over a rolling
upland which occupies the angle between the Rhine
and the Moselle. The valleys for the most part are
carved out of slaty rocks much of the same age as
those of Devonshire ; and the craters, " strange holes,
each eruption having been almost invariably at some
new point," are now very commonly occupied by quiet
pools of water, such as Lyell had already seen in the
old volcanic districts of the Papal States. Among
these craters, composed sometimes of loose and light
scoria, from which no lava-stream ever flowed, he
found fresh evidence — as at the Rotherberg — against
the diluvian hypothesis. " It is," as he writes to his
friend. Dr. Fleming, " one of the ten thousand proofs
of the incubus that the Mosaic deluge has been, and
is, I fear, long destined to be, on our science. Now, I
am fully determined to open my strongest fire against
the new diluvial theory of swamping our continents by
waves raised by paroxysmal earthquakes. I can prove
by reference to cones (hundreds of uninjured cones) of
loose volcanic scoriae and ashes, of various and some of
great antiquity (as proved by associated organic re-
mains), that no such general waves have swept over
Europe during the Tertiary era — cones at almost every
height, from near the sea, to thousands of feet above

it."* * Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 328.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 63

But early in August he was back in London, hard at
work in writing and correcting proofs. This business
detained him longer than he anticipated, but his
labours were cheered by the news of the eruption of
Graham's Island. Here was another case in support
of the thesis which he was ready to maintain against
all comers. But a few months since there had been
a depth of eighty fathoms, as was proved by sounding,
on the site of this island. Now the cone " is 200 feet
above water and is still growing.^ Here is a hill 680
feet, with hope of more, and the probability of much
having been done before the ' Britannia ' sounded."
Surely Nature herself was testifying " her approbation
of the advocates of modern causes ! Was the cross
which Constantino saw in the heavens a more clear
indication of the approaching conversion of a wavering
world ? "

But in the beginning of September Lyell broke
away from the emissaries of the press and took passage
by sea to Edinburgh, there to combine business with
a fair amount of both scientific work and social
pleasure. This visit afforded him an opportunity of
hearing Chalmers preach. In a letter to Miss Horner
he gives a brief abstract, and expresses his general
opinion of the sermon t : —

" It was a very long discourse, but admirable. The subject
was ' repentance/ a hackneyed one enough. . . . He explained
the effect of habit, and its increasing power over the mind, as a
law of our nature, with as much clearness and as philosophically
as he could have done had he been explaining the doctrine to

* T7t supra, p. 329. By the end of October it had not only ceased
to grow, but also had been nearly washed away by the sea. Now its
position is marked by a shoal.

t Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 331.

64 CHARLES LYELL

a class of university students in a lecture on tlie philosophy of
the human mind. But then the practical application was en-
forced by a strain of real eloquence, of a very energetic, natural,
and striking description. . . . But, unfortunately, every here
and there he seemed to feel that he was sinning against some
of the Calvinistic doctrines of his school, and all at once there
was some dexterous pleading about ' original sin,' which inter-
fered a little with the free current of the discourse. . . . Upon
the whole, however, judging from this single specimen, I think
I would sooner hear him again than any preacher I ever heard,
Reginald Heber not excepted."

At this time Lyell was keeping a journal, which
was forwarded to Miss Horner, then in Germany, to
serve apparently as a substitute for ordinary letters ;
home news, disturbances arising from the struggle
over the Keform Bill, visits of friends, geological re-
searches, walks on the hills to search for plants or for
insects, the habits of the Kinnordy bees, or the accom-
plishments of two parrots, brought from Africa by his
naval brother — all being jotted down just as they
occurred.

Among this farrago — though not of nonsense —
geological topics, since Miss Horner had similar tastes,
occupy a considerable space. She, however, evidently
was, comparatively speaking, a beginner, and in one or
two characteristic sentences her lover and preceptor
passes from information to counsel : " If you are not
frightened by De la Beche, I think you are in a fair
way to be a geologist ; though it is in the field only
that a person can really get to like the stiff part of it.
Not that there is really anything in it that is not very
easy, when put into . plainer language than scientific
writers choose often unnecessarily to employ." He
also records'^ a piece of advice from his old Mend, Dr.

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 342.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 65

Fleming, which is enough to make a modern professor
of geology sigh for " the good old times." He said to
LyeU:

" If you lecture once a year for a short course, I am sure
you will derive advantage from it. A short practice of lecturing
is a rehearsal of what you may afterwards publish, and teaches
you by the contact with pupils how to instruct, and in what
you are obscure. A little of this will improve your power,
perhaps as an author. Then, as you are pursuing a path of
original and purely independent discovery and observation, it
increases much your public usefulness in a science so unavoid-
ably controversial to have thrown over you the moral pro-
tection of being in a public and responsible situation, connected
with a body like King's College. But then you must stipulate
that you are to be free to travel, and must only be bound to
give one short course annually."

Truly those must have been halcyon days for
professors !

The journal also proves, by its brief account of a
Scotch festival, which accords with little hints dropped
elsewhere in it or in letters, that our forefathers, not
wholly excluding men of science, some sixty years ago
habitually consumed much more " strong drink " than
would be considered correct at the present day : —

"It was just an Angus set-to of the old regime. They
arrived at half-past six o'clock and waited dinner one hour.
Gentlemen rejoined the ladies at half-past twelve o'clock !
They, in the meantime, had had tea, and a regular supper laid
out in the drawing-room. After an hour with the ladies they
returned to the dining-room to supper at half -past one o'clock,
and my father left them at half-past two o'clock ! The ladies
did not go to this supper."

The journal, in short, like the well-known Scotch
dish, afifords a great deal of " confused feeding " of a
pleasant sort, but no samples of love-making. The
nearest approach to it is in the following passage,

66 CHARLES LYELL

which is worth quoting, not for that reason, but as
incidentally disclosing the strength of the author's
character : —

" I shall write a few words before I get into the steamboat
just to tranquillise my mind a little, after reading several
controversial articles by Elie de Beaumont and others against
my system. If I find myself growing too warm or annoyed at
such hostile demonstrations I shall always retreat to you.
You will be my harbour of peace to retire to, and where I may
forget the storm. I know that by persevering steadily I
shall some years hence stand very differently from where I
now am in science ; and my only danger is the being impatient,
and tempted to waste my time on petty controversies and
quarrels about the priority of the discovery of this or that
fact or theory." *

Friends in plenty were awaiting him in London,
which was reached about the first of November : the
Murchisons and Somervilles, Broderip, Curtis, Basil
Hall, and Hooker, with Necker from Switzerland, and
many more. He is also cheered by finding that his
ideas are steadily gaining ground among geologists,
converts becoming more confident, unbelievers more
uneasy. He made good progress with his book, and
realised, before the end of the year, that his materials
could not be compressed into a single volume ; so he
determined to issue the part already completed as a
second volume, and to finish the work in a third.

From time to time the diary contains references
to a recent contest for the Presidency of the Royal
Society, and to political matters such as the Reform
Bill ; but, though in favour of the latter, he is not very
enthusiastic on the subject, for on one occasion he
expresses regret at having been absent, through

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 347.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 67

forgetfulness, from a meeting of the Geographical
Society, where he would have "got some sound
information instead of hearing politicians discuss the
interminable bill."

The lectures at King's College evidently weighed
upon his mind as they drew near, and he was not
stirred to enthusiasm by the prospect of teaching;
for towards the close of the year he more than once
debated with his friends the question whether or no
he should retain the appointment. Murchison was in
favour of resignation; Conybeare took the opposite
view. Of his advice Lyell remarks, "The fact is,
Conybeare's notion of these things is what the English
public have not yet come up to, which, if they had,
the geological professorship in London would be a
worthy aim for any man's ambition, whereas it is now
one that the multitude would rather wonder at one's
accepting." ^ The British public apparently still lags
a long way behind the Conybearian ideal, and retains
its contempt for all those who, by presuming to teach,
insinuate doubts as to its innate omniscience.

Lyell, however, clearly perceived that it was
absolutely necessary that every teacher of professorial
rank should be himself a pioneer in his subject — a
fact of which government officials, as a rule, seem to be
totally ignorant. His comments, a little later in the
year, on the arrangements at the University of Bonn
are worth recording. " The Professors have to lecture
for nine months in the year — too much, I should
think, for allowing time for due advancement of the
teacher." Lyell's desires in regard to remuneration
seem reasonable enough. He is anxious to earn by

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 358.

68 CHARLES LYELL

his scientific work enoiigb. to provide for the extra
expenses which this work entails, and yet to command
sufficient time to advance his knowledge and reputa-
tion. The fates proved more propitious to him than
they are generally to men of science, for he succeeded
in accomplishing both of his desires.

Little of importance happened during the early
part of 1832. There was plenty of hard work in
collecting facts, in consulting friends about special
difficulties, and in working at the manuscript for the
third volume of the " Principles," for the second made
its appearance almost with the new year. Toil was
sweetened by occasional pleasures, such as an evening
with the Somervilles, or a dinner party at the
Murchisons, a talk with Babbage or Fitton, or a
symposium at the Geological Club, at which it is
sometimes evident that good care was taken lest
science should become too dry. One passage in his
diary indicates that sixty years have considerably
changed the habits of life in town and in the country,
for at the present day most people would express them-
selves in the opposite sense. " I have enjoyed parties
and two plays this month very much, because it was
recreation stolen from work ; but the difficulty in the
country is that, on the contrary, one's hours of work
are stolen from dissipation."

The lectures at King's College were begun in May.
Lyell evidently was not a nervous man, but he re-
garded the near approach of this new kind of work
with some trepidation, and admits that he slept ill
before the first lecture. It was, however, a decided
success in every respect, and the audience was a
large one, for the Council, after some hesitation, had

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. by

permitted the attendance of ladies. Each lecture was
pronounced by the hearers to be better than the last,
and Lyell uses the opportunity, as he says, to fire
occasional shots at Buckland, Sedgwick, and others
who are still hankering after catastrophic convulsions
and ail-but universal deluges. As a further encou-
ragement, his publisher, Murray, agrees willingly to
a reprint of the first volume of the " Principles," and
only hesitates between an edition of 750 or of 1,000
copies. About this time, also, he was asked to under-
take the presidency of the Geological Society, but
that, notwithstanding Murchison's urgency, he firmly
declined for the present ; writing of it to Miss Horner,
" It is just one of those temptations the resisting
of which decides whether a man shall really rise high
or not in science. For two more years I am free from
les affaires administratives, which, said old Brochart
in his late letter to me, have prevented me from
studying geology cTune maniere siiivie, whereby you
have already carried it so far."

He was, however, soon to be engrossed in an
" affair " of another kind ; one which has proved very
detrimental to the progress of many men of science,
but which, in Lyell's case, had the happiest results,
and smoothed rather than it impeded his path to
fame ; for in the summer — on July 12th — he ceased
to be a bachelor. The marriage was celebrated at
Bonn, where Miss Horner's family were still resident.
A Lutheran clergyman seems to have officiated, and
the ceremony was a very quiet one; the distance
from home preventing the attendance of English
friends or even of relations of the bridegroom.

The newly-married couple departed from Bonn

70 CHARLES LYELL

up the Rhine, and travelled by successive stages to
Heidelberg, but they Avere not forgetful of geology, even
in the first week of the honeymoon, for they visited
as they journeyed more than one interesting section
on the western edge of the Odenwald. Then they
made excursions to Carlsruhe and Baden-Baden, and
ultimately travelled from Freiburg to Schaffhausen
through the romantic defiles of the Hollenthal, and
across the corner of the Black Forest. A journal was
now needless, and probably the newly-married couple
were too much engrossed with their own happiness
to write many letters, for few details have been
preserved about their Swiss tour. It was, however,
comparatively a short one, for they remained less
than a fortnight in the country. Still Lyell probably
found it useful in refreshing recollections and testing
his early impressions by greatly increased knowledge
and experience. From the valley of the Rhone they
crossed the Simplon Pass into Italy and followed the
usual road to Milan along the shore of the Lago
Maggiore.

How long they remained in Italy, or by what route
they returned to England, is not stated ; indeed, for
nearly six months next to nothing is on record
concerning Lyell's movements or work, but in the
beginning of 1883 he and his wife were settled in
London at No. 16, Hart Street, Bloomsbury, which
became their residence for some years. A state of
happiness is not always indicated by much correspond-
ence : probably it was so with Lyell ; at any rate, a
single letter, dated January 5th, gives the only informa-
tion of his doings between September, 1832, and April,
1833. In this letter, however, he mentions that the

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 71

Council of King's College had decided that in future
ladies should not be admitted to Lyell's lectures, and
that, in consequence, he had received a pressing invita-
tion from the managers of the Royal Institution to
give, after Easter, a course of six or eight lectures in
their theatre, coupled with the offer of a substantial
remuneration.

At the end of April, as he tells his old friend
Mantell, both these courses had been begun. The
one at the Royal Institution was attended by an
audience of about 250, that at King's College, after
the opening lecture, dropped down to a class of
fifteen. The falling- off was entirely due to the above-
named resolution. For this the Council had assigned
a reason, which, perhaps, was not a prudent course, for
bodies of that kind, when they give reasons, often
succeed only in "giving themselves away." The
presence of ladies was forbidden, " because it diverted
the attention of the young students, of whom," Lyell
remarks sarcastically, " I had two in number from the
college last year and two this." Had the Council stated
boldly that the College did not appoint professors to
lecture urhi et orbi, their policy, though it would
have appeared a little selfish and might have proved
shortsighted, would have been defensible, because
the institution was founded for the education of a
particular class. But the reason assigned was open
to Lyell's retort, and gave the impression of unreality.
It is not impossible that the decision was the result
of secret " wire-pulling," and represented not so much
a fear of the disturbing influence of the fair sex as
a dread of the popularity of the subject. Geology was
still regarded with grave distrust by a very large

72 CHARLES LTELL

number of people, and King's College, it must be
remembered, was founded in the supposed interests
of the Church of England and in the hope of neutral-
ising the effects of the unsectarian institution in
Gower Street. Many of its supporters may have
been characterised rather by the ardour of their
dislikes than by the width of their sympathies, and
may have put pressure on the Council, so that this
body may have considered it safer to risk driving a
popular man from their staff than to alienate an im-
portant section of their adherents and to expose the
College to the danger of being charged with lending
itself to heretical teaching."^

The preparation of these lectures must have been
attended with some difficulty, for Lyell writes that,
" like all the world," he and his household — everyone
except his wife — had been down with the influenza,
which in that year was even more rampant in London
than it has been in any of its recent visits. But,
notwithstanding this and any other interruptions, the
third and final volume of the " Principles of Geology "
made its appearance in the month of May, 1833.

* Lyell resigned the Professorship after he had finished the course.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 73

CHAPTER y.

THE HISTORY AND PLACE IN SCIENCE OF THE
" PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY."

The publication of the last volume of the " Principles
of Geology" formed an important epoch in Lyell's
life. It brought to a successful close a work on
which his energies had been definitely concentrated
for nearly five years, and for which he had been
preparing himself during a considerably longer time.
It placed him, before his fourth decade was completed,
at once and beyond all question in the front rank of
British geologists ; it carried his reputation to every
country where that science was cultivated. It proved
the writer to be not only a careful observer and
a reasoner of exceptional inductive power, but also a
man of general culture and a master of his mother
tongue. The book, moreover, marked an epoch in
geology not less important ; it produced an influence
on the science greater and more permanent than any
work which had been previously written, or has since
appeared — greater even than the famous "Origin of
Species by Natural Selection," for that dealt only
with one portion of geology — viz. with palaeontology,
while the method of the Principles affected the
science in every part. For a brief interval, then, we
may desert the biography of the author for that of
the book — the parent for his offspring — and call
attention to one or two topics which are more im-
mediately connected with the book itself. A brief

74 CHARLES LYELL

sketch of its future history may be placed first ; for,
as its author was constantly labouring to improve
and perfect his work, it underwent many changes in
form and arrangement during the remainder — some
two-and-forty years — of his life, which will be better
understood from a connected statement than if they
have to be gathered from scattered references in the
other chapters of his biography.

The first volume of the "Principles of Geology"
appeared, as has been mentioned, in January, 1830 ;
the second in January, 1882 ; and the third in May,
1833. But a second edition of. the first volume was
issued in January, 1832, and one of the second volume
in the same month of 1833; these were all in 8vo
size. A new edition of the whole work was published
in May, 1834. This, however, took the form of four
volumes 12mo. This edition was called the third,
because the first two volumes of the original work
had gone through second editions. A fourth edition
followed in June, 1835, and a fifth in March, 1837.

Thus far the " Principles " continued without any
substantial alteration, but the author made an im-
portant change in preparing the next edition. He
detached from it the latter part — practically, the
matter comprised in the third volume of the original
work. This he re-wrote and published separately as
a single volume in July, 1838, under the title of
" Elements of Geology " ; a sixth edition of the
" Principles," thus curtailed, appeared in three volumes
12mo, in June, 1840. The effect of the change was.
to restrict the " Principles " mainly to the physical
side of geology — to the subjects connected with the
morphological changes which the earth and its

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 75

inhabitants alike undergo. Thus it made the contents
of the book accord more strictly with its title, while
the "Elements" indicated the working out of the
aforesaid principles in the past history of the earth
and its inhabitants — that is, the latter book deals
with the classification of rocks and fossils, or with
petrology and historical geology. The subsequent
history of the "Elements " may be left for the present.
In February, 1847, the seventh edition of the
" Principles " appeared, in which another change was
made. This, however, was in form rather than in
substance, for the book was now issued in a single
thick 8vo volume. The eighth edition, published in
May, 1850 ; and the nuith, in June, 1853, followed the
same pattern. A longer interval elapsed before the
appearance of the tenth edition, and this was pub-
lished in two volumes, the first being issued in
November, 1866, and the second in 1868. In this
interval — more than thirteen years — the science had
made rapid progress, and the process of revision had
been in consequence more than usually searching.
The author, as he states in the preface, had " found
it necessary entirely to rewrite some chapters, and
recast others, and to modify or omit some passages
given in former editions." Many new instances were
given to illustrate the effect which forces still at
work had produced upon the earth's crust, and these
strengthened the evidence which had been already
advanced. Into the accounts of Vesuvius and Etna
much important matter was introduced, the result of
visits which, as we shall find, Lyell made in 1857 and
1858 ; the chapters relating to the vicissitudes of climate
in past geological ages were entirely rewritten, together

76 CHARLES LYELL

with that discussing the connection between climate
and the geography of the earth's surface; and a
chapter, practically new, was inserted, which con-
sidered " how far former vicissitudes in climate may
have been influenced by astronomical changes; such
as variations in the eccentricity of the earth's orbit,
changes in the obliquity of the ecliptic, and different
phases of the precession of the equinoxes." But
the most important change was made in the later
part of the book — the last fifteen chapters.^ These
either were entirely new, or presented the original
material in a new aspect. In the earlier editions
of his work, Lyell had expressed himself dissatisfied,
as we have already seen, with the idea of the deriva-
tion of species from antecedent forms by some process
of modification, and had pointed out the weak places
in the arguments which were advanced in its favour.
But the evidence adduced by Darwin and Wallace
in regard to the origin of species by natural selec-
tion, strengthened by the support of Hooker on the
botanical side, had removed the difficulties which the
cruder statements of Lamarck and other predecessors
had suggested to his mind, so that Lyell now appears
as a convinced evolutionist. The question also of the
antiquity of man is much more fully discussed than
it had been in the earlier editions.

Considerable changes were introduced into the
eleventh edition, which appeared in January, 1872,
but these were chiefly additions which were made
possible by the rapidly increasing store of knowledge,
as, for instance, much important information con-

* Strictly speaking, fifteen out of the last sixteen chapters, for the
final one (dealing with coral reefs) is substantially a reprint.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 77

cerning the deeper parts of the ocean. On this
interesting subject great light had been thrown by
the cruises of the several exploring vessels, notably
those of the Lightning, the Bulldog, and the Fov-
citpine, commissioned by the British Government —
cruises in the course of which soundings had been
taken and temperatures observed in the North
Atlantic down to depths of about 2,500 fathoms ;
and in the lowest parts of the western basin of the
Mediterranean. Samples also of the bottom had been
obtained, and, in many cases, even dredgers had been
successfully employed at these depths. Thanks to
the skill of the mechanician, the way had been opened
which led into a new fairyland of science. This was
not, like some fabled Paradise, guarded by mountain
fastnesses and precipitous ramparts of eternal snow ;
it was not encircled by storm-swept deserts, or se-
cluded in the furthest recesses of forests, hitherto
impenetrable ; but it lay deep in the silent abysses
of ocean — on those vast plains, which are unruffled
by the most furious gale, or by the wildest waves. In
these depths, beneath the tremendous pressure of
so vast a thickness of water, and far below the limits
at which the existence of Ufe had been sup-
posed to be possible, numbers of creatures had
been discovered — many of them strange and novel :
molluscs, sea-lilies, glassy sponges of unusual beauty
— creatures often of ancient aspect, relics of a fauna
elsewhere extinct ; and the ocean floor, on and above
which they moved, was strewn with the white dust of
countless coverings of tiny foraminifera, which, even if
none were actually living, had fallen like a gentle but
incessant rain from the overhanging mass of water.

78 CHARLES LYELL

Similar changes were introduced into the twelfth
edition of the " Principles/' upon which the author
was engaged even up to the last few weeks of his hfe.
The Challenger, it will be remembered, started on
her memorable voyage of exploration at the close of
the year in which the eleventh edition had appeared ;
and though she did not actually return till after Lyell's
death, notes of some of her most interesting discoveries
had been communicated from time to time to the
scientific journals of this country. The edition, how-
ever, was left incomplete. The first volume had been
passed for the press, but the second was still un-
finished ; so that this twelfth edition was posthumous,
the work of revision having been finished by the
author's nephew and heir, Mr. Leonard Lyell.

By such conscientious and unremitting labour, the
scientific value of the " Principles " was immensely
increased ; it kept always in step with the advance of
the science, but at the same time it lost, as was in-
evitable, a little of that literary charm and that sense
of freshness which was at first so marked a charac-
^^ teristic. Books, like children, are apt to lose some
of their beauty as they increase in size and strength.
One must compare an early and a late edition, such
as the first or third and the tenth or eleventh, in
order to realise how great were the changes in this
passage from childhood to adolescence. New mate-
rial was incorporated into every part; it makes its
appearance sometimes on every page; changes are
made in the order of the subjects ; many chapters
are entirely rewritten ; nevertheless, a considerable
portion corresponds almost word for word in the two
editions. Lyell was no hurried writer, or " scamper "

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 79

of work ; he paid great attention to composition, so
that when the facts which he desired to cite had
undergone no change, he very seldom found any to
make in his language. Nevertheless, here and there,
some small modification, a slight verbal difference, a
trifling alteration in the order of a sentence, the
insertion of a short clause to secure greater perspi-
cuity, shows to how careful and close a revision the
whole had been subjected. In the substance of the
work, besides the excision of nearly one-third of the
material and the complete reconstruction of the part
relating to the antiquity of man and the origin of
species, already mentioned, the following are the
most important changes. The chapters which discuss
the evidence in favour of past mutations of climate
and the causes to which these are due, are rewritten
and greatly enlarged. In the earlier editions, the
effects of geographical changes were regarded as
sufticient to account for all the climatal variations
that geology requires ; in the later editions, the
possible co-operation of astronomical changes is ad-
mitted. Great additions also are made to the parts
referring to the condition of the bed of the ocean,
and much new and important information is incor-
porated into the sections dealing with volcanoes and
earthquakes; including many valuable observations
which had been made during visits to Vesuvius and
to Etna in the autumns of 1857 and 1858. The
section on the action of ice is so altered and enlarged
as to be practically new; for when the first edition
of the " Principles " was published comparatively little
was known of the effects of land-ice, and the art of
following the trail of vanished glaciers had yet to

80 CHARLES LYELL

be learnt. But, with this exception, the part of the
book dealing with the action of the forces of Nature —
heat and cold, rain, rivers, and sea — remains com-
paratively unaltered, as do the first five chapters,
which give a sketch of the early history of the
science of geology.

Without some knowledge of this history it is
hardly possible to appreciate the true greatness of
the " Principles," and its unique value as an influence
on scientific thought at the time it appeared. This,
however, to some extent may be inferred from those
chapters which we have mentioned ; but the perspec-
tive of half a century enables us to understand it
better at the present time ; for the author, of course,
had to deal with contemporary work and opinion only
in a very indirect way. We may dismiss briefly the
crude speculations of the earliest observers — those
anterior to the Christian era — of which the author
gives a summary in the second chapter of the " Prin-
ciples "; for at that early date few persons had made
any effort to arrange the facts of Nature in a con-
nected system. These were too scanty and too
disconnected for any such effort to be successful.
The general result cannot be better summed up
than in Lyell's own words : —

" Although no particular investigations had been made for
the express purpose of interpreting the monuments of ancient
changes, they were too obvious to be entirely disregarded ;
and the observation of the present course of Nature presented
too many proofs of alterations continually in progress on the
earth to allow philosophers to believe that Nature was in a
state of rest, or that the surface had remained and would
continue to remain, unaltered. But they had never compared
attentively the results of the destroying and the reproductive

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 81

operations of modern times with those of remote eras ; nor
had they ever entertained so much as a conjecture concerning
the comparative antiquity of the human race, or of living
species of animals and plants, with those belonging to former
conditions of the organic world. They had studied the move-
ments and positions of the heavenly bodies with laborious
industry, and made some progress in investigating the animal,
vegetable, and mineral kingdoms ; but the ancient history of
the globe was to them a sealed book, and though written in
characters of the most striking and imposing kind, they were
unconscious even of its existence." *

The above remarks hold good for the centuries
immediately succeeding the Christian era; and the
influence of the new faith, when it ceased to be per-
secuted and became a power in the state, was adverse
on the whole to progress in physical or natural science.
With the decline of the Koman empire a great dark-
ness fell upon the civihsed world ; art, science, litera-
ture withered before the hot breath of war and rapine,
as the northern barbarians swept down upon their
enfeebled master on their errand of destruction. It
was well nigh eight centuries from the Christian era
before the spirit of scientific enquiry and the love of
literature began to awaken from their long torpor ; and
it was then among people of an Eastern race and an
alien creed. The caliphs of Bagdad encouraged
learning, and the students of the East became familiar
by means of translations with the thoughts and ques-
tionings of ancient Greece and Rome. The efforts of
their earliest investigators have not been preserved,
but in treatises of the tenth century — written by one
Avicenna, a court physician, the "Formation and
Classification of Minerals " is discussed, as well as the

* " Principles of Geology," vol. i. p. 26 (eleventh edition).
V

82 CHARLES LYELL

'' Cause of Mountains." In the latter attention is called
to the effect of earthquakes, and to the excavatory
action of streams. In the same century also, " Omar
the Learned " wrote a book on " the retreat of the sea,"
in which he proved by reference to ancient charts and
by other less direct arguments that changes of im-
portance had occurred in the form of the coast of
Asia. But even among the followers of Mohammed
theology declared itself hostile to science ; the Moslem
doctors of divinity deemed the pages of the Koran,
not the book of Nature, man's proper sphere of
research, and considered these difficulties ought to be
settled by a quotation from the one rather than by
facts from the other. So progress in science was im-
peded, and recantations at the bidding of ecclesiastics
are not restricted to the annals of Christian races.
But men seem to have gone on speculating, and
Mohammed Kazwini, in a striking allegory which is
quoted by Lyell, tells his readers how (to use the words
of Tennyson) "^ :—

" There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O Earth, what changes thou hast seen !
There, where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea."

In Europe geological phenomena do not appear to
have attracted serious attention till the sixteenth
century, when the significance of fossils became the
subject of an animated controversy in Italy. At that
epoch this country held the front rank in learning and
the arts, and an inquiry of that nature arose almost as
a matter of course, because the marls, sands, and soft
limestones of its lower districts teem in many places
* In Memoriam, cxxiii.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 83

with shells and other marine organisms in a singular
state of perfection and preservation. It is interesting
to remark, that among the foremost in appealing to
inductive processes for the explanation of these
enigmas was that extraordinary and almost universal
genius, Leonardo da Vinci. He ridiculed the current
idea that these shells were formed " by the influence
of the stars," calling attention to the mud by which
they were filled, and the gravel beds among which
they were intercalated, as proof that they had once
lain upon the bed of the sea at no great distance from
the coast. His induction rested on the evidence of
sections which had been exposed during his con-
struction of certain navigable canals in the north of
Italy. Shortly afterward, the conclusions of Leonardo
were amplified, and strengthened on similar grounds
by Frascatoro. He, however, not only demonstrated
the absurdity of explaining these organic structures
by the " plastic force of Nature " — a favourite refuge
for the intellectually destitute of that and even a later
age, but he also showed that they could not even be
relics of the Noachian deluge. " That inundation, he
observed, was too transient; it had consisted prin-
cipally of fluviatile waters ; and if it had transported
shells to great distances, must have strewed them over
the surface, not buried them at vast depths in the
interior of mountains." As Lyell truly remarks,
" His clear exposition of the evidence would have
terminated the discussion for ever, if the passions of
man had not been enlisted in the dispute ; and even
though doubts should for a time have remained in
some minds, they would speedily have been removed
by the fresh information obtained almost immediately

84 . CHARLES LYELT^

afterwards, respecting the structure of fossil remains,
and of their living analogues." But the difficulties
raised by theologians, and the general preference for
deductive over inductive reasoning, greatly impeded
progress. It was not till the methods of the school-
men yielded place to those of the natural philosophers
that the tide of battle began to turn, and science to
possess the domains from which she had been un-
justly excluded. For about a century the weary war
went on; the philosophers of Italy leading the van,
those of England, it must be admitted, for long lagging
behind them, before the spectre of " plastic force " was
finally dismissed to the limbo of exploded hypotheses
in England. For instance, it was seriously maintained
by the well-known writer on county history. Dr. Plot,
in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, though
its absurdity had been demonstrated by his Italian
contemporaries; as by Scilla, in his treatise on the
fossils of Calabria, and by Steno, in that on " Gems,
crystals, and organic petrifactions enclosed in solid
rocks." The latter had proved by dissecting a shark
recently captured in the Mediterranean, that its teeth
and bones corresponded exactly with similar objects
from a fossil in Tuscany, and that the shells discovered
in sundry Italian strata were identical with living
species, except for the loss of their animal gluten and
some slight mineral change. Moreover, he had dis-
tinguished, by means of their organic remains, between
deposits of a marine and of a fluviatile character.

But now, as the "plastic force" dogma lost its
hold on the minds of men, its place was taken by
that which regarded all fossils as the relics of an
universal deluge.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 85

"The theologians who now entered the field in Italy,
Germany, France, and England, were innumerable ; and
henceforward, they who refused to subscribe to the position
that all marine organic remains were proofs of the Mosaic
deluge, were exposed to the imputation of disbelieving the
whole of the sacred writings. Scarce any step had been
made in approximating to sound theories since the time of
Frascatoro, more than a hundred years having been lost in
writing down the dogma that organised fossils were mere
sports of Nature. An additional period of a century and a
half was now destined to be consumed in exploding the
hypothesis that organised fossils had all been buried in the
solid strata by Noah's flood." *

Into the varying fortunes of this second struggle
it is needless to enter at any length. It was the
old conflict between theology and science in a yet
more acute form ; the old warfare between deductive
and inductive reasoning ; between dogmatic ignorance
and an honest search for truth. Protestants and
Romanists alike seemed to claim the gift of infalli-
bility, with the right to decide ex cathedra on questions
of which they were profoundly ignorant, and to
pronounce sentence in causes where they could not
even appreciate the evidence. Ecclesiastics scolded;
well-meaning though incompetent laymen echoed
their cry; the more timorous among scientific men
wasted their time in devising elaborate but futile
schemes of accommodation between the discoveries
of geology and the supposed revelations of the Scrip-
tures ; the stronger laboured on patiently, gathering
evidence, strengthening their arguments and dissect-
ing the fallacies by which they were assailed, until
the popular prejudice should be allayed and men be
calm enough to Hsten to the voice of truth. It was

* " Principles of Geology," chap. iii. p. 37.

86 CHARLES LYELL

a long and weary struggle, which is now nearly,
though not quite, ended; for there are still a few
who mistake for an impregnable rock that which is
merely the shifting-sand of popular opinion, and
cannot realise that the province of revelation is in
the spiritual rather than in the material, in the moral
rather than in the scientific order. The outbursts
of denunciation aroused by the assertion of the
antiquity of man and the publication of the " Origin
of Species," which many still in the full vigour of
their powers can well remember, were but a recru-
descence of the same spirit, a reappearance of an old
foe with a new face.

But when Lyell was young and the idea of the
" Principles " began to germinate in his mind, popular
prejudice against the free exercise of inquiry in geology
was still strong ; this diluvial hypothesis still hampered,
if it did not fully satisfy, the majority of scientific
workers. Here and there, it is true, some isolated
pioneer demonstrated the impossibility of referring the
fossil contents of the earth's crust to a single deluge,
or protested against the singular mixture of actual
observation, patristic quotation, and deductive reason-
ing which commonly passed current for geological
science. Chief and earliest among these men, Vallis-
neri, also an Italian, about a century before Ly ell's
birth, was clearsighted enough to see " how much
the interests of religion as well as those of sound
philosophy had suffered by perpetually mixing up the
sacred writings with questions in physical science " ;
indeed, he was so far advanced as to attempt a general
sketch of the marine deposits of Italy, with their
organic remains, and to arrive at the conclusion that

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 87

the ocean formerly had extended over the whole
earth and after remaining there for a long time had
gradually subsided. This conclusion, though inade-
quate as an expression of the truth, was much more
philosophical than that of an universal and compara-
tively recent deluge. Moro and Generelli, in the same
country, followed the lead of Vallisneri, in seeking
for hypotheses which were consistent with the facts
of Nature, Generelli even arriving at conclusions
which, in effect, were those adopted by Lyell, and
have been thus translated by him :

" Is it possible that this waste should have continued for
six thousand and perhaps a greater number of years, and that
the mountains should remain so great unless their ruins have
been repaired"? Is it credible that the Author of Nature
should have founded the world upon such laws as that the
dry land should be for ever growing smaller, and at last
become wholly submerged beneath the waters ? Is it credible
that, amid so many created things, the mountains alone
should daily diminish in number and bulk, without there
being any repair of their losses ? This would be contrary to
that order of Providence which is seen to reign in all other
things in the universe. Wherefore I deem it just to conclude
that the same cause which, in the beginning of time, raised
mountains from the abyss, has down to the present day
continued to produce others, in order to restore from time to
time, the losses of all such as sink down in different places,
or are rent asunder, or in other ways suffer disintegration.
If this be admitted, we can easily understand why there
should now be found upon many mountains so great a number
of Crustacea and other marine animals."

This attempt at a system of rational geology was
a great advance in the right direction, though many
gaps still remained to be filled up and some errors to
be corrected; such for instance as the idea adopted
by Generelli from Moro, and maintained in other

88 CHARLES LYELL

parts of his work, that all the stratified rocks are
derived from volcanic ejections. Nevertheless, geo-
logy, by the middle of the eighteenth century,
had evidently begun to pass gradually, though very
slowly, from the stage of crude and fanciful hypo-
theses to that of an inductive science. But even then
the observers had only succeeded in setting foot on the
lower slopes of a peak, the summit of which will not
be reached, if indeed it ever be, for many a long year
to come. During the next half of the century progress
was made, now in this direction, now in that ; slowly
truths were established, slowly errors dispelled ; and
as the close of that century approached, the founda-
tions of modern geology began to be securely laid.
A great impulse was given to the work, though to
some extent the apparent help proved to be a real
hindrance, by that famous teacher, Werner of Frei-
berg, in Saxony. His influence was highly beneficial,
because he insisted not only on a careful study of
the mineral character of rocks, but also on attend-
ing to their grouping, geographical distribution, and
general relations. It was hurtful almost to as great
a degree, because he maintained, and succeeded by
his enthusiasm and eloquence in impressing on his
disciples, most erroneous notions as to the origin of
basalts and those other igneous rocks which were
formerly comprehended under the name " trap."
Such rocks he stoutly asserted to be chemical pre-
cipitates from water, and, besides this, he held views in
general strongly opposed to anything like the action
of uniform causes in the earth's history. In short,
the Saxon Professor was in many respects the exact
antithesis of Lyell, and the points of essential con-

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 89

trast cannot be better indicated than in the words of
the latter."^

*' If it be true that delivery be the first, second, and third
requisite in a popular orator, it is no less certain that to travel
is of first, second, and third importance to those who desire
to originate just and comprehensive views concerning the
structure of our globe. Now Werner had not travelled to
distant countries ; he had merely explored a small portion of
Germany, and conceived, and persuaded others to believe,
that the whole surface of our planet and all the mountain-
chains in the world were made after the model of his own
province. It became a ruling object of ambition in the minds
of his pupils to confirm the generalisations of their great
master, and to discover in the most distant parts of the globe
his 'universal formations,' which he supposed had been each in
succession simultaneously precipitated over the whole earth
from a common menstruum or chaotic fluid."

These wild generalisations, as Lyell points out,
had not even the merit of being really in accordance
with the evidence afforded by some parts of Saxony
itself Werner, in fact, was a conspicuous example of
a tendency, which perhaps even now is not quite
extinct, to work too much beneath a roof and too
little in the open air ; to found great generalisations
on the minute results of research in a laboratory,
without subjecting them to actual tests by the study
of rocks in the field.

This error on Werner's part was the less excusable,
because, even before he began to lecture, the true nature
of basalts and traps generally had been recognised
by several observers of different nationalities. In the
Hebrides and in Iceland, in the Vicentin and in
Auvergne, even in Hesse and in the Rheingau, proof
after proof had been cited, and the evidence in favour

.* " Principles of Geology," chap. iv.

90 CHARLES LYELL

of the "igneous" origin of these rocks had become
irresistible, as one might suppose, within some half
dozen years of Werner's appointment as professor at
Freiberg. Faujas, in 1779, published a description
of the volcanoes of the Yivarrais and Velay, in which
he showed how the streams of basalt had poured out
from craters which still remain in a perfect state.
Desmarest also pointed out that in Auvergne "first
came the most recent volcanoes, which had their
craters still entire and their streams of lava conform-
ing to the level of the present river courses. He then
showed that there were others of an intermediate
epoch, whose craters were nearly effaced, and whose
lavas were less intimately connected with the present
valleys ; and lastly, that there were volcanic rocks still
more ancient without any discernible craters or scoriae,
and bearing the closest analogy to rocks in other
parts of Europe, the igneous origin of which was
denied by the school of Freiberg." Desmarest even
constructed and published a geological map of Au-
vergne, of which Lyell speaks in terms of high com-
mendation. " They alone who have carefully studied
Auvergne, and traced the different lava streams from
their craters to their termination — the various isolated
basaltic cappings — the relation of some lavas to the
present valleys — the absence of such relations in
others — can appreciate the extraordinary fidelity of
this elaborate work." ^

But before the close of the eighteenth century,
two champions had already stepped into the arena
to withstand the Wernerian hypothesis, which, like
a swelling tide, was spreading over Europe, and

* " Principles of Geology," chap. iv.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 91

threatening to sweep away everything before it.
These were James Hutton and William Smith ; the
one born north, the other south of the Tweed. From
the name of the former that W his friend and ex-
positor, John Playfair, must ne^er be separated. They
were the Socrates and the Pl^to of that school of
thought from which modern geology has been
developed."^ To quote the eloquent words of Sir
Archibald Geikief : —

" On looking back to the beginning of this century we see
the geologists of Britain divided into two hostile camps, which
waged against each other a keen and even an embittered
warfare. On the one hand were the followers of Hutton of
Edinburgh, called from him the Vulcanists, or Plutonists ;
on the other, the disciples of Werner. . . . who went by the
name of Wernerians, or Neptunists. . . . The Huttonians,
who adhered to the principles laid down by their great
founder, maintained, as their fundamental doctrine, that the
past history of our planet is to be explained by what we can
learn of the economy of Nature at the present time. Unlike
the cosmogonists, they did not trouble themselves with what
was the first condition of the earth, nor try to trace every
subsequent phase of its history. They held that the geological
record does not go back to the beginning, and that therefore
any attempt to trace that beginning from geological evidence
was vain. Most strongly, too, did they protest against the
introduction of causes which could not be shown to be a part
of the present economy. They never wearied of insisting that
to the everyday workings of air, earth, and sea, must be our
appeal for an explanation of the older revolutions of the globe.
The fall of rain, the flow of rivers, the slowly crumbling decay
of mountain, valley, and shore, were one by one summoned as
witnesses to bear testimony to the manner in which the most
stupendous geological changes are slowly and silently brought

*IIutton's "Theory of the Earth" was first published in 1788,
and in an enlarged form in 1795. Plaj^air's " Illustrations of the
Huttonian Theory " appeared in the spring of 1802.

+ Geikie's "Life of Murchison," chap. vii.

92 CHARLES LYELL

about. The waste of the land, which they traced everywhere,
was found to give birth to soil —renovation of the surface thus
springing Phoenix-like out of its decay. In the descent of
water from the clouds to the mountains, and from the moun-
tains to the sea, they recognised the power by which valleys
are carved out of the land, and by which also the materials
worn from the land are carried out to the sea, there to be
gathered into solid stone— the framework of new continents.
In the rocks of the hills and valleys they recognised abundantly
the traces of old sea-bottoms. They stoutly maintained that
these old sea-bottoms had been raised up into dry land from
time to time by the powerful action of the same internal heat
to which volcanoes owe their birth, and they pointed to the
way in which granite and other crystalline rocks occur as con-
vincing evidence of the extent to which the solid earth has
been altered and upheaved by the action of these subterranean
fires."

Sucli were the leading principles of tlie "Huttonian
tlieory," though perhaps they are stated here in a
slightly more developed form than when it was first
presented by its illustrious author. But it was defec-
tive in one important respect, on a side from which it
might have obtained the strongest support, and have
liberated itself from the bondage of deluges ; in other
words, of convulsive action, by which it was still
fettered, for " it took no account of the fossil remains
of plants and animals. Hence it ignored the long
succession of life upon the earth which those remains
have since made known, as well as the evidence
thereby obtainable as to the nature and order of
physical changes, such as alternations of sea and
land, revolutions of climate, and suchlike."

This defect was supplied by William Smith. He
had learnt, by patient labour among the stratified
rocks of England, to recognise their fossils, had
ascertained that certain assemblages of the latter

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 93

characterised each group of strata, and by this means
had traced such groups through the country, and
had placed them in order of superposition. So
early as 1790, he published a " Tabular View of the
British Strata," and from that time was engaged at
every spare moment in constructing a geological map
of England, all the while freely communicating the
results of his researches to his brethren of the
hammer. " The execution of his map was completed
in 1815, and it remains a lasting monument of
original talent and extraordinary perseverance; for
he had explored the whole country on foot without
the guidance of previous observers, or the aid of
fellow labourers, and had succeeded in throwing into
natural divisions the whole complicated series of
British rocks." ^

A most important step in view of future progress,
at any rate in our own country, was taken by the
foundation of the Geological Society of London in
1807, the members of which devoted themselves at
first rather to the collection of facts than to the
construction of theories, while in France the labours
of Brongniart and Cuvier in comparative osteology,
and of Lamarck in recent and fossil shells, smoothed
the way toward the downfall of catastrophic geology.
Those men, with their disciples, " raised these depart-
ments of study to a rank of which they had never
before been deemed susceptible. Their investigations
had eventually a powerful effect in dispelling the
illusion which had long prevailed concerning the
absence of analogy between the ancient and modern
state of our planet. A close comparison of the recent

* " Principles of Geology," chap. iv.

94 . CHARLES LYELL

and fossil species, and the inferences drawn in regard
to their habits, accustomed the geologist to contem-
plate the earth as having been at successive periods
the dwelling-place of animals and plants of different
races — some terrestrial, and others aquatic ; some
fitted to live in seas, others in the waters of lakes
and rivers. By the consideration of these topics
the mind was slowly and insensibly withdrawn from
imaginary pictures of catastrophes and chaotic con-
fusion, such as haunted the imagination of the early
cosmogonists. Numerous proofs were discovered of
the tranquil deposition of sedimentary matter, and
the slow development of organic life.""^

Such was the earlier history of Geology; such
were the influences which had moulded its ideas till
within a few years of the date when Lyell began to
make it a subject of serious study. At that time,
namely about the year 1820, the Geological Society
of London had become the centre and meeting-point
of a band of earnest and enthusiastic workers, whose
names will always hold an honoured place in the
annals of the Science. Among the older members —
most of whom, however, were still in the prime of
life, were such men as Buckland, Conybeare, Fitton,
Greenough, Horner, MacCuUoch, Warburton and Wol-
laston ; among the younger, De la Beche and Scrope,
Sedgwick and Whewell. Murchison, though a few
years Ly ell's senior, was by almost as many his junior
as a geologist, for he did not join the Society till the
end of 1824, and was actually admitted on the even-
ing when Lyell, then one of its honorary secretaries,
read his first paper — on the marl-lake at Kinnordy.

* ** Principles of Geology," chap. iv.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 95

Such men also as Babbage, Herschel, Warburton, Sir
Philip Egerton, the Earl of Enniskillen (then Viscount
Cole), must not be forgotten, who were either less fre-
quent visitors or more directly devoted to other studies.
At this time geology was passing into a phase which
endured for some forty years — the exaltation of the
palseontological, the depreciation of the mineralogical
side. If it be true, as it has been more than once
remarked, that the father of the geologist was a
mineralogist, it is no less true that his mother was
a palaeontologist; but at this particular epoch the
paternal influence obviously declined, while that ot
the mother became inordinately strong. WoUaston
and MacCuUoch, indeed, were geologists of the old
school ; excellent mineralogists and petrologists (to
use the more modern term) as accurate as it was
possible to be with the appliances at their disposal,
but among the younger men De la Beche, accompanied
to a certain extent by Scrope and Sedgwick, was
almost alone in following their lead. But although
palaeontology and stratigraphical geology as its as-
sociate were clearly making progress, the school of
thought, of which Lyell became the champion,
counted at this time but few adherents, for the older
geologists were almost to a man " catastrophists." A
few, like MacCulloch, undervalued paloeontological re-
search, and thus were doubly prejudiced against the
uniformitarian views. Buckland, Conybeare, Green-
ough, as we have already seen from incidental re-
marks in Ly ell's letters, had put their trust in deluges,
and imagined that by such an agency the earth had
been prepared for a new creation of living things
and a new group of geological formations. Sedg\vick

96 CHARLES LYELL

even was to a great extent on their side. He had
speedily emerged from the waters of Wernerism, in
which at first he had been for a short time immersed,
but he did not escape so easily from the roaring floods
of diluvialists, and the grandeur of catastrophic
changes in the crust of the earth fascinated his en-
thusiastic, almost poetic, nature. Even so late as
1830, we find him criticising from the chair of the
Geological Society the leading argument of Lyell's
"Principles of Geology" in no friendly spirit, and
bestowing high praise on Elie de Beaumont's theory
of Parallel Mountain-chains.

A brief summary of the views advocated by this
eminent French geologist may serve to indicate, per-
haps better than any general statements, the in-
fluences against which Lyell had to contend at the
outset of his career as a geologist. With the omission
of certain parts, to which no exception would be
taken, or which have no very direct bearing upon the
immediate question, they are as follows "^ : (1) In the
history of the earth there have been long periods of
comparative repose, during which the sedimentary
strata have been continuously deposited, and short
periods of paroxysmal violence, during which that
continuity has been interrupted. (2) At each of
these periods of violence or revolution in the state
of the earth's surface, a great number of mountain-
chains have been formed suddenly, and these chains, if
contemporaneous, are parallel ; but if not so, generally
differ in direction. (3) Each revolution or great
convulsion has coincided with the date of another

* Abridged from Lyell's summary: "Principles of Geology,"
Qhap. vii.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 97

geological phenomenon, namely, the passage from
one independent sedimentary formation to another,
characterised by a considerable difference in " or-
ganic types." (4) There has been a recurrence of
these paroxysmal movements from the remotest
geological periods ; and they may still be produced.

Thus the force of authority, which has to be
reckoned with in geology, if not in other branches of
science, was in the main adverse to Lyell, who could
count on but few to join him in his attack on
catastrophism. One indeed there was, a host in
himself, who, though his contemporary in years, had
devoted himself wholly to geology at a slightly earlier
date and had already become convinced, by his
field-work in Italy and France, of the efficacy of ex-
isting forces to work mighty changes, if time were
given, in the configuration of the earth's surface.
This was George Poulett Scrope, a man of broad cul-
ture, great talents, and singular independence of
thought, who had convinced himself of the errors of
the Wernerian theory by his studies in Italy in
the years 1817-19, and had thoroughly explored the
volcanic district of Auvergne in 1821. His work
on the Phenomena of Volcanoes, pubhshed in 1823,
and that on the Geology of Central France, published
in 1826, had given the cowp de grace to Werner's
hypothesis and had made the first breach in the
fortress of the catastrophists.

For a complete solution of the problem to which
Lyell had addressed himself, two methods of investi-
gation were necessary. It must be demonstrated that
in tracing back the life history of the earth from
the present age to a comparatively remote past no

98 CHARLES LYELL

breach of continuity could be detected, and that the
forces which were still engaged in sculpturing and
modifying this earth's surface were adequate, given
time enough, to produce all those changes to which
the catastrophist appealed as proofs of his hypotheses.
To establish the one conclusion, it was necessary to
make a careful study of the Tertiary formations,
which were still in a condition of comparative con-
fusion ; to arrange them in an order no less clear and
definite than that of the Secondary systems ; and to
show, by working downward from the present fauna,
not only that many living species had been long in
existence, but also that these had appeared gradually,
not simultaneously, and had in like manner replaced
forms which had one after another vanished — to
prove, in short, " that past and present are bound
together by an unsevered cord of life, whose inter-
lacing strands carry us back in orderly change from
age to age." To establish the other conclusion it was
necessary to show that, even in historical times,
considerable changes had occurred in the outlines
of coasts, and that heat and cold, the sea, or rain
and rivers — especially the last — had been agents of
the utmost importance in the sculpture of cliffs,
valleys, and hills. For both these purposes careful
study, not only in Britain, but also still more in other
regions, was absolutely necessary, and it was with
them in view that Lyell undertook his journeys, from
the time when his geological ideas began to assume
a definite shape until the last volume of the " Prin-
ciples" was published. By that date, as has been
stated in the preceding chapters, he had made him-
self familiar in the course of his geological education

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. \)\f

with many parts of Britain, had laboriously inves-
tigated the more important collections and museums
of France and Italy, and had carefully studied in the
field the principal Tertiary deposits not only in these
countries but also in Sicily and in parts of Switzer-
land and Germany. To obtain evidence bearing on
the physical aspect of the question on a scale grander
than was afforded by the undulating lowlands, or
worn-down highland regions of Britain and the neigh-
bouring parts of Europe, he had rambled among the
Alps and Pyrenees, examining their peaks and preci-
pices, their snowfields, glaciers, lakes, and torrents,
and watching the processes of destruction, transpor-
tation, and deposition ot which crag, stream, and
plain afford a never-ending object-lesson. In order
to study volcanoes still in activity, he had climbed
Vesuvius and Etna; in order to scrutinise more
minutely the structure of cones, craters, and lava
streams, he had visited Auvergne, Catalonia, and the
Eifel; while in all his goings and comings through
scenes where Nature worked more unobtrusively, he
had watched her never-ending toil, as she destroyed
with the one hand and built with the other. He was
thus able to Avrite with the authority of one who has
seen, not of one who merely quotes ; of one who knew,
not of one who had learnt by rote. The " Principles of
Geology," though of course it had to rely not seldom
on the work of others, bore the stamp of the author's
experience, and was redolent, not of the dust of
libraries, but of the sweetness of the open air. That
fact added no little force to its cautious and clear
inductive reasoning; that fact did much to disarm
opposition, and to open the way to victory.

100 CHARLES LYELL

CHAPTER VI.

EIGHT YEARS OF QUIET PROGRESS.

Both courses of lectures ended* and the third volume
of the " Principles " successfully launched, Mr. and
Mrs. Lyell left London in June, 1833, for another
Continental tour. During their first halt, at Paris,
she was duly introduced to the famous quarries of
Montmartre, and had an opportunity of " collecting
a fossil shell or two for the first time." Thence they
made their way to Bonn, which she had left as a
bride the previous summer, and, after another short
halt, proceeded up the gorge of the Rhine to Bingen,
visiting on the way the ironworks at Sayn, and
examining the stratified volcanic deposits on the plain
between the river and that town. The Tertiary basin
at Mayence was next visited, and from it they went
leisurely to Heidelberg. From the picturesque old
town by the Neckar they struck off to Stuttgart and
to Pappenheim, examining one or two collections at
the former place, and the quarries of Solenhofen,
near the latter. These were already noted for the
abundant and well-preserved fossils obtained in the
quarries worked for the well-known " lithographic
stone," though the famous Arch^eopteryx had yet to be
found ; that strange creature, feathered and like a bird,
but with teeth in its beak and a tail like a reptile,
which has supplied such an important link in the
chain of evidence in favour of progressive develop-

♦ At King's College and at the Royal Institution. See -pj^. 71, 72.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 101

ment. Thence they travelled to Niirnberg and
Bayreuth, visiting on their way the noted caves at
Muggendorf, and returned to Bonn by way of
Bamberg, Wiirtzburg, AschafFenberg, and Frankfurt.
In this journey, few localities of special interest were
investigated, but, as Lyell's letters show, no oppor-
tunity was lost of discussing important questions with
local geologists, or of examining sections in the lield.
But on the way back to England through Belgium
a halt was made at Liege, to inspect Dr. Schmerling's
grand collection of cave-remains. It is evident,
though but a short notice of it has been preserved,
that this visit kindled an enthusiasm which was to
produce important results in later years. Lyell writes
(to Mantell, after his return to England) : —

" I saw at Li^ge the collection of Dr. Schmerling, who in
three years has, by his own exertion and the incessant labours
of a clever amateur servant, cleared out some twenty caves
untouched by any previous searcher, and has filled a truly
splendid museum. He numbers already thrice the number of
fossil cavern mammalia known when Buckland wrote his
'Idola Specus'; and such is the prodigious number of the
individuals of some species — the bears, for example, of which
he has five species, one large, one new — that several entire
skeletons will be constructed. Oh, that the Lewes chalk had
been cavernous ! And he has these, and a number of yet
unexplored and shortly to be investigated holes, all to himself:
but envy him not— you cannot imagine what he feels at being
far from a metropolis which can afford him sympathy ; and
having not one congenial soul at Li^ge, and none who take
any interest in his discoveries save the priests— and what kind
they take you may guess, more especially as he has found
human remains in breccia, embedded with the extinct species,
under circumstances far more difficult to get over than any I
have previously heard of. The three coats or layers of stalagmite
cited by me at Choquier are quite true." *

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 401.

102 CHARLES LYELL

Very probably among these human relics was one
which was destined to become famous — the skull
found in the cave at Engis — for this was described
by Dr. Schmerling in his " Recherches sur les osse-
ments fossiles decouverts dans les cavernes de la
Province de Liege," a book published in 1833. It
was found at a depth of nearly five feet, hidden
under an osseous breccia, composed of the remains
of small animals, and containing one rhinoceros tusk
with several teeth of horses and of ruminants. The
earth in which it was lying did not show the slightest
trace of disturbance, and teeth of rhinoceros, horse,
hysena, and bear surrounded it on all sides."^ This
relic proved — and since then numbers of similar
cases have been discovered — that if the man of Engis
were an antediluvian, and his corpse had been washed
into the cave together with the drowned bodies of
rhinoceros, and other animals, f that event, at any
rate, must have corresponded with a great change in
the habits of the larger mammalia, for they had been
unable to return to haunts which once had been
congenial. In other words, the foundation was being
laid, now in 1833, for the next great advance in
geological science, the contemporaneity of man and
several extinct species of mammals, indicating, of
course, the antiquity of the human race. To this
point, however, public attention was not directed
for nearly twenty years. Then various causes, especi-
ally an examination into the evidence discovered in

* Huxley, " Man's Place in Nature," p. 121.

t Only the skull was found, and that imperfect ; moreover, the
missing part could not be discovered. The same is true of the other
animal remains, so that they could hardly have been victims of the
Deluge.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 103

the neighbourhood of Abbeville and Amiens by M.
Boucher de Perthes, brought the question to the
front. But though the controversy was sharp and
bitter for a time, it was speedily over, and the question
which is still agitated — though mildly and in a sense
wholly scientific — is whether man appeared in this
part of Europe and in corresponding regions of North
America, before, during, or after the glacial epoch ?

But the Engis skull is a relic exceptionally interest-
ing. Though the handiwork of primaeval man is
common enough — rudely chipped instruments or
weapons of flint or other stone, worked portions of
bones and antlers, and such like — yet his bones are far
less common than those of other mammals, and, most
of all, skulls are rare. Professor Huxley, in his work
from which we have already quoted, states that Dr.
Schmerling found a bone implement in the Engis
cave, and worked flints in all the ossiferous Belgian
caves, yet this was the only skull in anything like a
perfect condition, though another cavern furnished
two fragments of parietal bones. Yet from the latter
numerous bones of the extremities were obtained, and
these had belonged to three individuals. What
inferences, then, can be drawn from this skull as
to the intellectual rank of primaeval man? This
question was discussed by its discoverer, and the
evidence has been also considered by Professor
Huxley. The former thus expressed his opinion,
" that this cranium has belonged to a person of
limited intellectual faculties, and we conclude thence
that it belonged to a man of a low degree of civilisa-
tion ; a deduction which is borne out by contrasting
the capacity of the frontal with that of the occipital

104 CHARLES LYELL

region." Professor Huxley sums up a careful dis-
cussion of the evidence, in which he calls special
attention to points where it happens to be defective,
by stating that the specimen agrees in certain respects
with Australian skulls, in others with some European,
but that he can find in the remains no character
which, if it were a recent skull, would give any
trustworthy clue to the race to which it might apper-
tain. "Assuredly there is no mark of degradation
about any part of its structure. It is, in fact, a fair
average human skull, which might have belonged to
a philosopher, or might have contained the thought-
less brains of a savage." ^

The winter of 1833 and the spring of the following
year were spent in London. It was evidently a busy,
though uneventful, time : a new edition of the " Prin-
ciples " was being prepared and printed, a paper read
to the Geological Society on a freshwater formation
at Cerdagne in the Pyrenees, and information collected
for a summer's journey. This was to be in a new
direction — to Scandinavia — with the more especial
intent of studying the evidence on which it has been
asserted that the shores of the Baltic had changed
their level within recent times. But on this occasion
Mrs. Lyell remained at home, as the travelling might
occasionally have been too rough for her ; so we find,
in a journal written for her perusal, a full sketch of a
tour which proved, as he had anticipated, to be fruitful
in scientific results. His first halt was at Hamburg,
where, on his arrival, with characteristic energy he
dashed off at once in a carriage to examine a section
below Altona which he had marked down on his

* " Man's Place in Nature," p. 156.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 105

voyage np the Elbe. This is his brief summary :
" CHffs sixty or seventy feet high. Filled three pages
of note-book. Saw the source of the great Holstein
granite blocks. Gathered shells thrown ashore by the
Elbe." From Hamburg he drove to Lubeck, along
one of the worst of roads. The primary cause of its
badness was geological — a loose sand interspersed with
granite boulders ; the secondary, the royal revenues ;
for these largely depended on the tolls paid by vessels
on entering the sound, and if a good road had con-
nected the two towns much merchandise would have
gone overland, to the king's loss. At Ltibeck Lyell
for the first time stood upon the shore of the Baltic,
and utilised the half-hour before his steamer started
for Copenhagen by hunting for shells. As a reward,
he found a well-known freshwater genus (Pcdudina)
among common marine forms."^

From Copenhagen a rapid journey in Seeland and
to Moen introduced him to a number of interestino^
sections of the drift, accounts of which were afterwards
worked into his books, and showed him at Faxoe and
elsewhere limestones overlying the upper chalk, like
those at Maestricht in Holland, and at Meudon near
Paris. All these limestones possess an exceptional
interest, for they contain a mixture of Secondary with
Tertiary fossils, and thus help to fill up the wide gap
between these two great divisions in Britain and the
adjacent parts of Europe. On his return to Copen-
hagen Lyell was very kindly received by the Crown
Prince, who was an ardent naturalist, and allowed him
to examine a fine collection of minerals and fossils
accumulated by himself.

* Turbo litto7'etcs, Mytihis edulis, Cardium edtile.

106 CHARLES LYELL

After crossing the Sound to Malmo, Lyell spent
about a fortnight in driving along an inland route
through the southern part of Sweden to Norrkoping,
while a halt at Lund afforded the opportunity of
pleasant talks with the professors of the University,
and of seeing some formations of which hitherto he
had not had much experience. The terms in which
he refers to these indirectly proves what strides geology
has taken in the last sixty years. " We made an
excursion together through a country of greywacke
with orthoceratite limestone and schist,^ containing a
curious zoophyte called graptolite in great abundance,
and a few shells." On the journey also he found
much to interest a geologist — boulders almost every-
where, some of huge size, lying on the surface or
scattered in the sand; in one place an outcrop of
Cretaceous greensand, full of belemnites, which were
popularly regarded as " witches' candles." Then over
a picturesque granite region — " a country of rock, fir-
wood, and peasants" — till he arrived at Norrkoping,
and made his way in a steamer down one fjord and up
another until he came into the Malar Lake. These last
stages introduced him to a kind of scenery of which
Scandinavia affords such striking and innumerable
examples — the margin of a submerged mountain land.
" We entered," he says, " a passage between an endless
string of islets and the mainland, the water here
smooth as a millpond. We passed swiftly on in deep
water close to the rocks, on the barest of which are a
few firs in the clefts. These are evidently the summits
of submarine mountains." At Stockholm he found

* The term, of course, is used here in the sense of either a slaty-
rock or a hard shale.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 107

plenty to be done. Some of the evidence, which had
been brought forward to prove a rising of the land,
was obviously weak. For instance, on one of his first
visits to a place where the upward movement was said
to be comparatively rapid, he found a fine oak-tree,
perhaps a couple of centuries old, growing eight feet
above high- water mark, and thus indicating either
that oak-trees had recently changed their habits or
that the change of level had been slow. " In dealing
with this question it is necessary," he writes, " to
cross-examine both nature and man. The testimony
of the former is strong ; of the latter, I must say, so
weak and contradictory that I require to know the
men and find how they got their views." A valuable
precaution this, which might be remembered with
advantage in days when stay-at-home geologists are
far too numerous. If this were done, the paper
currency of the science would be considerably reduced
in quantity, and there would be a closer correspon-
dence between its real and its nominal value. A little
scepticism was certainly justifiable, for one would-be
savant stood him out " that a bed of GardiuTYi edule
(the common cockle) 100 feet high proves that the
fresh water of Lake Malar was once that much higher."
Lyell adds nothing to this remark, but his silence is
eloquent.

This expedition, however — to Sodertelje — gave
results yet more striking than marine shells 100 feet
above the present level of the Baltic. " What think
you," he writes, " of ships in the same formation, nay,
a housel It is as true as the Temple of Serapis."^

* The ruins of which (in the Bay of Baise) gradually sank after the
middle of the fifth century until (probably towards the end of the

108 CHARLES LYELL

I do not mean that I discovered all this, but I shall
be the first to give a geological account of it. I am
in high spirits at the prize." Upsala also, to which
he next moved, increased his stores of knowledge and
of fossils. " I went to the hill, a hundred feet high,
on which the tower stands, to examine marine shells.
All of Baltic species. You remember that in the
half -hour between the two steamboats at Ltibeck,
or rather Travemunde, I collected shells by the quay.
Not one fossil have I found newer than the chalk in
Sweden, that was not in the number of those found
living in that half-hour." More localities for shells
were visited, erratics were examined, and pilots were
questioned closely " about the agency of ice, in which
they believe." With their opinion Lyell inclined
to agree; at any rate, he was convinced that his
observations would " quite overset the debacle theory,"
and, as he expected, "bring in ice carriage as the
cause." On the coast further north at Oregrund and
Gefle, bench-marks had been cut some years previously
in order to apply a more exact test to the question of
the change in levels. These he visited, and the
former seemed to prove " as Galileo said in a different
sense, that ' the earth moves.' " The marks near
Gefle afforded similar testimony, so that he felt now
that the main object of his journey was accomplished,
and inserted this pregnant note in his journal : — " I
feel now what I was very sensible of when correcting
my last edition,"^ that I was not justified in writing

fifteenth century) the floor was more than twenty feet under water.
Since then it has risen up again. — " Principles of Geology," chap. xxx.
* He had expressed his doubts, in this and the former editions, as
to the validity of the proofs of a gradual rise of land in Sweden.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 10

any more until I had done all in my power to ascer-
tain the truth in regard to the 'great northern
phenomenon/ as the gradual rise of part of Sweden
has been very naturally called. You will see by-and-
by how important a point it was, and how materially
it will modify my mode of treating the science, and
how much it will advance the theory of the agency
of existing causes as a key to explain geological
phenomena." ^

But the work at sea-marks was not yet quite
ended, and there was besides another classic spot
to be visited — Uddevalla, between Lake Werner and
the western coast. Here are deposits in which sea-
shells are abundant at a height of about two hundred
feet above the sea. Nothing but a submergence can
account for their presence, for polyzoa and barnacles
are found attached to the solid rock. Some of the
latter, adhering to the gneiss, were collected by Lyell
on this occasion.f

Fossil shells (of existing species) were so numerous
that, he says, the deposit was worked for making
lime, and he compares it with a well-known bed in the
Tertiaries of the Paris Basin. The shells, however, at
Uddevalla, as he points out, are not of that brackish-
water character peculiar to the Baltic, but such as
now live in the Northern Ocean. { On reaching the
coast he made an expedition by boat, and saw the
bench-mark at Gullholmen, and rocks which had

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 436.

t Lyell's specimens appear to have come from Kured, two miles
north of Uddevalla, and only one hundred feet ahove the sea, but
barnacles were obtained by Brorgniart at two hundred feet. — " Princi-
ples of Geology," chap. xxxi.

chap. iii.

110 CHARLES LYELL

emerged from the sea within the memory of people
still living. Here, by way of completing his work, he
" hired the services of a smith to make a mark at
the water's edge : —

C. 18. L.

18. 7. 34."

So he brought his journey in Scandinavia to a
close, and by the end of July had reached Kinnordy,
where Mrs. Lyell awaited his coming. Then he set
to work to prepare a brief sketch of his investigations
for the approaching meeting of the British Associa-
tion in Edinburgh, and a more elaborate paper, to be
communicated to the Royal Society in London, in
which he set forth the reasons which had convinced
him that in Sweden, " both on the Baltic and ocean
side, part of that country is really undergoing a
gradual and insensibly slow rise." It affects an
area measuring about one thousand miles north and
south, and is believed to reach a maximum at the
North Cape. There it is said, but the statement
needs verification, to amount to five feet in a century ;
at Gefle, ninety miles north of Stockholm, it cannot
be more than two or three feet in the same time;
while at Stockholm itself it can hardly exceed six
inches. Further south, in Scania proper, as at
Malmo, Skanor, Trelleborg, and Ystad, the movement
is distinctly in an opposite direction.^

This paper was afterwards accepted by the Royal
Society as the Bakerian lecture for the year. But
the preparation of this was not Lyell's only occupa-

♦ " Principles of Geology," ch. xxxi. " Antiquity of Man," ch. iii.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. Ill

tion. In October he had begun fossil ichthyology, was
attending lectures in chemistry, and " had made some
progress," as he writes to Mantell, " in a single volume
which two years ago I promised Murray, a purely
elementary work for beginners in geology, and which
I find more agreeable work than I had expected."
So his hands were pretty full. A pleasant surprise
came in the closing months of the year, namely the
award ol one of the Royal Medals by that Society in
acknowledgment of the merits of his "Principles of
Geology."

In the earlier part of 1835 Lyell accepted the
presidency of the Geological Societ}^, an office which, it
will be remembered, he had virtually refused a couple
of years before, when he was busy with his great book.
With this exception, nothing worthy of record appears
to have happened in the first six months of the year,
but in July Mrs. Lyell and he left England for a
journey to France, Germany, and Switzerland. By
that date, as he mentions in a letter to a friend, 1,750
copies of the last edition of the " Principles " had been
sold, a demand that puts him in good heart as to the
future of the book, and proves that his labours on it had
not been in vain. But he did not permit himself to
be idle. As a letter written to Sedgwick from Paris
shows, he was still working away at the classification
of the Tertiary deposits ; for in this letter he discusses
the relation of the coralline and the red, or shelly
Crag of Suffolk. Mr. Charlesworth, subsequently well
known as a collector, had been obtaining a number of
fossil shells from the former deposit, and the character
of these suggested that it was distinctly the older of
the two, as is now universally admitted. In discussing

112 CHARLES LYELL

this question Lyell lays down a principle of classifica-
tion the soundness of which has been proved by
experience, namely, that the age of a Tertiary deposit
is to be determined by the proportion of recent species
and the relation of these to the forms still living in
the neighbouring seas. If, for instance, the recent
shells in a formation, amounting to one-half, or even
as few as one-third, of the total number can be thus
found, the formation will be Pliocene in age, " while the
recent shells of the Miocene have a more exotic and
tropical form." To this conclusion he had been led, by
an examination, with the help of Deshayes, of a
typical collection of Crag fossils which he had carried
with him to Paris. As to other matters, the leading
French geologists were still warring vigorously in
defence of deluges, and none of his numerous heresies,
he remarks, appears '' to have excited so much honest
indignation as his recent attempt to convey some of
the huge Scandinavian blocks to their present destina-
tion by means of ice." He had proved, he reminds
Sedgwick, that " some of the great blocks near Upsala
must have travelled to their present destination since
the Baltic was a brackish water sea, so that those who
maintain that there was one, and one only, rush of
water, which scattered all the blocks of Sweden and
the Alps, must make out this catastrophe to be, as
it were, an affair of yesterday." Geology, even at
that date, had advanced far enough for this admission
to have landed the diluvialists in some awkward
dilemmas, to say nothing of the physical difficulties
which they would find in accounting for the existence
of waves or currents potent enough to bowl the Pierre d
hot from the aiguilles round the Trient glacier to the

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 113

slopes of the Jura, or to fling tlie erratics of Scandinavia
broadcast over the lowlands around the Baltic. This,
however, was not the only lost cause over which the
French geologists were holding their shield. Lyell
goes on to write, with a touch of quiet sarcasm :
" As to the elevation crater business, Von Buch, de
Beaumont, and Dufresnoy are to write and prove that
Somma and Etna are elevation craters, and Von Buch
himself has just gone to Auvergne to prove that Mont
Dore is one also."

Lyell's special intention in visiting the Alps was to
obtain evidence as to the relation of the metamorphic
and sedimentary rocks. Geologists of the Wernerian
School, with sundry others who hardly went so far as
the Freiberg professor, maintained that the crystalline
schists, including gneiss, had been produced, often as
precipitates, in a primaeval ocean, the waters of which
were far too hot to allow of the existence of life. At
a later time, as the temperature fell, the great masses
of slightly altered slates and grits were deposited — the
region of " greywacke," the transitional rocks as they
were commonly called. These for the most part were
unfossiliferous, at any rate in their earliest stages. To
this view, of course, the Huttonian dictum, which
Lyell sought to establish, was diametrically opposed,
viz. that the earth showed no signs of a beginning.
Now he had been informed that in the Alps certain
slaty rocks contained fossils which indicated an age
corresponding generally with the chalk of England,
and that in other parts of that chain even crystalline
schists could be found interbedded with fossiliferous
strata of Secondary age. To settle the former question
he intended to visit the famous quarries of Glarus,

H

114 CHARLES LYELL

but was ultimately compelled to leave this for another
year, as he took the latter point first in order of time,
and the investigation of it involved more work than he
had anticipated. In regard to this, the most important
sections were to be found on the precipitous northern
slopes of the Jungfrau and in the upper part of the
Urbach-thal, a lonely glen which descends into the
main valley of the Aar at Imhof, above Meyringen.
In both these localities gneiss appears to overlie
" fossiliferous limestone," and Lyell, after visiting them,
returned satisfied that he had seen " alternations of the
gneiss with limestone of the lias or something newer
in the highest regions of the Alps." That undoubtedly
he saw, but he did not suspect that the appearance
was illusory. This was not in the least surprising ; the
Alps were still almost a terra incognita ; the processes
of " mountain making " as yet were unknown ; many
statements in common currency as to the passage of
sedimentary into crystalline rocks were erroneous and
distinctly misleading. Only by degrees was it dis-
covered that this superposition of gneiss or crystalline
schist to Secondary rock was due to folding on a scale
so gigantic that the older had been doubled over upon
the younger rock and the apparent order of succession
was the converse of the true one. The intercalation
also of the gneiss and the Jurassic limestone was a
result of a similar action, but carried, if possible, to an
even greater extreme, for here the hard gneiss had
been thrust in wedge-like slabs between the softer
masses of sedimentary rock, like a paper-knife between
the leaves of a book ; that is to say, the gneiss and
crystalHne schists in both cases were vastly more
ancient than the fossiliferous limestone. It is only of

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 115

late years that this startling fact has been established
beyond question ; and even now there are many
geologists who do not appear to recognise how
seriously the Huttonian dictum " there is no sign of
a beginning" has been shaken by the collapse of
this evidence. At the present time the question is
in this position ; all the attempts to prove crystalline
schists to be of the same age as, or younger than,
fossiliferous sedimentary rocks either have been com-
plete failures or have proved to be very dubious, while
in many cases these schists are demonstrably earlier
than the oldest rocks of the district to which a date
can be assigned. Hence, though possibly it may turn
out that the disciples of Hutton were right, and that,
as Lyell thought, a metamorphic rock may be of
almost any geological age, his hypothesis not only
is unproved, but also the evidence which has been
brought forward in its favour has turned out after a
strict scrutiny to be exceedingly dubious, if not abso-
lutely contrary. In regard to this question we may
feel a little surprise that one difficulty did not occur
to Lyell's sceptical mind, namely : what could be the
nature and cause of a process of metamorphism
which could convert one sediment into a crystalhne
schist — changed practically past recognition — and
leave its neighbour so far unaltered that its character-
istic fossils could be readily recognised ?

But though he was unable to investigate the
question of Secondary or perhaps early Tertiary fossils
in the " transition "-like rock of Glarus, his study of
the sedimentary deposits of the Bernese Oberland,
which had formed a necessary preliminary to the
other inquiry, raised some difficulties in his mind as

116 CHARLES LYELL

to the origin of slaty cleavage. At a meeting of the
Geological Society in the month of March, Professor
Sedgwick had read his classic paper ^ on this subject,
in which he established the independence of cleavage
and bedding. This paper laid the foundation for the
discovery of the true cause of the former structure,
though its author was unable, with the information
then at his command, to do more than suggest an
hypothesis, which afterwards proved to be incorrect.
He had shown that both the strike and the dip of
cleavage-planes were persistent over large areas, and
that while the one might gradually change its
direction and the other its angle of inclination, if
they were followed far enough, yet this angle usually
remained unaltered for considerable distances, and
appeared to be quite unaffected by any variation in
the slope of the strata. From these observations it
followed that the planes of cleavage ought not to be
coincident with those of bedding. Lyell, however,
writes to tell Sedgwick f : —

" I found the cleavage or slaty structure of fine drawing
slate in the great quarry of the Niesen, on the east [south] side
of the Lake of Thun, quite coincided with the dip of the strata
ascertained by alternate beds of greywacke . . . . As it
is the best description of drawing slate, and as divisible
almost as mica into thin plates, I cannot make out how to
distinguish such a structure from any which can be called
slaty, and such an attempt would, I fear, involve the subject
in great confusion."

The observation was perfectly correct, and many
like instances could be found in the Alps ; neverthe-

* " On the Structure of Large Mineral Masses," etc. Trans. Geol.
Soc. Lond., iii. p. 461.

t Life, Letters, and Journals, vol, i. p. 460.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. llV

less, Sedgwick was right in his generalisation, and the
two structures are perfectly independent, though the
difficulty raised by Lyell did not disappear till the
true cause of slaty cleavage was recognised — viz.
that it is a result of pressure. Thus, in a region like
the Alps, where the strata often have been so com-
pletely folded as to be bent, so to say, back to back,
the planes of cleavage, which are produced when the
rocks can no longer yield to the pressure by bending,
necessarily coincide with those of bedding. Still,
even in these cases, if careful search be made in the
vicinity, some minor flexure generally betrays the
secret, and exhibits the cleavage structure cutting
across that of bedding.

The next year, 1836, flowed on, like the last,
quietly and uneventfully ; a flfth edition of the
" Principles " was passing through the press ; the
" Elements of Geology " was making progress, though
slowly ; and Lyell's duties as President of the Geo-
logical Society, which involved the delivery of an
address in the month of February and the prepara-
tion of another one for the same season in the
following year, occupied a good deal of his time.
The summer was spent in a long visit to his parents
at Kinnordy, after which he and Mrs. Lyell made
some stay in the Isle of Arran before they returned
to London. The latter seemingly had been rather
out of health, and this may have been the reason why
a longer journey was not undertaken, but she must
have found the Scotch air a complete restorative, for
after her return to London in the autumn Lyell writes
to his father that " everyone is much struck with the
improvement in Mary's health and appearance."

lis Chahles lyell

But one letter, of the few which ha^e Ixen pre-
served from those written in 1836, possesses a special
interest, for it expresses his ideas, at this epoch, in
regard to the question of the origin of species, and
indicates his freedom from prejudice and the openness
of his mind. It is addressed to Sir John Herschel,
then engaged in his memorable investigations at the
Cape of Good Hope, who had favoured him with some
valuable comments and criticisms on the Principles of
Geology, and in the course of these had corrected a mis-
take which Lyell had made in regard to a rather diffi-
cult physical question. In referring to this, the latter
remarks that the clearness of the mathematical reason-
ing (to quote his words) " made me regret that I had
not given some of the years which I devoted to Greek
plays and Aristotle at Oxford, and afterwards to law
and other desultory pursuits, to mathematics." Doubt-
less there is hardly any better foundation for geology
than a course of mathematics ; at the same time,
classical studies did much to give Lyell his lucidity
and elegance of style, and thus to ensure the success
of the " Principles of Geology."

It will be best to give Lyell's own words, for the
document forms an appendix or lengthy postscript.
As is incidentally mentioned, it was not in his own
handwriting,"^ and thus probably was drawn up with
rather more than usual care.

" In regard to the origination of new species, I am very
glad to find that you think it probable it may be carried on
through the intervention of intermediate causes. I left this
rather to be inferred, not thinking it worth while to offend a
certain class of persons by embodying in words what would

* The weakness of his eyes was always more or less of a trouble.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 119

only be a speculation .... When I first came to the
notion — which I never saw expressed elsewhere, though I have
no doubt it had all been thought out before — of a succession
of extinction of species, and creation of new ones, going on
perpetually now, and through an indefinite period of the past,
and to continue for ages to come, all in accommodation to the
changes which must continue in the inanimate and habitable
earth, the idea struck me as the grandest which I had ever
conceived, so far as regards the attributes of the Presiding
Mind. For one can in imagination summon before us a small
part * at least of the circumstances which must be contem-
plated and foreknown, before it can be decided what powers
and qualities a new species must have in order to enable it
to endure for a given time, and to play its part in due relation
to all other beings destined to coexist with it, before it dies
out. It might be necessary, perhaps, to be able to know the
number by which each species would be represented in a given
region 10,000 years hence, as much as for Babbage to find
what would be the place of every wheel in his new calculating
machine at each movement.

" It may be seen that unless some slight additional pre-
caution be taken, the species about to be born would at a
certain era be reduced to too low a number. There may be
a thousand modes of ensuring its duration beyond that time ;
one, for example, may be the rendering it more prolific, but this
would perhaps make it press too hard upon other species at
other times. Now, if it be an insect it may be made in one of
its transformations to resemble a dead stick, or a lichen, or a
stone, so as to be less easily found by its enemies ; or if this
would make it too strong, an occasional variety of the species
may have this advantage conferred upon it ; or if this would be
still too much, one sex of a certain variety. Probably there is
scarcely a dash of colour on the wing or body, of which the
choice would be quite arbitrary, or what might not affect its
duration for thousands of years. I have been told that the
leaf- like expansions of the abdomen and thighs of a certain
Brazilian Mantis turn from green to yellow as autumn advances,
together with the leaves of the plants among which it seeks for

* It is " past " in the text (Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i.
p. 468), but I think this an obvious misprint.

120 CHARLES LYELL

its prey. Now if species come in in succession, such contri-
vances must sometimes be made, and such relations predeter-
mined between species, as the Mantis for example, and plants
not then existing, but Avhich it was foreseen would exist
together with some particular climate at a given time. But I
cannot do justice to this train of speculation in a letter, and
will only say that it seems to me to offer a more beautiful sub-
ject for reasoning and reflecting on, than the notion of great
batches of species all coming in, and afterwards going out at
once."

Early in October Charles Darwin, for whose return
from his noted voyage on the Beagle Lyell had more
than once expressed an earnest desire, arrived in
England, bringing with him a large collection of speci-
mens and almost innumerable facts, geological and
biological, the fruits of his travels. The biological
observations slowly ripened in Darwin's mind till they
had for their final result the " Origin of Species."
The geological stirred Lyell to immediate enthusiasm,
for they afforded a valuable support to some of the
ideas which he had put forward to the " Principles."
"The idea of the Pampas going up," he writes to Darwin,
" at the rate of an inch a century, while the Western
Coast and Andes rise many feet and unequally, has
long been a dream of mine. What a splendid field
you have to write upon ! " The enthusiasm evidently
was not confined to words, for Darwin himself says in
writing to Professor Henslow, " Mr. Lyell has entered
in the most good-natured manner, and almost without
being asked, into all my plans." ^ The letter to Dar-
win,! which is quoted above, also contains a character-
istic piece of advice.

" Don't accept any official scientific place if you can avoid

* « Life of Charles Darwin," vol. i. p. 273.
t Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 475.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 121

it, and tell no one I gave you this advice, as they would all cry
out against me as the preacher of anti-patriotic principles. I
fought against the calamity of being President [of the Geologi-
cal Society] as long as I could. All has gone on smoothly, and
it has not cost me more time than I anticipated ; but my ques-
tion is, whether the time annihilated by learned bodies ('par
les affaires administratives ') is balanced by any good they do.
Fancy exchanging Herschel at the Cape for Herschel as Presi-
dent of the Royal Society, which he so narrowly escaped being,
and I voting for him too ! I hope to be forgiven for that. At
least, work as I did, exclusively for yourself and for Science for
many years, and do not prematurely incur the honour or the
penalty of official dignities. There are people who may be
profitably employed in such duties, because they would not
work if not so engaged."

Not very altruistic advice, it may be feared, but
nevertheless bearing the stamp of practical wisdom.
Committee-work and other official duties are terrible
wasters of time, and thus, although often necessary
and inevitable, are rightly regarded as evils. Many
men, as Lyell intimates, have been seriously hindered
in researches for which they were exceptionally fitted
by allowing themselves to be at everyone's beck and
call, and getting their days cut to shreds by meetings.
So far has this gone in some cases, that the high promise
of early days has been very inadequately fulfilled, and
some great piece of work has been never completed.
If the spirit in which Lyell writes were more frequent,
the common illusion that workers in science belong
to some inferior branch of the public service would be
dispelled, and the business of scientific societies would
sometimes run more smoothly ; at any rate, it would
be finished more quickly, because no one would care
to waste time over splitting hairs, and hunting for
knots in a bullrush."'^

* It is but rarely that, so far as the writer has seen, this remark

122 CHARLES LYELL

The year 1837, like the preceding one, was spent in
quiet work, though three months of the summer were
devoted to a journey on the Continent. As regards
the former, it is evident that the book on which he
was engaged had caused him more than ordinary diffi-
culty, for it appears to have progressed more slowly
than can be explained either by the duties of the
Presidential chair, which he resigned in the month
of February of this year, or by any distraction caused
by other scientific work. But a sentence in a letter
written to one of his sisters at the beginning of May
throws some light on the cause of the delay. He
says, " I have at last struck out a plan for the future
splitting of the ' Principles ' into ' Principles ' and
' Elements ' as two separate works, which pleases me
very much, so now I shall get on rapidly."

The summer journey was to Denmark and the
south of Norway, and this time Mrs. Lyell was able to
bear him company. They left London early in June
for Hamburg, crossing Holstein to Kiel, and travelling
thence to Copenhagen. Here he set to work at once
with Dr. Beck to study fossil shells, in the Crown
Prince's cabinet and in the other museums of the city.
Questions had arisen as to the nomenclature of various
fossil species to which Lyell had referred in his book,
on which Dr. Beck differed from Deshayes, so that
Lyell was anxious to investigate some of the points for
himself, and to see the original type-specimens in Lin-
naeus' collection, since these, in some cases, had been
wrongly identified by Lamarck and other palseontolo-

applies to the committees of scienti6c societies in London, but the
amount of time thus wasted in the universities, judging from his own
experience of one of them, is really melancholy.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 123

gists. During a drive with the Crown Prince, he had
the opportunity of examining an interesting section
of the drift a few miles from Copenhagen, where it
" was composed to a great depth of innumerable rolled
blocks of chalk with a few of granite intermixed. Fossils
were numerous in the chalk. . . . Prince Christian set
four men to work, while the horses were baiting, to
clear away the talus, by which I saw that the boulders
of chalk were in fact in beds, with occasional layers of
sand between."

On reaching Norway Lyell made several expedi-
tions from Christiania, in the course of which he ex-
amined a clay which occupies valleys and other parts
of the granite region. This, which sometimes is found
more than 600 feet above sea-level, he states " is a
marine deposit containing recent species of shells, such
as now inhabit the fjords of Norway."

This visit to Norway gave Lyell the opportunity of
dispelling some erroneous ideas as to the relation of
the granite to the " transition " (or lower Palaeozoic)
strata. This granite he found to be intrusive into
these rocks, and into the much more ancient gneiss
on which they rested. The sedimentary rocks near
the junction were much altered, the limestones being
changed into marble, the shale into micaceous schists ;
the fossils being more completely obliterated in the
latter than in the former case. Some remarks which
he makes as to the relations of the granite and gneiss
indicate the closeness and carefulness of his observa-
tions. " This gneiss . . . this most ancient rock
is so beautifully soldered on to the granite, so nicely
threaded by veins large and small, or in other cases so
shades into the granite, that had you not known the

124 CHARLES LYELL

immense difference in age, you would be half-staggered
with, the suspicion that all was made at one batch." "^

From Copenhagen, on their return, they went to
Liibeck and drove thence to Hamburg, across the sand
and boulder formation of the Baltic, and so through
the north of Germany. Among these boulders Lyell
recognised the red granite, which he had seen in
Norway sending off" veins into the orthoceratite lime-
stones and associated Silurian rocks. This " had been
carried, with small gravel of the same, by ice of course,
over the south of Norway, and thence down the south-
west of Sweden, and all over Jutland and Holstein
down to the Elbe, from whence they come to the
Weser, and so to this or near this (Wesel-on-the-
Rhine). But it is curious that about Miinster and
Osnabruck, the low Secondary mountains have stopped
them ; hills of chalk, Muschelkalk, old coal, etc., which
rise a few hundred feet in general above the great
plain of north and north-west Germany, effectually
arrest their passage. This then was already dry land
when Holstein, and all the Baltic as far as Osnabruck
or the Teutoberger Waldhills, was submerged." f

At the end of September they returned to London
through Paris and Normandy, and the rest of the
year was mainly devoted to the completion of the
"Elements of Geology." Little seems to have hap-
pened in the earlier part of the next year (1838) ; and
in the summer Lyell went northward, halting on
the way, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, to attend the meet-
ing of the British Association. Here he was made
President of the Geological Section, which appears to

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. ii. p. 22.
t Ibid., vol. ii. p. 20.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 125

have been very successful, for he writes that the
section was crowded — from 1,000 to 1,500 persons
always present. The meeting, altogether, was a large
one; but as the total number of tickets issued only
amounted to 2,400, it seems probable that the general
public was admitted more freely than is the custom
at the present day. Sedgwick also on one occasion
attracted a large crowd, for we are told that he
delivered a most eloquent lecture " to 3,000 people on
the Sea-shore." Geology, no doubt, has made great
advances since that day, little more than half a
century ago, but at the cost of much loss of attract-
iveness. It was then simple in its terminology, and
fairly intelligible to people of ordinary education ; now
these are frightened away by papers bristling with
technical terms and Greek-born words, and nothing
but the prospect of a "scrimmage" would draw to-
gether 500 people to a meeting of Section C at the
present day. Commonly the audience hardly amounts
to one-fifth of that number. Geologists, perhaps, might
consider with advantage whether a little abstinence
from long words might not make the science more
generally intelligible, and thus more attractive, with-
out any loss of real precision.

The " Elements of Geology " was finally published
a few weeks before the Newcastle meeting, and the
work of recasting the " Principles " went on at
intervals in preparation for the sixth edition, which
appeared in 1840. If, in accordance with the maxim,
a nation is happy which has no history, Lyell ought
to have passed almost a year in a state of felicity, for
nothing is recorded between September 6th, 1838,
when he writes to Charles Darwin from Kinnordy, and

126 CHARLES LYELL

August 1st, 1839, when he writes to Dr. Fitton from
the same place. Both these letters are interesting.
The former discusses the relation of Darwin's theory
of the formation of coral islands with E. de Beau-
mont's idea of the contemporaneity of parallel mount-
ain chains, which has been already mentioned. One
passage also throws light upon the difficulties with
which the British Association in its earlier days had
to contend. Some of the most influential newspapers
had set themselves to write it down — needless to say,
without success. Good sense sometimes is too strong
even for newspapers. But Lyell thus urges Darwin"^: —

"Do not let Broderip, or the Times or the Age or John
Bull, nor any papers, whether of saints or sinners, induce you
to join in running down the British Association. I do not
mean to insinuate that you ever did so, but I have myself
often seen its faults in a strong light, and am aware of what
may be urged against philosophers turning public orators, etc.
But I am convinced— although it is not the way I love to
spend my own time — that in this country no importance is
attached to any body of men who do not make occasional
demonstrations of their strength in public meetings. It is a
country where, as Tom Moore justly complained, a most
exaggerated importance is attached to the faculty of thinking
on your legs, and where, as Dan O'Connell very well knows,
nothing is to be got in the way of homage or influence, or even
a fair share of power, without agitation."

Far-reaching words, the truth of which has been
demonstrated again and again during the years which
have elapsed since they were written. Lyell lays his
finger on the weakest spot in the nature of the true-
born Briton: he is deaf to quiet reasoning, and
frightened by loud shoutings.

The second letter, that of 1839, is addressed to

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. ii. p. 45.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 127

Dr. Fitton, who had written for the Edinburgh Revievj
a criticism of the " Principles of Geology," in which
he had expressed the opinion that Lyell had in-
sufficiently acknowledged the value of Hutton's work.
From this charge Lyell defends himself, pointing out
that, valuable as were Hutton's contributions to the
philosophy of geology, he was by no means the first
in the field — that there were also "mighty men of old"
to whom he felt bound to do justice, even at the risk
of seeming to undervalue the great Scotchman. He
points out that Hutton's work occupies a fair amount
of space in the section of the " Principles " which
is devoted to an historical sketch of the earlier
geologists : —

" In my first chapter," he writes, " I gave Hutton credit for
first separating geology from other sciences, and declaring it to
have no concern with the origin of things ; * and after rapidly
discussing a great number of celebrated writers, I pause to
give, comparatively speaking, full-length portraits of Werner
and Hutton, giving the latter the decided palm of theoretical
excellence, and alluding to the two grand points in which he
advanced the science — first, the igneous origin of granite ;
secondly, that the so-called primitive rocks were altered
8trata.t I dwelt emphatically on the complete revolution
brought about by his new views respecting granite, and
entered fully on Playfair's illustrations and defence of
Hutton. . . . The mottoes of my first two volumes were
especially selected from Playfair's 'Huttonian Theory' be-
cause—although I was brought round slowly, against some of

* Though nndoubtedly this severance of geology and cosmogony
was very helpful at the time to the progress of the former, the justice
of it may be questioned ; and Lyell's approval would not be endorsed
by every geologist at the present day, though probably it would
still commend itself to the majority.

I While this is true of many of the so-called primitive rocks, it is
now generally believed that no inconsiderable portion are really
abnormal or modified igneous rocks.

128 CHARLES LYELL

my early prejudices, to adopt Playfair's doctrines to the full
extent — I was desirous to acknowledge his and Hutton's
priority. And I have a letter of Basil Hall's, in which, after
speaking of points in which Hutton approached nearer to my
doctrines than his father, Sir James Hall, he comments on the
manner in which my very title-page did homage to the
Huttonians, and complimented me for thus disavowing all
pretensions to be the originator of the theory of the adequacy
of modern causes." *

In the following month Lyell attended a meeting
of the British Association at Birmingham, and was
invited, together with several of the leading men ot
science there present, to dine and spend the night at
Drayton Manor, the residence of Sir R. Peel, near
Tamworth. In a letter to one of his sisters, Lyell
gives an interesting sketch of his impressions of the
great statesman : —

" Some of the party said next day that Peel never gave an
opinion for or against any point from extra-caution, but I really
thought that he expressed himself as freely, even on subjects
bordering on the political, as a well-bred man could do when
talking to another with whose opinions he was unacquainted.
He was very curious to know what Vernon Harcourt [the
President for that year] had said on the connection of religion
and science. I told him of it, and my own ideas, and in the
middle of my strictures on the Dean of York's pamphlet f I
exclaimed, ' By-the-bye, I have only just remembered that he
is your brother-in-law.' He said, ' Yes, he is a clever man and

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. ii. p. 48.

f The Very Eeverend W. Cockburn, D.D., who testified against
the Association in a pamphlet entitled *' The Dangers of Peripatetic
Philosophy " (published in 1838). When the Association met at York
in 1844, he read a paper before the Geological Section, criticising that
science, and propounding a cosmogonical theory of his own. He was
severely handled by Professor Sedgwick, but published his paper under
the title, " The Bible defended against the British Association." This,
though an exceptionally silly production, had a large sale. (" Life
and Letters of Sedgwick," vol. ii. p. 76.)

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 129

a good writer, but if men will not read any one book written by-
scientific men on such a subject, they must take the conse-
quences.' ... If I had not known Sir Robert's extensive
acquirements, I should only have thought him an intelligent,
well-informed country gentleman ; not slow, but without any
quickness, free from that kind of party feeling which prevents
men from appreciating those who differ from them, taking
pleasure in improvements, without enthusiasm, not capable of
joining in a hearty laugh at a good joke, but cheerful, and not
preventing Lord Northampton, Whewell, and others from
making merry. He is without a tincture of science, and inter-
ested in it only so far as knowing its importance in the arts,
and as a subject with which a large body of persons of talent
are occupied.*

The next year (1840) appears to have slipped away
uneventfully, for only a single letter serves as a record
for the twelvemonth, and that is but a short one
addressed to Babbage asking him to look up one
or two geological matters during a journey through
Normandy to Paris. As it is dated from London on
the 11th of August, this looks as if Lyell did not go
during the summer farther than Scotland, where he
presided over the Geological Section at the meeting
of the British Association. t The earlier part of 1841
appears to have been equally uneventful; but the
summer of that year saw the beginning of a long
journey and the opening of a new geological horizon,
for Mr. and Mrs. Lyell crossed the Atlantic on a visit
to Canada and the United States.

* Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. ii. p. 61.

t Held at Glasgow, beginning September 17th. An allusion, how-
ever, during his American journey seems to imply a visit to France
this year.

130 CHARLES LYELL

CHAPTER VII.

GEOLOGICAL WORK IN NORTH AMERICA.

This is a summary of their doings on the opposite side
of the Atlantic in Lyell's own words : " In all, we were
absent about thirteen months, less than one of them
being spent on the ocean, nearly ten in active geologi-
cal field work, and a little more than two in cities,
during which I gave by invitation some geological
lectures to large and most patient audiences."

To this may be added " three dozen boxes of speci-
mens," and a mass of notes on the raised beaches of
the Canadian lakes, the glacial drift, the falls of
Niagara, and other questions of post-tertiary geology,
as well as on the tertiary, cretaceous, coal, and older
rocks. These afterwards produced a crop of about
twenty papers, which appeared in various scientific
periodicals. The principal results and the general
impressions of the journey were worked up into a
book entitled " Travels in North America," which
was published in 1845.

A geologist who has been trained among the
scenery of Britain finds his first view of the Alps to
be the beginning of a new chapter in the Book of
Nature, but a visit to America more like the beginning
of a new volume. There almost everything is on a
colossal scale — rivers, lakes, forests, prairies, distances,
such as cannot be matched, at any rate in the more
accessible parts of Europe. One may read of plains
where the sun rises and sets as from a sea ; of lakes,

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 131

like Superior, as big as Ireland ; of falls, like Niagara,
where the neighbouring ground never ceases to quiver
with the thud of the precipitated water ; of rivers well
nigh half a league wide while their waters still are far
from the sea. But such things must be seen to be
realised. In our own island Nature seems to be
working at the present time on a scale comparatively
puny ; she must be watched as she puts forth her full
strength before the adequacy of modern causes can
be duly appreciated, and the history of the past
can be understood by comparing it with that of the
present.

The invitation to cross the Atlantic hardly could
have reached Lyell at a more opportune epoch of his
life. In his forty-fourth year, he was in full vigour
both of mind and of body. A long course of study
and of travel in Europe had trained him to be a keen
observer, had enabled him to appreciate the signifi-
cance of phenomena, and had supplied him with
stores of knowledge on which he could draw for the
interpretation of difficulties. America also offered a
splendid field for work. Much of the country had
been settled and brought under cultivation at no dis-
tant date; new tracts were being made accessible
almost daily. Geologists of mark were few and far
between, so that large areas awaited exploration, and
in many places the traveller found a virgin field. The
Geological Survey of Canada was just then being
organised, the labours of the National Survey in the
United States had not yet begun, though State sur-
veys Avere at work, and had already borne good fruit.
Indeed, while Lyell was in the country, the third
meeting of the Association of American Geologists

iS2 CHARLES LYELL

was held at Boston, and among those present were
several men whose names will always occupy an
honoured place in the history of the science. Still, at
almost every step the observer might be rewarded by
some discovery or by some fascinating problem which
would give a direction to his future work.

The Lyells left Liverpool on July 20th, 1841, and
reached Halifax on the 31st of the month, whence
they went on to Boston, arriving there on August 2nd.
The close resemblance of the shells scattered on the
shore at the latter place to those in a similar situation
in Britain was one of the first things which Lyell
noted; for he found that about one-third were actually
identical, a large number of the remainder being
geographical representatives, and only a few affording
characteristic or peculiar forms. For this correspond-
ence, which, as he writes, had a geological significance,
he was not prepared. The drifts around Boston, good
sections of which had been exposed in making cut-
tings for railways, resembled very closely the deposits
which he had seen in Scandinavia. Were it not, he
says, for the distinctness of the plants and of the
birds, he could have believed himself in Scotland,
or in some part of Northern Europe. These masses
of sand and pebbles, derived generally from the more
immediate neighbourhood, though containing some-
times huge blocks which had travelled from great
distances, occasionally exceeded 200 feet in depth.
Commonly, however, they were only of a moderate
thickness, and were found to rest upon polished and
striated surfaces of granite, gneiss, and mica-schist.
The latter effects, at any rate, would now be generally
attributed to the action of land ice, but Lyell thought

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 133

that the great extent of low country, remote from any
high mountains, made this agent practically im-
possible, and supposed that the work both of transport
and of attrition had been done during a period of
submergence by floating ice and grounding bergs.

After a few days' halt at Boston, they moved on
to Newhaven, where Professor Silliman showed him
dykes and intrusive sheets of columnar greenstone
altering red sandstone, their general appearance and
association recalling Salisbury Crags and other familiar
sections near Edinburgh. In this district Lyell found
the grasshoppers as numerous and as noisy as in
Italy, watched the fire-flies sparkling in the darkness,
and had his first sight of a humming-bird, and of
a wildflower hardly less gorgeous, the scarlet lobelia.

From Newhaven they went to New York, and up
the Hudson River in one of the great steamers, past
the noble colonnade of basalt called the Palisades,
and along the winding channel through the gneissic
hills to Albany. Here a geological survey had been
established by the State, and its members had already
done good work, which, however, was not altogether
welcome to its employers, for they had dispelled all
hopes of finding coal within the limits of the State.
This, as Lyell says, was a great disappointment to
many ; but it did good in checking the rashness of
private speculation, and in preventing the waste of
the large sums of money which had been annually
squandered in trials to find coal in strata which really
lay below the Carboniferous system. The advantage
to the revenues of the state by the stoppage of this
outlay and the more profitable direction given to
private enterprise were sufficient, Lyell remarks, " to

134 CHARLES LYELL

indemnify the country, on mere utilitarian grounds,
for the sum of more than two hundred thousand
dollars so munificently expended on geological in-
vestigation."

From Albany Lyell travelled to Niagara. The
journey was planned in order to give him an
opportunity of examining a connected series of
formations from the base of the Palaeozoic, where it
rested on the ancient gneiss, to the coalfield of
Pennsylvania; and he had the great advantage of
being accompanied by one of the most eminent of
American geologists, Mr. James Hall.

" In the course of this third tour," Lyell writes,* " I became
convinced that we must turn to the New World if we want to
see in perfection the oldest monuments of the earth's history,
so far as relates to its earliest inhabitants. Certainly in no
other country are these ancient strata developed on a grander
scale, or more plentifully charged with fossils ; and as they
are nearly horizontal, the order of their relative position is
always clear and unequivocal. They exhibit, moreover, in
their range from the Hudson River to the Niagara some fine
examples of the gradual manner in which certain sets of strata
thin out when followed for hundreds of miles ; while others,
previously wanting, become intercalated in the series."

He observed, also, that while some species of the
fossils contained in these rocks were common to both
sides of the Atlantic, the majority were different ; thus
disproving the statement which at that time was
often made — namety, that in the rocks older than the
Carboniferous system the fossil fauna in different
parts of the globe was almost everywhere the same,
and showing that, " however close the present analogy

* '* Travels in North America," chap. i.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 135

of forms may be, there is evidence of the same law
of variation in space as now prevails in the living
creation."

Lyell made a thorough study of the Falls of
Niagara, to which he paid a second visit before his
return to England. The first view of these Falls, like
the first sight of a great snow-clad peak, is one of
those epochs of life of which the memory can never
fade. It stirred Lyell to an unwonted enthusiasm.
At the first view, from a distance of about three
miles, with not a house in sight — it would be
impossible, we think, to find such a spot now ;
'' nothing but the greenwood, the falling water, and
the white foam " — he thought the falls " more beauti-
ful but less grand " than he had expected ; but,
after spending some days in the neighbourhood,
now watching the river sweeping onwards to its final
plunge, here in the turmoil of the rapids, there in
its gliding, so smooth but so irresistible ; now gazing
at that mighty wall of 'shattered chrysoprase' and
rainbow-tinted spray, which floats up like the steam
of Etna; now looking down from the brink of the
crags below the fall upon those rapids, where the
billows of green water roll and plunge like the waves
of the ocean, he "at last learned by degrees to
comprehend the wonders of the scene, and to feel its
full magnificence."

But, keenly as he might be impressed with the
poetic grandeur of the falls, he could not forget the
scientific questions which were ever present to his
mind. The gorge of Niagara offered a problem for
solution which had for him a special fascination.
Not only did it illustrate on a grand scale the

1 36 CHARLES LYELL

potencies of water in rapid motion, but also it
furnished data for estimating the period during
which this agent had been at work. The gorge has
been carved in a plateau of Silurian rock, which
terminates, seven miles below the falls, in a pre-
cipitous escarpment overhanging Queenstown. There
was a time when that gorge did not exist, when the
river first took its course along the plateau on its way
from Lake Erie, and plunged over the brink of the
escarpment. The valley at first was nothing more
than a shallow trench excavated in the drift which
covers the surface of the country — such an one as may
still be seen between Lake Erie and the falls — but
the river, slowly and steadily, has cut its way back
through the rocky plateau from the first site of the
falls near Queenstown to their present position. The
upper part of this plateau consists of a thick bed of
hard limestone, but beneath this the deposits become
softer; and the lowest bed is the most perishable.
The water, as it plunges down, undermines the over-
lying rock. The gorge began at once to be developed,
and it has ever since continued to retreat towards
Lake Erie. Every year makes some slight change.
This becomes more marked when old histories are
consulted and old drawings compared with the
present aspect of the scene. Father Hennepin's
sketch, of which Lyell gives a copy,"^ rude and in-
correct as it is, proves beyond all question that the
changes in the neighbourhood of Table Rock have
been very considerable, for it shows that on this side
a third and much narrower cascade fell athwart the
general course of the main mass of water. This

* " Travels in North America," chap. ii.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 137

cascade, by the time of Kalm's^ visit in 1751, had
ceased to be conspicuous, and had quite disappeared
before the date of Lyell's visit. The Horseshoe Fall
also at the present time is less worthy of the name
than it was at that date, for its symmetry has been
seriously marred by a deep notch which the northern
stream has cut in the more central part of the curve. f
Careful inquiry convinced Lyell that the slow re-
cession of the falls was an indubitable fact, and that
its rate, on an average, was about a foot a year. As
the gorge is about seven miles long, this would fix its
beginning about 35,000 years ago. J

From Niagara Falls they travelled, still in Mr.
Hall's company, by Buffalo to Geneva, examining on
the way some red, green, and bluish-grey marls, with
beds of gypsum and occasional salt springs, which,
though older than the coal measures of England,
closely resembled in appearance the upper part of the
New Red Sandstone of Britain. Finally, after crossing
the outcrops of the Devonian system, they reached
Pennsylvania, where Lyell obtained his first view of
the coal measures of North America, and was no less
interested than surprised to find how closely the whole
series corresponded with that of Britain. He saw sand-
stones " such as are used for building in Newcastle or
Edinburgh, dark shales often full of ferns ' spread

*. See the plate in the Gentleman'' s Magazine, 1751.

t See map in " Man and the Glacial Period," by Dr. G. F. Wright
(International Scientific Series), p. 338.

X The estimates made by geologists have varied from 55,000 years
(Ellicott, in 1790) to not more than 7,000 years (United States
Geological Survey, 1886). Professor J. W. Spencer, who has recently
investigated the question, has arrived, by a different method, at a
date practically identical with that assigned by Lyell (Proc. Roy.
Soc, vol. Ivi. (1894), p. 145).

138 CHARLES LYELL

out as in a herbarium/ beds and nodules of clay-iron-
stone, seams of bituminous coal, varying in thickness
from a few inches to some yards, and, beside these,
an underlying coarse grit, passing down into a con-
glomerate, which was very like the millstone grit of
England. The underclays beneath the seam of coal
were full of stems and rootlets of Stigmaria, and the
sight of these confirmed him in the opinion that the
coal was formed of the remains of plants which had
grown upon the spot."^ After examining the district,
they returned to Albany, and went thence to New
York and Philadelphia, picking up on the way as much
geological information as was possible.

New Jersey afforded some highly interesting sec-
tions of rocks belonging to the Cretaceous system, for
these, though in mineral character resembling the
greensands on the eastern side of the Atlantic, con-
tained fossils which corresponded more closely with
those of the white chalk, some species being actually
identical. This fact was another proof that, though
there had been in past ages a general similarity in
the fauna of any period, geographical provinces
had existed no less than they do at the present
time.

Lyell had examined, as mentioned above, the
bituminous coals in the undisturbed region of Penn-
sylvania, the next step was to study the beds of anthra-
cite, with the associated strata, in the folded and broken
ridges of the Alleghany Mountains. In this part of
his work he had the inestimable advantage of being

* This was still a moot point with geologists. Lyell refers to the
confirmatory evidence which W. Logan had recently obtained in the
South Wales coalfield of Britain.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 139

guided by Professor H. 0. Rogers, Avhose name is in-
separably connected with the geology of that classic
region. The A.lleghanies or Appalachians consist of a
series of Silurian, Devonian, and Carboniferous strata
in orderly sequence, " folded " (to use Ly ell's words) " as
if they had been subjected to a great lateral pressure
when in a soft and yielding state, large portions
having afterwards been removed by denudation. The
long uniform, parallel ridges, with intervening valleys
like so many gigantic wrinkles and furrows, are in
close connection with the geological structure," and
the rocks are most disturbed on the south-eastern
flank of the chain, where the folds sometimes bend
over to the west ; in other words, the greatest dis-
turbances are on the side nearest to the fundamental
gneiss and the basin of the Atlantic — facts which
probably stand in the relation of effect and cause.

It was a surprise to Lyell, on reaching the anthra-
cite district around Pottsville on the Schuylkill, to see
'/ a flourishing manufacturing town with the tall chim-
neys of a hundred furnaces, burning night and day,
yet quite free from smoke." Special contrivances, of
course, are requisite to secure the combustion of
anthracite, especially in household fireplaces, but he
had no hesitation in declaring that he preferred the
use of it, notwithstanding the stove-like heat produced,
to that of the bituminous coal consumed in London,
with the penalty of living in an atmosphere dark with
smoke and foul with smuts.

The seams of anthracite in this district are some-
times worked in open-air excavations, but as the strata
have been bent into a vertical position the beds above
and below, when the anthracite h^s been quarried out,

140 CHARLES LYELL

are left like the walls of a fissure, and thus can be
examined with the greatest ease.

Here also the "roof" of the seam proved to be a
dark shale full of the usual plant-remains, among
which were some British species of ferns, and the
" floor " was an " under clay " containing the stems and
rootlets of Stigmaria. Lyell also observed that the beds
of detrital materials — sandstones, shales, etc. — were
less persistent than those of coal, and that the way in
which the former became thicker towards the south-
east indicated that this was the direction of the
ancient land region from which they had been derived.
The result of his examination satisfied him that the
anthracite of the Appalachians was identical in age,
generally speaking, with the bituminous coal which
he had previously examined, and was merely a frag-
ment of the great continuous coalfield of Pennsylvania,
Virginia, and Ohio, which lies about forty miles away
to the westward.

After returning to Philadelphia Mr. and Mrs.
Lyell went, via New York, to Boston, where he had
been engaged to deliver a course of twelve lectures on
geology at the LoweU Institute. To the courses here
admission was free, but the tickets were given under
certain restrictions. For Lyell's lectures about 4,500
were issued, and the class, he states, usually consisted
of more than 3,000 persons. It had therefore to be
sub-divided and each lecture to be repeated. The
audience was composed " of persons of both sexes, of
every station in society, from the most affluent and
eminent in the various learned professions to the
humblest mechanics, all well-dressed, and observing
the utmost decorum/'

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 141

At the conclusion of the lectures the Lyells tra-
velled southwards, so that he might take advantage
of the more genial climate and continue his geological
work in the open air. He first halted at Richmond in
Virginia, and from that place visited the Tertiary de-
posits in the vicinity of the James River. The more
interesting of these are of Miocene age, and he
observed that the fossils of Maryland and Virginia
resembled those of Touraine and the neighbourhood
of Bordeaux more closely than those from the coral-
line Crag of Suffolk, especially in the presence of
genera indicative of a warm climate.

From this place they travelled across the "pine
barrens " — where their train was stopped for the night
by the slippery condition of the rails — to Weldon in
North Carolina. Here Lyell saw the Great Dismal
Swamp, a morass which extends for about forty miles
from the neighbourhood of this town to Norfolk in
Virginia. Like the bogs of Ireland, this marshy
plain, some five- and- twenty miles across, is rather
higher at the middle than at the edges. Its surface
" is carpeted with mosses, and densely covered with
ferns and reeds, above which many evergreen shrubs
and trees flourish, especially the white cedar (Cupressus
thyoides), which stands firmly supported by its long
tap-roots in the softest parts of the quagmire. Over
the whole, the deciduous cypress (Taxodium dis-
tichum) is seen to tower with its spreading top, in full
leaf, in the season when the sun's rays are hottest, and
when, if not interrupted by a screen of foliage, they
might soon cause the fallen leaves and dead plants of
the preceding autumn to decompose, instead of adding
their contributions to the peaty mass. On the surface

142 CHARLES LYELL

of the whole morass lie innumerable trunks of large
and tall trees, blown down by the winds, while thou-
sands of others are buried at various depths in the
black mire below. They remind the geologist of the
prostrate position of large stems of Sigillaria and
Lepidodendron, converted into coal in ancient Carboni-
ferous rocks." ^

At Charleston they had practically passed beyond
the southern limit of the winter snowfall, the greatest
enemy of the field-geologist, and could carry on work
without fear of interruption. Here they found flowers
'* at the end of December still lingering in the gardens,"
and were in the region of the palmetto palm. Few
things during this rather lengthy journey impressed
Lyell more than the facility of locomotion in a dis-
trict which, comparatively speaking, was a new settle-
ment, and was still in places thinly peopled, together
with the general good quality of the accommodation
for travellers. In this respect they had fared much
worse during the previous year, when they were
travelling through some of the more populous parts
of France, such as Touraine and Brittany. After a
journey through the pine woods, they reached Augusta
in Georgia, where another group of Tertiary deposits
invited a halt. Those belonging to the Eocene period
lie further down the Savannah River, so that a journey
was made for the purpose of examining them, in the
course of which, near the town of the same name as
the river, Lyell also saw the clay in which remains of
the mastodon and of other extinct mammals had
been found. The muddy beach, with the tracks of
racoons and opossums, gave him some hints as to

* " Principles of Geology," chap, xliv.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 143

the history of fossil footprints, so that on the whole
very much interesting geology was the reward of a
three weeks' stay in South Carolina. Then they once
more turned their faces northward, and made their
way, working at geology as they went, to Philadelphia,
where they found themselves again in the region of
colder winters at the present, and of erratic boulders
as memorials of the past.

Six weeks were spent in Philadelphia, but Ly ell's
time was largely taken up by the delivery of a short
course of lectures on geology. Pennsylvania, however,
added to his experiences in another way, for the state
had passed through a commercial crisis, and was
unable to pay the interest on its funded debt. The
soreness produced by this repudiation will not be
readily forgotten, for nearly two-thirds of the stock —
the whole amount of which was eight millions sterling
— was held by British owners, so that the loss was felt
heavily on this side of the Atlantic. In his " Travels "
Lyell gives a brief history of this transaction, and dis-
cusses the political causes of a crisis which had been
hardly less disastrous in America than in England.

They reached New York in the month of March,
and spent several weeks there, for in that neighbour-
hood both the ancient crystalline rocks and the modern
drift, with its erratics, afforded Lyell ample materials
for study, each of these being then reckoned (and they
have not ceased to be so counted) among the most
difficult questions of geology. Towards the middle of
April he proceeded northward, in order to examine
the perplexing schists and less altered sedimentary
deposits of the Taconic range, rocks which from that
time to this have given ample employment to geolo-

144 CHARLES LYELL

gists. After this he found an opportunity of making
use of the lessons learnt on the flats by the James
Eiver, for he went to Springfield and examined the
famous footprints in the sandstone of Connecticut.
As the deposit was referred to the Trias, and the
footprints to birds, they were supposed to indicate the
existence of this class of the animal kingdom at the
beginning of the Secondary era. They have, how-
ever, now lost their special interest, since they are
generally assigned to reptiles. After the middle of
April was past, the travellers again reached Boston,
from which city an excursion was made in order to
study the Tertiary deposits of the island called
Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts,

Returning to Philadelphia early in May, they went
by Baltimore westward to the valley of the Ohio, in
order to examine the undisturbed country beyond
the folded district of the Alleghany Mountains. By
this journey another section was, in fact, run across
the great coalfield of the Eastern States, but consider-
ably to the south of that which had been examined in
the autumn of the preceding year. This proved no
less interesting than the former one. At Brownsville,
to take one instance only, a seam of bituminous coal,
ten feet in thickness, was seen cropping out in the
river cliff* by the side of a large tributary of the Ohio,
where it was worked by horizontal galleries. Pittsburg
and other interesting localities in the neighbourhood
were also visited, and then the Lyells descended the
Ohio River to Cincinnati. He had thus traversed in
descending order the succession of strata from the
Carboniferous to the Lower Silurian or Ordovician
system, which is exposed in the neighbourhood of that

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 145

town. This, however, was not the only attraction
offered by Cincinnati. Some two-and-twenty miles
distant is the famous Big Bone Lick in Kentucky.
Here some saline springs break out on a nearly level
and boggy river plain, which are still attractive to wild
animals, and often in past time lured them to their
death in the adjacent quagmires. Here the bones of
the mastodon and the elephant, of the megalonyx,
stag, horse, and bison, have all been found, some in
great numbers ; and the last-named animals had fre-
quented the springs within the memory of persons
who were living at the time of Lyell's visit. These
bones are generally embedded in a black mud, at a
depth of about a dozen feet below the surface of the
creek. Lyell suggests that very probably the heavy
mastodons and elephants were lost by shoving one
another off the tracks and into the more marshy
ground as they struggled to satisfy themselves at the
springs; just as horses, cattle, and deer get pushed
into the stream in thronging to the rivers on the
pampas of South America.

From Cincinnati the travellers struck northward
to Cleveland on Lake Erie, going across a region which
at that time was still being cleared and settled, and
getting an experience of that American form of
travellers' torture called a corduroy road. The lake-
ridges — curious mounds or terraces of water- worn
materials — in the neighbourhood of Cleveland afforded
a new subject for an investigation which was continued
in the vicinity of Ontario. But before reaching this
lake Lyell spent a week at the Falls of Niagara, revis-
ing and enlarging the work already done. During the
time he investigated the buried channel which appears

146 CHARLES LYELL

to lead from the whirlpool to St. Davids, a league or
so to the west of Queens town. This was supposed by
Lyell and many subsequent geologists to indicate part
of an old course of the St. Lawrence, which had after-
wards been blocked up by glacial drifts. It is, how-
ever, according to Professor J. W. Spencer, only a
branch of a buried valley, outside the Niagara canon
and much shallower than it, which has been cut
through by the present St. Lawrence, and has merely
produced an elongation of the chasm at the Whirl-
pool."^ Another series of lake-ridges was examined in
the neighbourhood of Toronto. Here Lyell traced
them to a height of 680 feet above the level of Ontario,
seeing in all no less than eleven, some of them much
reminding him of the osar which he had examined in
Sweden. In regard to these lake-ridges he writes
thus : —

With the exception of the parallel roads or shelves of
Glenroy and some neighbouring glens of the Western High-
lands in Scotland, I never saw so remarkable an example of
banks, terraces, and accumulations of stratified sand and gravel,
maintaining, over wide areas, so perfect a horizontality, as in
the district north of Toronto." f

Leaving Toronto on June 18th, they descended
the St. Lawrence to Montreal and Quebec. The
neighbourhood of either town afforded opportunities
for much interesting work, especially in the drift

* Proc. Roy. Soc. Ivi. (1894), p. 146.

f The lake-ridges and raised beaches around the Great Lakes,
indicating margins of the water when it stood at a higher level than
now, have received much attention of late years from Canadian and
American geologists. They are found to vary somewhat in level,
thus indicating unequal movements of the earth's crust. References
to literature prior to 1890 will be found in a paper by Professor J. W.
Spencer, Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc, vol. xlyi. (1890), p. 523.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 14V

deposits ; the underlying ice-worn surfaces of crystal-
line or Palaeozoic rock reminding Lyell of what he
had seen in Scandinavia. At Montreal, the great hill,
which gives its name to the town built upon its lower
slopes, affords some highly interesting sections. It is
composed of Palaeozoic limestone, which has been
pierced by more than one mass of coarsely crystalline
intrusive rock and cleft by many dykes of a more
compact character. Near the junction with the
larger intrusive masses the limestone becomes con-
spicuously crystalline, and the fossils disappear, just
as in the cases which Lyell had already seen about
the border of granite in Scandinavia. Some also of
the igneous rocks now possess a further interest, for
they contain nepheline, a mineral not very common.
This, however, had not been recognised at the time of
Lyell's visit. The limestone in some of the quarries
is wonderfully ice-worn, and the overlying drifts are
in many ways remarkable. Of these drifts, Lyell ex-
amined various sections, at heights of from 60 to
200 feet above the St. Lawrence, finding plenty of
sea-shells,^ the common mussel beuig in one place
especially abundant. He also examined some sections
of stratified drifts between Montreal and Quebec, but
without obtaining any fossils, though they had been
found by Captain Bayford and others. The drifts,
however, near the latter city were more prolific.
With their shells, indeed, he was already, to some
extent, familiar, for in the year 1835 he had received
a collection from Captain Bayford. This happened to

* See, for descriptions of these sections and lists of the fossils, Sir
W. Dawson's "The Ice Age in Canada," chaps, vi. and vii. They
•occur up to 560 feet above /Asea.

148 CHARLES LYELL

reach London at a time when Dr. Beck of Copenhagen
was with him, and " great was our surprise," he writes,
" on opening the box to find that nearly all the shells
agreed specifically with fossils which, in the summer
of the preceding year, I had obtained at Uddevalla in
Sweden." The most abundant species were still living
in northern seas, some in those of Greenland and
other high latitudes; while in Sweden they were
found fossil between latitudes 58° and 60° N., and
here in latitude 47°. These fossil shells occur at
Beaufort, about a league below Quebec, and about a
quarter of a mile from the river, in deposits which
have filled an old ravine in the Palaeozoic rock. A
laminated clay forms the lowest bed, above which
comes a stratified sand, and this is followed by a clay
containing boulders, each of these deposits being about
twenty-five feet thick. They are without fossils, which
begin with the next bed, a stratified mass of pebbly
sand and loam, and become more frequent, till at last
this passes into a mass nearly twelve feet thick, consist-
ing almost wholly of the well-known bivalve Saxicava
Tugosa. This deposit was about 150 feet above the
level of the sea. Afterwards, in travelling southwards
from Montreal, whither he returned from Quebec,
Lyell found marine shells on the border of Lake
Champlain, about eighty miles from the former town.
Here they occured in a loam, which was covered by a
sand, and rested on a clay about thirty feet thick, con-
taining boulders, some of them nine feet in diameter.

Lyell sums up the results of his investigations by
stating that, in his opinion, the shells certainly belong
to the same geological period as do the boulders, and
occur both above and below beds containing erratics ;

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 149

while the fundamental rocks below the drift are
"smoothed and furrowed on the surface by glacial
action." This effect Lyell at that time attributed to
the friction of bergs grounding as they floated, but it
is now referred by the majority of geologists to the
action of land ice. Be this, however, as it may, the
shell-bearing beds must have been deposited in the
sea; so that either the land must have sunk as the
ice retreated, or the latter at the time of its greatest
extension must have trespassed on the domain of the
sea, as it still does around parts of the Antarctic
continent.

From Montreal they went, by way of Lake Cham-
plain and over the Green Mountains, to Boston, where
they arrived about the middle of July, and proceeded
by steamer to Halifax. Here began the last stage of
Ly ell's journey, the examination of the Carboniferous
system in Nova Scotia, to which work a full month
was devoted. After studying the gypsum, red marl,
and sandstone of the lower part of that system, which
bears some resemblance to the Upper Trias (Keuper) of
Britain, he crossed the Bay of Mines to Minudie, in
the heart of the Nova Scotian coalfield. The cliffs by
the sea-shore exhibit a fine series of sections, from
the gypseous rocks up to the coal measures, uninter-
rupted by faults, the beds dipping steadily at an
angle of nearly 30°. Sandstones, shales, and seams
of coal could be seen alternating in the usual manner ;
and from the last-named, stumps of trees, sometimes
two or three yards high, were seen in places, as at
South Joggins, projecting at right angles to the sur-
face of the bed. Of such stems he observed at least
seventeen at ten different levels. The stumps never

150 CHAKLES LYELL

pierced a coal-seam, but always terminated downwards
either in it or in shale, and never in sandstone, thus
indicating that they were a part of the vegetation
from which the coal had been formed, and that it,
like a peat-bog in England, required a subsoil im-
pervious to water. Lyell also mentions that Mr. (now
Sir) J. W. Dawson, who was his companion for part
of the time, had found a bed of calamites in a similar
position of growth.

But, in addition to much interesting work in
various parts of the Nova Scotian coalfield, Lyell
had the opportunity of witnessing the noted tides of
the Bay of Fundy, where the difference between high
and low water is as great as, if not greater than, any-
where else on the globe. On the muddy flats thus
left bare he had another opportunity of studying the
tracks left by various animals, marine and terrestrial ;
and in watching how these were hardened by the
action of the sun, if they had been made near the
high-water mark of spring-tides, he gained further
hints for interpreting the fossil footprints of Con-
necticut and other countries.

On the 18th of August the Lyell s left Halifax for
England, thus bringing to a close a year of assiduous
field-work, long journeys, and varied experiences. It
was a period of the most continuous outdoor labour,
and thus the most fruitful in the acquisition of
knowledge which he had spent since his marriage
and the publication of the " Principles of Geology " —
a period comparable only with his journey, between
May, 1828, and February, 1829, in France, Italy, and
Sicily, though it was still longer and more fruitful,
were this possible, in varied geological experiences.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 151

He had not, indeed, seen in this part of America any
volcanoes, active or extinct — of which, however, he had
already examined plenty; but he had studied good
and characteristic sections of almost every formation
which occurred in the more eastern states of America,
from the most ancient crystalline masses, the founda-
tion stones of the continent, to the most recent
fossiliferous drifts. He had travelled from a region
which resembled Scandinavia to one where the climate
was more like that of the north coast of Africa, and
had enlarged his conceptions of the scale on which
Nature worked. But, in addition, he had been
afforded an opportunity of studying the social and
political condition of a young and vigorous nation as
it was developing, unfettered by antiquated laws and
hereditary customs. To this aspect of the tour a
brief reference will be made in a later chapter ; now
it is enough to say that the long journeying of the
twelvemonth had been happily ended, without illness,
without the slightest accident, without anything that
could be called an adventure. This good fortune
followed them to the very end, for even the home-
ward passage is dismissed with the brief remark that
it took nine days and sixteen hours ; so that it may
be supposed to have been prosperously uneventful.
Then in eight hours after leaving Liverpool the
travellers were back once more in London.

152 CHARLES LYELL

CHAPTER YIIL

ANOTHER EPOCH OF WORK AND TRAVEL.

Very soon after their arrival in England the travellers
went north to Kinnordy, where they remained till the
end of October, when they returned again to their
London home. Such an accumulation of specimens
and of notes as had been gathered in America made
necessary a long period of labour indoors, unpacking,
classifying, and arranging; while certain groups of
fossils had to be repacked and sent to friends, who
had undertaken to work them out. These occupa-
tions apparently detained Lyell in London till August,
1848, when he started for Ireland, indulging himself
on the way with a short run in Somersetshire for
some geological work around Bath and Bristol, ex-
amining more particularly the " dolomitic conglomer-
ate," a shore deposit of Keuper age, in which the re-
mains of saurians had been found, and the Radstock
Collieries, where he spent more than five hours under-
ground " traversing miles of galleries in the coal," and
finding here, as he had done in America, the stumps
of trees in an upright position and shales full of fossil
ferns as " roofs " to the seams. Then, in company with
Mrs. Lyell, he crossed over to Cork, where the British
Association assembled on August 17 th, under the presi-
dency of the late Earl of Rosse. The meeting was
well attended by scientific men, but was coldly
received by the neighbourhood and county — partly,
as Lyell says, because the gentry cared little for

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 153

science ; partly because the townspeople, comprising
many rich merchants and most of the tradesmen,
were " Repealers " ; " and, the agitation having occurred
since we were invited, the opposite parties could
never, in Ireland, act or pull together."

It was impossible to visit Cork without seeing the
beauties of the lakes and mountains of Killarney;
and after this a short stay was made at Birr Castle,
Lord Rosse's pleasant home at Parsonstown. The
huge reflecting telescope, which is now more than a
local wonder, was not then completed ; but the smaller
one, itself on a gigantic scale, was in full working
order, and already had led to grand results by " not
only reducing nebulae into clusters of distinct stars,
but by showing that the regular geometric figures in
which they presented themselves to Herschel, when
viewed with a glass of less power, disappear and
become very much like parts of the Milky Way."
Thence they went northward to the coast of Antrim,
to see the waves breaking upon the colonnades of
basalt at the Giant's Causeway, and the dykes of that
rock cutting through and altering the white chalk.
Evidently the geology proved interesting, as well it
might, for here Nature presents a volume of her
geological history, that of the Secondary era, with
only the opening and the concluding chapters, all the
record from the early part of the Lias to the beginning
of the Cretaceous having been torn out. The dark-
tinted greensand, changing almost immediately into
the pure white chalk, often presents curious colour-
contrasts in a single section; while the classification
of the several deposits offered a problem at which
probably Lyell thought it wiser to " look and pass on."

154 CHARLES LYELL

Several of the more interesting facts observed during
this trip were afterwards described in the " Elements
of Geology/' "^ among them the beds of lignite which
occur in Antrim, associated with the gfeat flows of
basalt. Somewhat similar deposits were found, about
seven years later, at Ardtun, in Mull, by the Duke of
Argyll — a discovery which led Lyell to suggest, in later
editions of the above-named work, the probability
that the basalts of Antrim and of the Inner Hebrides
were of the same geological age, — an inference which
since then has been abundantly confirmed by the
researches of Professor Judd and other geologists.

One of the most interesting sections in Scotland
faces Antrim. Here, on the Ayrshire coast, between
Girvan and Ballantrae, a complex of several kinds of
igneous rock and a region, not a little disturbed, of
"greywackes" and other sedimentary deposits present
the geologist with problems more than sufficiently
perplexing. At these Lyell took the opportunity of
glancing, but a day's trip afforded no opportunity for
any serious attempt to read the riddle. That had to
be left to a later generation, and so it remained for
over forty years. Something is now known about the
igneous rocks, though here work still remains to be
done ; and the sedimentary deposits have been
brought into order by the labours of Professor Lap-
worth. They exhibit, according to his description,t
an ascending succession from the Llandeilo to the
Llandovery group, and appear to be more modern
than some, if not all, of the above-named igneous

* Chapters xiv. and xxix.

t "The Girvan Succession," Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc, xxxviii.
(1882), p. 537.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 155

rocks. After their brief halt in this district the Lyells
went on to Forfarshire, and spent the rest of the
autumn at Kinnordy.

The winter was a busy time ; he was writing
steadily at his " Travels in North America," and work-
ing up some of the more distinctly scientific notes into
formal papers for the Geological and other societies.
Thus occupied, more than a year slipped away, diversi-
fied only by a summer visit to Scotland, attending the
meeting of the British Association at York, and a
journey to the Haswell Colliery, Durham, together
with Faraday, as commissioners to examine into the
cause of a recent disastrous explosion, and see whether
such accidents could be prevented. Work at the
" Travels in North America " took up all Ly ell's spare
time during the winter, and the book was published in
the earlier part of 1845.

It was only a few months old when Mr. and Mrs.
Lyell again set off for another tour in America. They
left Liverpool on September 4 th, and landed at Hali-
fax on the 17 th, after a voyage diversified agreeably
by the sight of an iceberg and disagreeably by two
gales. They went on at once to Boston, and thence
made a tour through the State of Maine. During this
sundry masses of drift were examined, which rested on
polished and grooved surfaces of crystalline rock, and
contained the usual shells, astarte, cardium, nncula,
saxicava, etc., and in some places a fossil fish"^ in
concretionary nodules. At Portland similar shells
had been found in drifts which also contained bones
both of the bison and of the walrus. These drifts in
some places attained a thickness of 170 feet, and in

* The capelin [Mallotus villosus), which, still lives in the Atlantic.

156 CHARLES LYELL

them valleys 70 feet deep had been excavated by
streams. Then they went to the White Mountains,
and on approaching them Lyell did not fail to notice
" on the low granite hills many angular fragments of
that rock, fifteen to twenty feet in diameter, resting
on heaps of sand." On their way they came to the
Willey Slide, where a whole family of that name had
been killed nineteen years previously in a landslip.
Lyell carefully examined the scene of the accident, in
order to ascertain what effects were produced by a mass
of mud and stones as it slid over a face of rock, and
found that it only made short scratches and grooves,
not long and straight furrows, like those left by a
glacier. They halted at Fabyan's Hotel near Mount
Washington, and after waiting for a favourable day
reached the summit (6,225 feet above the sea) on
October 7th. It is easily accessible on horseback.

The notes of this excursion among the mountains
show that Lyell still retained his old liking for natural
history in general, for they contain remarks on the
flowers, the insects, and the birds. Some observations
on the Alpine flora of the higher summits in the
White Mountains indicate his position at that time in
regard to the origin of species. He adopts the hypo-
thesis of ' specific centres,' viz. that " each species had
its origin in a single birthplace and spread gradually
from its original centre to all accessible spots, fit for
its habitation, by means of the power of migration
given it from the first." He supposed that the plants
common to the more arctic regions and to the higher
ground further south in Europe and Northern America
were dispersed by floating ice during the glacial epoch,
when the ground stood at a lower level, and that after-

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 157

wards, when the climate became warmer, they gradually
mounted up the slopes of the hills. The possibility
of a migration by land is not mentioned, though
doubtless it would have been admitted, because the
evidence which he had so often studied pointed rather
to a downward than to an upward movement ; but he
asserts with some emphasis that many living species
are older than the existing distribution of sea and
land.

On his return to Boston, he had other opportuni-
ties of studying ice-worn rocks and erratics, and from
this city made an excursion to Plymouth (Massachu-
setts) to see the spot where, on a mid- winter day, the
Pilgrim Fathers had landed. But even here he could
not neglect the shells upon the strand, and he records
that eighteen species were collected, one- third of which
were common to Europe. Still, we may note that on
this journey rather more attention was paid than on
the former to questions political, commercial, educa-
tional, and theological, and these occupy a larger space
in the " Second Visit to the United States," which
may account for its greater popularity. For example,
it contains a sketch of the witch-finding mania in
Massachusetts late in the seventeenth century, and a
whole chapter on the sea-serpent. This " hardy peren-
nial " had appeared in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in
the previous August and in October, 1844,^ and had
repeatedly visited the New England coast from 1815
to 1825, when it had been seen by many credible
witnesses. Lyell appears to be satisfied that, though
allowance had to be made for exaggeration and honest

* It was also seen the following year on the coast of Virginia, and
on that of Norway in both 1845 and 1846.

158 CHARLES LYELL

misconception, some big creature had been seen, and
suggests that it may have been an exceptionally large
specimen of the basking shark.^

After a stay of nearly two months in Boston, they
left for the south early in December, and found a
little difficulty at first, as on a former occasion, from
the slippery state of the rails. They journeyed by
Newhaven, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington
to Richmond, where a halt was made to examine the
coalfield some sixteen miles to the south-west of the
city. The measures rest on the granite, filling up
inequalities on its surface, and are occasionally cut by
dykes, which produce the usual alteration in the adja-
cent coal. The principal seam is from thirty to forty
feet thick ; but the field, as a whole, reminded Lyell
most of that at St. Etienne (France), which he had
visited in 1843.-!- From Richmond they went, as on
the former occasion, by Weldon to Wilmington, where
the cliffs near the town yielded some Tertiary fossils,
and on Christmas morning they landed from a steamer
at Charleston.

From this city Lyell again visited the deposits
near Savannah, which contained remains of mega-
therium, mastodon, and other large quadrupeds, as
well as a second locality on Skiddaway Island, and
then, on the last day of the year, quitted Charleston
for Darien in Georgia. Here also were some more
deposits of the same kind, while at St. Simon's Island
Lyell examined a very large Indian mound. It was a

* He says that the alleged sea-serpent washed ashore at Stronsa
(Orkneys) in 1808 is proved by the bones (some of which are preserved)
to have been this animal.

f The formation, however, does not belong to the Carboniferous
system, but is shown by its fossils to be Jurassic in age.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 159

mass of shells, chiefly of oysters, and contained flint
arrow-heads, stone axes, and fragments of Indian
pottery.

Returning to Savannah, they travelled towards the
north-west, by Macon to Milledgeville. For more than
150 miles of the first part of the journey Lyell went
along the railway on a hand-car, so as to study the
cuttings and obtain the most continuous section
possible of the Tertiary deposits from the sea to the
inland granite. These deposits consisted of porcelain
clays, yellow and white sands, and "burrstone," a
flinty grit used for millstones, which often was full of
silicified shells and corals, with the teeth of sharks
and the bones of zeuglodon. Lyell mentions that in
the neighbourhood of Macon he saw blockhouses such
as those described by Cooper in the "Pathfinder,"
which twenty-five years earlier had been used for
defence against the Indians before any white men's
houses had been built in the forest.

Near Milledgeville the granite, gneiss, etc., is
decomposed in situ to a considerable depth, and the
rain-water, when the trees have been cut down,
quickly furrows the detrital deposits of the neigh-
bourhood. A remarkable instance of this action had
occurred at Pomona Farm, where a ravine 180 feet
broad and 55 feet deep had been excavated in the
course of only twenty years."^ From Milledgeville
they returned to Macon, and thence travelled west-
ward by Columbus to Montgomery, being much jolted
in the stage-coach, but securing as a reward some
Tertiary fossils ; and at the latter place they found red

♦ It is described and figured in later editions of the " Principles of
Geology," chap. xv. (eleventh edition).

160 CHARLES LYELL

clays and sandstones, which, however, were about the
same age as the chalk of England. After the coach
travelling, a journey by steamer down the Alabama
River to Mobile was a welcome change, and the not
unfrequent halts for cargo or to take in wood gave
opportunities for collecting fossils from the neigh-
bouring bluffs. One night they were startled by loud
crashing noises and the sound of breaking glass, and
found that the steamer had run foul of the trees
growing on the bank. Their branches touched the
water, as the river was unusually high; and the
vessel, in the darkness, had been steered too near to
the shore. Longer halts were made at Claiborne, to
collect fossils from deposits corresponding in age with
those at Bracklesham in England; and at Macon
(Alabama), to visit a place where some remarkable
specimens of the zeuglodon had been discovered.
From Mobile also a long river journey was under-
taken to Tuscaloosa, to visit a coalfield which supplied
the town with fuel and the materials for gas. The
field, "a southern prolongation of the great Appa-
lachian coalfield," is a large one, being about ninety
miles long and thirty wide, with some seams sixteen
feet thick worked in open quarries. He remarks that
he made geological excursions " through forests re-
cently abandoned by the Indians, and where their
paths may still be traced."

The strata on the Alabama River afforded a useful
lesson on the variability of lithological characters.
Were it not for the fossils, Lyell says, the Lower
Cretaceous beds of loose gravel might be taken for the
newest Tertiary, the main body of the Chalk for Lias,
and the soft Tertiary limestone for the representative

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 161

of the Chalk. It was impossible to leave Mobile
without seeing something of the Gulf of Mexico ; so
they went in a steamer down the Alabama River to
the seaside, looked upon the muddy banks, with the
shells'^ which live in them and the quantities of
drift-timber which bestrew them, and then went
across to one of the minor mouths of the Mississippi,
and, passing up it, landed at New Orleans.

This town, about 110 miles by water from the
confluence of the main channel of the Mississippi
with the sea, afforded a convenient opportunity for
studying the character of the lower part of the delta
of the " Father of Waters." Such a region might be
expected to supply facts which would be helpful in
the interpretation of many phenomena presented by
the coal measures. Accordingly, Lyell made one ex-
cursion to Lake Pontchartrain, a great sheet of fresh
water no great distance from both New Orleans and
the sea, and another down to the mouth of the
Mississippi. The road through the swamp to the
former was constructed of a strange material — viz.
the white valves of a fresh-water mollusc, f These
are obtained from a huge bank over a mile in length,
and sometimes about four yards in depth, at one end
of the lake. How this had been formed seemed
doubtful. Possibly the shells had been piled up by
the waves during a storm; possibly there had been
some slight change of level. The lake itself is about
fifteen feet below high-water mark, and is about as
many deep ; but, as it receives an arm of the Missis-
sippi, silt is gradually raising the bottom. The sea

* A species of Gnathodon,
f Gnathodon cuneatus.

162 CHARLES LYELL

sometimes, when impelled by a strong south-east
wind, makes its way into the lake. Among the
English coal measures — as, for instance, at Coalbrook
Dale or in Yorkshire — beds of marine shells are
occasionally found intercalated among or even as-
sociated with freshwater molluscs, without any altera-
tion in the general character of the beds in which
they lie. How this might occur is illustrated by
Lake Pontchartrain in the swampy alluvial delta.
Here a very slight physical change might enable the
sea to take, for a time, possession of the land, and the
denizens of its water, like a band of pirates, to dis-
possess the usual inhabitants.

The other expedition also supplied not a few
valuable facts relating to the history of river deltas,
which were afterwards supplemented as they travelled
northwards for some hundreds of miles up the river,
following its sinuous course through leagues of
marshy plain, densely overgrown with vegetation.
In the seaward reaches, reed, and rush, and willow,
but above New Orleans cypresses and other timber
trees, rise above the rank herbage.

The minor channels, blocked with driftwood which
formed natural rafts ; the sand-bars and mud- banks ;
the great curves of the river, the "bayous""^ and
isolated pools ; the natural banks built up by the
sediment arrested at flood-time by the herbage near
the river brink ; the floating timber and the " snags "
— all provided valuable illustrations of the physical

* A bayou is the name given to an old channel of the river. When
the latter is making a series of horseshoe curves, the stream often
cuts through the neck of land which separates its nearest parts. The
water then takes the shortest course, the entrances to the old channel
are silted up, and it becomes a horseshoe-shaped pool.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 163

features of a great river delta, and supplied him with
material which afterwards was Avorked up into newer
editions of the " Principles " and the " Elements."

From New Orleans Lyell went by steamer to Nat-
chez, halting on the way to examine more closely
certain localities of interest and to obtain illustrations
of how a coalfield might be formed. The bluffs of
Natchez — almost the first place where distinctly higher
ground approaches the river-side — afforded plenty of
semi-fossil shells, specifically identical with those still
inhabiting the valley of the Mississippi, but the loam
in which they were embedded — a loam which re-
minded him of the loess of the Rhine — also contains
the remains of the mastodon, and overlies a clay with
bones of the megalonyx, horse, and other quadrupeds,
mostly extinct. Beneath this clay are sands and gravel,
the whole forming a platform which rises about 200 feet
above the low river plain, revealing an earlier chapter
in the history of the river. Similar bluffs occur at
Yicksburg, but these disclosed Eocene strata beneath
the alluvial deposits, and thus invited a halt in order
to explore the neighbourhood. The next stage was to
Memphis, nearly 400 miles. Lyell speaks highly of
the accommodation generally afforded by the river
steamers, but found the inquisitiveness of his Ameri-
can fellow-travellers rather a nuisance, and the spoiled
children a still greater one. The former drawback to
pleasure has certainly abated during the last half-cen-
tury, but whether the latter has done the same may
perhaps be disputed. New Madrid, 170 miles above
Memphis, called for a longer halt, for the neighbouring
district had suffered from a great earthquake in the
year 1811, when shocks were felt at intervals for about

164 CHARLES LYELL

three months, the ground was cracked, water mingled
with sand was spouted out, yawning fissures opened
(in one case draining a lake) , portions of the river cliff
were shaken down into the stream, and a large district
—about 2,000 square miles in area — was permanently
depressed. Some traces of the earthquake, in addi-
tion to the last-named, could still be recognised at the
time of Lyell's visit, though more than thirty years
had elapsed.

At Cairo, above New Madrid, the Ohio joins the
Mississippi, and it was ascended to Mount Vernon.
The geology now became a little more varied, for
beneath the shelly loam already mentioned Car-
boniferous strata make their appearance, in which
fossil plants are sometimes abundant and upright
trees now and then occur. For nearly 200 miles
higher up the Ohio, rocks of this age are exposed at
intervals, till at last, near Louisville, those belonging
to the Devonian system rise from beneath them.
These, at New Albany, contain a fossil coral-reef, ex-
posed in the bed of the river and crowded with
specimens in unusually good preservation. At Cin-
cinnati the travellers came at last upon old ground,
and journeyed thence by steamer to Pittsburg. About
thirty-two miles from this town, at a place called
Greensburg, some remarkable footprints had been
discovered on slabs of stone not many months before
Lyell's visit, but as the beds on which they occurred
belonged to the coal measures doubt had been ex-
pressed as to their being genuine, so he went thither
to satisfy himself on this point. The footprints
had disturbed the peace of Pittsburg, for they
had started discussions in which one party had

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 165

assumed, as matters of course, the high antiquity
of the earth and the great changes in its living
tenants, and had thus incurred the censure — which
in some cases was followed by professional injury —
not only of the multitude, but also of some of the
Roman Catholic and Lutheran clergy. Commenting
on this episode, Lyell quotes with approbation the words
of a contemporary author,* which even at the pre-
sent time occasionally need to be remembered: —
" To nothing but error can any truth be dangerous ;
and I know not where else there is to be seen so
altogether tragical a spectacle, as that religion should
be found standing in the highways to say 'Let no
man learn the simplest laws of the universe, lest
they mislearn the highest. In the name of God
the Maker, who said, and hourly yet says, " Let
there be light," we command that you continue in
darkness ! ' "

The travellers crossed the Alleghany Mountains
in their way to Philadelphia. But a piece of work
in Virginia had been left unfinished on the last
occasion — the examination of the Jurassic coalfield
near Richmond. So he set off thither, leaving Mrs.
Lyell in Philadelphia, and took the opportunity of
examining the Tertiary deposits near the former town
and the Eocene strata on the Potomac River. On
his return they went to Burlington, which they reached
in the first week in May, just as the humming-birds
were arriving in hundreds, and by the 7 th of the
month they were in New York. The age of the so-
called Taconic Group — a question of which so much
has been heard of late years — was then beginning

* T. Carlyle ("Letter on Secular Education").

166 CHARLES LYELL

to attract attention, so Lyell went in company with,
some American geologists to Albany in the hope of
solving the problem. This he trusted he had done,
but as his conclusions now would be deemed un-
satisfactory, they need not be quoted. In reality,
the question at that time was not even ripe for
discussion.

On the homeward journey he turned aside at
Boston to visit Wenham Lake, from which much ice
was being supplied to London, and then they left for
England by a steam packet which touched at Halifax.
Four days after leaving this place they passed among
a "group of icebergs several hundreds in number,
varying in height from 100 to 200 feet," many of them
picturesque in form, some even fantastic. Stones were
resting on one of them, but as a rule they were per-
fectly clean and dazzlingly white, except on the wave-
worn parts, which, as usual, were a beautiful blue.
These, and a fine aurora borealis on the next niglit,
were the only incidents of the voyage, and on June
13th, in twelve and a half days from Boston, the
vessel reached Liverpool.

The close of this journey marks an epoch in Ly ell's
life. It was the last — unless we except his visit to
Madeira — of his long wanderings for the purpose of
questioning Nature face to face, and of studying her
under various aspects and diverse conditions. He did
not, indeed, cease to travel. He twice returned to
America, he revisited Sicily and various parts of
Europe, but these journeys not only occupied less time
but also led him among scenes for the most part not
unfamiliar. He doubtless felt that on reaching his
fiftieth year he might fairly regard the more laborious

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 167

part of his education completed, although he never
ceased to be a learner, even to the latest days of his
Hfe, when strength had failed and memory was be-
coming weak.

An account of the above-named journey was pub-
lished in 1849, under the title of " A Second Visit to
the United States of North America." This book,
in addition to descriptions of the scenery and the
geology of the country, contains much general infor-
mation about the people, with remarks by the author
on various political questions, such as the condition of
parties, the effects of almost universal suffrage, particu-
larly on the national sense of honour and morality, the
existence and evils of slavery, the state of religious
feeling, the position of Churches, and the systems
of education, especially when contrasted with those of
England. Some of these questions about this time
were exciting much attention in Great Britain, and in
regard to one matter — the delimitation of the terri-
tories of the two nations in the region west of the
Rocky Mountains — friction existed, which was so
serious that more than once war seemed possible.
On this account, probably, the " Second Visit " was a
greater success, commercially speaking, than the
" Travels," for it reached a third edition.

168 CHABLES LTELL

CHAPTER IX.

STEADY PROGRESS.

The " Principles of Geology " had been completed
and published for thirteen years, yet catastrophism,
as we learn from a correspondence with Edward
Forbes,^ dated September, 1846, was dying hard.
" Agassiz, Alcide D'Orbigny, and their followers [were
still] trying to make out sudden revolutions in organic
life in support of equally hypothetical catastrophes
in the physical history of the globe."t A remark
in Forbes's reply is striking : —

" You are pleased to compliment my paper on its originality.
Any praise from you must ever be among the greatest gratifica-
tions to me, and to any honest labourer in the great field of
Nature. But I had rather hear the views I have set for-
ward be proved not original than the contrary. It seems to
me that the surest proof of the truth of such conclusions as I
have summed up at the end of my essay is the fact of their not
being original so far as one person is concerned, and of their
having become manifest to more than one mind, either about
the same, time or successively, without communication. I be-
lieve laws discover themselves to individuals, and not that
individuals discover laws. If a law have truth in it, many
will see it about the same time."

In this month also the Lyells removed from Hart
Street to 11, Harley Street. The house where they
had spent fourteen years very happily was not left
without regret, but it had become too small. They

* In reference to an essay ■written hy him on the connection
hetween the fauna and flora of the British Isles and geological
changes. (" Memoirs of the Geological Survey," i. p. 336.)

t Life, Letters, and Journals, vol ii. p. 110.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 169

had no children, but a rapidly increasing geological
collection takes up almost as much room as (though
it is much more silent than) a growing family. The
removal of a geological collection is a laborious
business ; and, besides this, Lyell was preparing a
new edition of the "Principles" and writing a book
about his recent travels in America. Still, to judge
from his letters, he found time for some pleasant
social distractions ; for his letters to the old home at
Kinnordy contain more often than formerly interesting
references to talks with such men as Macaulay, Milman,
and Rogers, Lord Clarendon and Lord Lansdowne.
The seventh edition of the " Principles," condensed into
a bulky single volume, was published early in 1847,
and in the following June Lyell attended the meeting
of the British Association at Oxford, which appears to
have been no less pleasant than successful, although
" out of twenty-four Heads of Houses only four were
at Oxford to receive the Association." On this
occasion, he writes, he became better acquainted with
" Ruskin, who was secretary of our Geological Sec-
tion." The remainder of this summer was spent in
Scotland, and the rest of the year, with most of the
following one, was devoted to quiet work. Still, Lyell
took an active part in a crisis through which, about
this time, the Royal Society was passing. A number
of the Fellows, including most of those eminent in
science, were anxious to raise the standard for
admission into the Society. For many years past
the "three letters" had often signified little more
than an indication of good means and social posi-
tion, coupled with a certain interest in scientific
pursuits. The reformers prevailed, after a long

170 CHARLES LYELL

struggle " with a set of obstructives compared with
whom Metternich was a progressive animal/' and the
present status of the society is the result. Inci-
dental remarks in Lyell's letters to his relations also
indicate that he was becoming well known in circles
other than scientific, of which a further proof was
given in the autumn of 1848, when he received the
offer of knighthood. Of course, in any country where
" orders of merit " exist, other than Great Britain,
Lyell would have been "decorated" years ago, but
we manage things differently. As a rule, we let
science and literature be their own reward, and, as
an exception, confer the same distinction on a man
who has won a world-wide reputation (provided he
is fairly rich) and on an opulent tradesman who
is accidently prominent on some auspicious occasion,
or is a local wirepuller in party politics. Lyell went
over from Kinnordy to Balmoral to receive the
intended honour, and had, as he writes, " a most
agreeable geological exploring on the banks of the
Dee, into which Prince Albert entered with much
spirit." In February, 1849, he was elected for the
second time President of the Geological Society,
and in the autumn, when at Kinnordy, was again
invited to Balmoral, where he had some interesting
talks with Prince Albert on subjects ranging from
various educational and broad political questions
to the entomology of Switzerland, Scotland, and
the Isle of Wight.

In the middle of September he attended the meet-
ing of the British Association at Birmingham, where
he was for the third time President of the Geological
Section. A few weeks later his father, whose health had

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. I7l

been for some time failing, died at Kinnordy."^ The
latter was a rich man, but as he made Kberal provi-
sion for his daughters and younger sons, Sir Charles,
though he succeeded to a considerable estate, found
himself unable to afford the expense of keeping up
Kinnordy as well as a house in London. Which,
then, was henceforth to be his home ? The attractions
of Kinnordy were obvious, but the long distance
from the metropolis was a serious drawback, while
the duties of a resident landlord would have inter-
fered much with his geological work, which would
have been still more hampered by the severance
from libraries, museums, and intercourse with fellow-
workers. Thus he felt it his duty to retain his house
in London and to let Kinnordy, though, as his mother
and sisters retreated to the " dower house," he was
able from time to time to visit the old place. The
decision probably was less painful than it otherwise
would have been from the fact that his boyhood
had been spent in England. At any rate, it was a
wise one, in regard to both his own reputation and
the progress of science in general.

In the summer of 1850, Sir Charles augmented
his experience and refreshed old memories by a
tour in Germany. During this he saw for the first
time the Koth-todt-hegende or Lower Permian con-
glomerates at Halle and at Eisenach, as well as the
great lava streams which had supplied them with
so much of their materials. Also he went to the
Brocken in order to examine into Yon Buch's
extraordinary assertion that the granite had "come
up in a bubble." This, it is needless to say, was

* He died November 8th, 1849.

172 CHARLES LYELL

speedily pricked. The loess also, that singular deposit
which wraps like a mantle so much of the undulating
ground in Northern Germany, evidently engaged his
attention, and we find the fruits of these studies in
a later work. In addition to all this, he did more
than glance at the Maestricht Chalk, the " Wealden "
coal of Hanover, the Tertiary deposits near Berlin,
the Palaeozoic rocks of the Hartz, and the scenery of
the Saxon Switzerland.

His books, his scientific papers, and Presidential
addresses to the Geological Society, his duties as a
commissioner, at first for the Exhibition of 1851,
and somewhat later for the reform of the University
of Oxford, kept him pretty well employed till August,
1852, when he for the third time crossed the Atlantic
to deliver another course of lectures at the Lowell
Institute, Boston. Though he was back in England
before Christmas, he found time for some geological
work in America, the most important item in
which was an excursion from Halifax in company
with his old acquaintance, Mr. J. W. Dawson, to
the Nova Scotian coalfield. On this occasion he
passed through a fair amount of country still un-
cleared, which made the journey more interesting ;
he had also opportunities of appreciating the effects
of ice in moving and piling up boulders on the shores
of lakes, and obtained still more evidence in regard
to this, on reaching the sea-coast in the neighbour-
hood of the coalfield. But their labour was rewarded
by one discovery of exceptional importance. In the
trunk of a tree which had died and become hollow
in a forest of the Carboniferous period, they found en-
tombed the skeleton of an animal. Whether this were

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 173

a fish or a reptile was at first hotly disputed, but finally
it proved to be an amphibian.

i^ On his return to England, Sir Charles was kept for
some time fully employed by the preparation of the
ninth edition of the "Principles," but early in the
summer of 1853 he went for the fourth time to America
— on this occasion in company with Lord EUesmere —
as commissioner to the Exhibition held at New York.
But now his time was fully taken up by official duties,
and his visit was a short one, for he returned before
the end of July, and was soon afterwards invited to
visit Osborne and give some account of his journey to
the Queen and Prince Albert.

Very early in 1854 he again left England, in
company with Lady Lyell and Mr. and Mrs. Bunbury,
to visit Madeira. Some three weeks were devoted to
a careful study of the geology of that island,"^ partly
with the view of determining whether it afforded any
support to Von Buch's favourite notion that volcanic
cones were mainly formed by upheaval. As might
be anticipated, the evidence was distinctly unfavour-
able. The island was proved to be mainly composed
of volcanic material, cones of basaltic scoria, and
great flows of similar lava, which had been piled
successively one on another in the open air to a
depth of about 4,000 feet. This mass had been sub-
sequently pierced by dykes, worn by storm and
stream, and in one or two places deeply grooved by
rivers. There were, indeed, some underlying beds of
marine origin, which, in one part of the island, rose
to a height of 1,200 feet above the sea, and thus

* He had the advantage of the company of Mr. C. Hartung, who
was an excellent naturalist and well acquainted with the island.

174 CHARLES LYELL

indicated a certain amount of upheaval; but even
this was not of the kind which Von Buch's hypo-
thesis required, while the rest of the evidence,
including that afforded by some tuffs containing
fossil plants, proved that the major part of the island
had been formed above water.

From Madeira they went on to Teneriffe, Palma,
and the Grand Canary. Of this part of the journey
few details are given, but the results were afterwards
incorporated with one of his books.^ To the Peak of
Teneriffe the reference is comparatively brief. Of
Palma the account is much fuller, for this island had
been regarded by Yon Buch, who visited it in 1825,
as a type of his " craters of elevation " — an idea which
was dispelled by Lyell's investigation. The Grand
Canary, like Madeira, proved to be formed of masses
of subaerial volcanic rock, perhaps even thicker than
those in Madeira, which also rested upon some
upraised marine deposits of Miocene age.

In the course of 1854 Sir Charles received from
his own University the honorary degree of D.C.L.
Much time was spent in working up the results of his
last journey, some of which were communicated to
the Geological Society. t In the spring of 1855 he
went to the Continent, studying, among other matters,
the drifts in the neighbourhood of Berlin. In the
summer he visited Scotland, made the acquaintance
of Hugh Miller, worked over Arthur's Seat, Blackford
Hill, and " the coast of Fife from Kinghorn to Kirk-
caldy." It would be hard to find a set of sections

* "Elements of Geology" (sixth edition), pp. 621-635.
f "On the Geology of Some Parts of Madeii-a" (Quart. Jour.
Geol. Soc, X. p. 325).

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. l75

better adapted for the study of ancient volcanic rocks,
both contemporaneous and intrusive, than this coast
affords; and his experience in Madeira and the
Canaries enabled him to regard " the Edinburgh and
Fife rocks with very different eyes."

One or two of his published letters about this
period have a special interest, for they show that his
views on the origin of species were undergoing a
gradual modification. Speaking of some strange
variations in the flower of an orchideous plant,^ he
refers, half in jest, to " ugly facts, as Hooker, clinging
(like me) to the orthodox faith, calls these and other
abnormal vagaries"; and again, the following sentences
do not come from a man who is firm in his belief f : —

" When Huxley, Hooker, and Wollaston were at Darwin's
last week, they (all four of thern) ran a tilt against species
further, I believe, than they are deliberately prepared to go —
Wollaston least unorthodox. I cannot easily see how they
can go so far, and not embrace the whole Lamarckian doctrine.
Huxley held forth last week about the oxlip, which he says
is unknown on the Continent. If we had met with it in
Madeira and nowhere else, or the cowslip, should we not have
voted them true species 1 Darwin finds, among his fifteen
varieties of the common pigeon, three good genera and about
fifteen good species, according to the received mode of species
and genus-making of the best ornithologists, and the bony
skeleton varying with the rest ! After all, did we not come
from an ourang, seeing that man is of the Old World, and not
from the American type of anthropomorphous mammalia ? '

* In a letter to Mr. Bunbury, dated November 13th, 1854 (Life,
Letters, and Journals, vol. ii. p. 199). It is written from 63, Harley
Street, one in the previous August bearing the superscription of 11,
Harley Street, so that he appears (though there is no allusion to this in
his published letters or journals) to have removed into another house
in the same street. The number of this was subsequently altered.

t Another letter to Mr. Bunbury, dated April 30th, 1856 {ibkl,
p. 212).

176 CHARLES LYELL

Sir Charles and Lady Lyell were again on the
Continent in the summer of 1856, examining the
drifts of Northern Germany, visiting Humboldt at
Berlin, discussing geological questions, especially in
regard to Carboniferous plants, at Breslau with
Roemer and Goeppert ; working over the Riesen-
gebirge; then going on to Dresden, and passing
through the Saxon Switzerland to Aussig. The coal-
field north-west of the former city was not neglected,
the great breccia beds of the Rothliegende were again
examined, and account was taken of Ramsay's opinion
that certain British Permian breccias were glacial in
origin. Close attention was also bestowed upon the
great masses of hard quartzose grit, through which
the Elbe has carved its way — the Quader of Saxony ;
for this formation, "a grit wholly deficient in cal-
careous matter, corresponds to the more purely cal-
careous rock (Chalk) of Great Britain, and yet contains
here and there the same shells." He did not neglect
the Brown Coal^ between Toplitz and Aussig, and,
on reaching Prague, made the acquaintance of Bar-
rande, who took him to see those older Palaeozoic
rocks among which the great palaeontologist had been
labouring for nearly a quarter of a century. Then
the travellers proceeded to Vienna, and after that to
the Styrian Alps, to visit various interesting sections
in the Salzkammergut, such as the classic ground at
Gosau and the Triassic limestones near Hallstadt,
where the last survivors of the Palaeozoic ages are
entombed with the representatives of the period.
His letters, like many others of earlier date, indicate
that, notwithstanding the fascinations of geology,

* This deposit belongs to the Tertiary era (Oligocene system).

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 177

neither living molluscs, nor insects, nor plants had
ceased to interest. They returned by way of Munich,
Ulm, Zurich and Paris, reaching England about the
end of October.

The summer of 1857 was devoted to another Con-
tinental tour, rather more restricted than the former,
but by no means unimportant. They went leisurely
through Belgium and up the Rhine into Switzerland,
halting at different places either to study sections of
special interest or to confer with eminent geologists.
Part of a letter written at this time "^ gives a valuable
insight into the intention of these journeys and the
character of the author, who was now in his sixtieth
year:—

" I hope to continue for years travelling, making original
observations, and, above all, going to school to the younger,
but not, for all that, young geologists, whom I meet everywhere,
so far ahead of us old stagers that they are familiar with
branches of the science, fast rising into importance, which
were not thought of when I first began."

Switzerland, obviously, was visited on this occasion
with a very definite purpose. Be Charpentier, Escher
von der Linth, and other local geologists, had been
for some time asserting that the glaciers of the Alps,
at no remote epoch in geological history, had attained
to an enormous size, had buried the Swiss lowland
and covered it with morainic deposits, and had even
welled up high against the flanks of the Jura, where
the huge blocks of protogine from the Mont Blanc
range — such as Pierre a bot and its companion
erratics, full 800 feet above the Lake of Neuchatel—
indicated one position of its terminal moraine. For-

* Life, Letters, and Journals, ii. p.. 243.
h

178 CHARLES LYELL

merly, in common with many other geologists, Sir
Charles had supposed these blocks to have been
transported from the Alpine peaks by ice-rafts on
the sea, at a time when the whole region stood at
a considerably lower level. But now, after examining
the erratics, their regular and significant distribution,
the other glacial debris, the ice- worn surfaces of rock
beneath it, and ascertaining the distinctly terrestrial
character of the deposits all about the mountains,
he unreservedly admitted land-ice to be the only
possible agent, and, in accepting this hypothesis,
perceived clearly that he must not shrink from
applying it to Scotland. Then he plunged into the
mountains to examine and follow the track of the
retreating ice-sheet up to the glaciers which are
still at work among the higher peaks, passing up
the valley of the Reuss, crossing the Furka Pass,
and descending the Rhone valley to Yisp, but turning
aside to examine the earth pillars on the flank of
the Eggishorn."^ Another, and a larger group of
these pillars — instances of the erosive action of rain-
water on morainic material — was seen near Stalden,
in the Visp-thal; but these had been damaged by
the earthquake Avhich two years before had severely
shaken this part of the Alps. At Zermatt the charac-
teristics of glaciers and the effects of ice were care-
fully studied among the grandest of Alpine scenery ;
then, on returning to the Rhone Valley, they crossed
the Alps by the Simplon and went on to Turin. Here
he took the opportunity of visiting the huge moraine
near Ivrea, which rises from the lowland like a range

* The largest, called the Zwergiithuin, is about one and a half
hours walk above Viesch.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 179

of hills, and of investigating tlie erratics of the
Superga, satisfying himself that they really belonged
to the Miocene deposits of that hill, and were indi-
cative of the existence of glaciers in the Alps of
that epoch, which had been large enough to reach
the sea-level, and to send off masses of ice laden with
boulders. Then they went on to Genoa, and along
the beautiful Riviera di Levante to Pisa; thence,
after a short visit to Florence, proceeding direct from
Leghorn to Naples. Here, he once more examined
Vesuvius, and had the luck to see lava streams
actually in motion — "some going fast, others going
very slow" — a sight which "gave him many new
ideas." A study also of the dykes of Somma con-
vinced him that they afforded no support to De
Beaumont's idea of a distension of the mass."^

From Naples he. went to Sicily, in order to make
a second examination of Etna, and then, after re-
joining Lady Lyell, spent some time in the neigh-
bourhood of Rome, visiting the old volcanic district
of the Alban Hills, and making excursions, as they
travelled northward, into the Apennines. They re-
turned through France, reaching London towards the
end of December.

But, for a worker so thorough in his methods,
this visit to the volcanoes was not enough, so next
year, after spending the earlier part of the summer
with his brother's t family in the neighbourhood of
Darmstadt, he left Lady Lyell there, and set off

* This had been asserted in support of the hypothesis of "craters
of elevation."

f Colonel Lyell had retired from the ai my and returned to England
a short time before the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny.

180 CHARLES LYELL

towards the end of August for a third examination
both of Vesuvius and of Etna. TraveUing rapidly
up the valley of the Rhine, he went by Geneva to
Culoz, and over Mont Cenis to Turin and Genoa,
without halting for geological work, and thence by sea
to Naples. Lava was still flowing from Vesuvius,
that black mass, with its strange rope-like folds and
slaggy wrinkles,"^ now so well known to every visitor.
Accompanied by Professor Guiscardi — one of the
most genial and helpful of leaders — Sir Charles made
his way to a vent at the base of the principal cone,
where the lava was still welling forth from " a small
grotto, looking as fluid as water where it first issued,
and moving at a pace which you would call rapid in
a river. White-hot, at first, in a canal four or five feet
broad, then red before it had got on a yard, then in
a few feet beginning to be covered by a dark scum,
which thickened fast and was carried along on the
surface." But the great question, whether a volcano
was mainly a " crater of elevation " or a " crater of
ejection," was ever present to his mind; so, in addi-
tion to studying the grand sections displayed in the
crags of Monte Somma, he devoted two days to the
exploration of the ravines which furrow its outer
slopes. He also found time to have another look
at the Temple of Serapis, and to examine the Sol-
fatara, which is a striking example of a crater at
once broad and low.

After a week's halt at Naples, Sir Charles resumed
his journey to Sicily, landing at Messina on September
10th. By the 15th he was once more on the slopes of

* See Professor J. W. Judd : " Volcanoes " (International Scientific
Series), Fig. 22.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 181

Etna, and had begun a twelve-day period of hard work
on the mountain, passing five nights in very rough
quarters at the Casa degh Inglesi, 9,600 feet above sea-
level. During this stay he ascended the principal
cone, carefully examining both the larger and the
smaller craters, and descended into the Val del Bove, a
laborious expedition, but one which well repaid him
by throwing much light on the structure of the
volcanic mass. Still he was not yet satisfied, for after
he had descended to Zafarana, he returned to spend
another night at the Casa degli Inglesi in order to
satisfy himself about one or two details. From
Zafarana also he went again to the Val del Bove,
checking and increasing his notes, and devoted
another day to a most interesting excursion through
picturesque scenery as far as the watershed between
this vast hollow in the mountain side and the neigh-
bouring Yal di Tripodo. On all these excursions Sir
Charles, as far as possible, rode, remarking to his wife,
" I feel here that a good mule is like presenting an
old geologist with a young pair of legs." Work on
the mountain ended, he spent a little time in examin-
ing the Tertiary beds of the neighbouring lowland,
and then, getting back to Messina about the middle
of October, returned in due course to England.

These two journeys in succession greatly aug-
mented his knowledge of the structure of volcanic
cones, and enabled him to deal the death-blow to the
" crater of elevation " hypothesis which had found
such favour among Continental geologists. He could
now prove that lava would solidify in a compact form
on slopes of thirty-five or even forty degrees — a fact
which had been stoutly denied by advocates of that

182 CHARLES LYELL

hypothesis, and was able to offer an explanation of
the singular structure of the Yal del Bove, viz. that
it was a huge gulf, formed by a series of mighty ex-
plosions, similar to those which shattered half of the
old crater of Vesuvius,"^ and sent one side of Bandai
Sanf flying through the air. He returned to England
satisfied that his feet were on firm ground, if such a
phrase be permissible in regard to a volcano, and that
the results J of this conscientious labour in the fulness
of his age had strengthened him in the position which
he had adopted in his scientific youth.

In the next year (1859) Lyell also travelled, though
the journeys were not so lengthy as their two prede-
cessors. Still, in the spring he visited both Holland
and Le Buy in Auvergne, and in the earlier part of the
autumn attended the meeting of the British Associa-
tion at Aberdeen, under the presidency of Brince
Albert. A strong body of geologists were present, and
Lyell was for the fourth time in the chair of the Geo-
logical Section, the Brince coming to hear his address.
Among the old friends whom he met was one who
would have been a suitable husband for the famous
Countess of Desmond, for Lyell writes of him to Mrs.
Horner, his wife's mother, " Dr. F. at ninety-four looks
well enough, but having eaten turtle-soup, and melon
too close to the rind, and other imprudences, is not
quite well to-day ! " 0 dura Doctorum ilia ! The
meeting ended, Lyell with some geological friends

* In the famous eruption of a.d, 79.

t A volcano of Japan.

X These results are worked into the tenth edition of the " Principles "
(chaps. XXV. and xxvi.). See also a paper on Stony Lava on Steep
Slopes of Etna (Proc. Eoy. Soc. 1858, ix. p. 248). He received the
Copley Medal from the Royal Society in Novemher.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 183

went off to Elgin to examine the sandstone quarried
at Cutties Hillock, near that town. The rock closely
resembles the ordinary Old Red Sandstone ; it seemed
at first sight to form a continuovis mass, yet in one
place it contained a fossil fish belonging to that
period, and in another the remains of a reptile {Teler-
peton). After some days of careful study, the Rev.
W. S. Symonds, who was one of the party, came to
the conclusion (which has been fully ratified by later
investigations) that the deposits were of different ages ;
the one with the fish being truly " Old Red," the other,
with the reptile, " New Red." The chief cause of the
puzzle is that the sand which has been derived from
the older rock has gone to form the newer one, and
that the usual indications of a discontinuity are prac-
tically absent. It aftbrds a valuable caution, for it
shows that Nature sometimes does set traps, which
might well catch even the most wary geologist.

In the same autumn Lyell read Darwin's great
work on " The Origin of Species," by which his scien-
tific position was finally determined, for his letters
show that, if any objection to the leading principles
in his friend's views had still lingered in his mind,
they were overcome by the perusal of this masterly
specimen "of close reasoning and long sustained
argument."

184 CHARLES LYELL

CHAPTER X.

THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

Though many men on reacliing their sixty-third year
are content to rest upon their oars and not to attempt
new ventures, Lyell had plunged into a question
which was arousing almost as much excitement as
the origin of species — namely, the antiquity of man.
It was a question, indeed, which for a long time
must have been before his mind — witness his remarks
on Dr. Schmerling's work in the caves near Liege;
but it had assumed a special significance owing to
the famous discovery of flint implements in the valley
of the Somme.^ The whole subject also would have
a special interest for Lyell, because he had made
Tertiary deposits his special field in stratigraphy, and
had worked at this subject downwards, comparing
extinct with living forms, so that he had seen more
than others of the borderland which blends by an
insensible transition the province of the geologist with
that of the archaeologist. Probably also the thought
which he had been giving to the question of the origin
of species would bring into no less vivid prominence
that of the age and origin of the human race. Be
this as it may, he undertook a task comparatively
novel, and for the next three years was fully occupied

* Found by M. Boucher de Perthes, who had published a book on
the subject in 1847, and had announced the discovery about seven
years earlier; but geologists, for various reasons, were not fully
satisfied on the matter till the visit of Messrs. Prestwich and John
Evans (now Sir) in 1857.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 185

in tlie preparation of his third great book, "The
Antiquity of Man." Travel was necessary for this
purpose also ; but as the journeys were less lengthy
than those already described, and led him for the
most part over old ground, it is needless to enter into
details. He visited the gravels of the Somme Valley
and the caves on the Meuse, besides other parts of
Northern France and Belgium,^ the gravel pits near
Bedford, and various localities in England, examining
into the evidence for himself, and paying particular
attention, not only to the question of man's antiquity,
but also to the supposed return of a warmer climate
than now prevails after the era of glacial cold. The
book was published early in 1863. Naturally its
conclusions were startling to many and were vigour-
ously denounced by some ; but it was a great success,
for it ran through three editions in the course of the
year. A fourth and enlarged edition was published
in 1873.

The book may seem, from the literary critic's
point of view, rather composite in character, and
this objection was made in a good-natured form by
a writer in the Saturday Review,-^ who r.alled it "a,
trilogy on the antiquity of man, ice, ^T^ri r)ar\Yin "
That, however, is but a slight blemish, if blemish it
be, and it was readily pardoned, because of the general
interest of the book, the clearness of its style, and the
lucidity of its reasoning.

In accordance with his usual plan of work — pro-
ceeding tentatively from the known to the unknown

* He went to Florence in 1862, but how far this was for geological
work is not stated,
t Vol. XV. p. 311.

186 CHARLES LYELL

— Lyell begins with times nearest to the present era
and facts of which the interpretation is least open to
dispute. He conducts his reader at the outset to
the peat mosses of Denmark, where weapons of iron,
bronze, and stone he in a kind of stratified order ; and
to those mounds of shells, the refuse heaps of a rude
people, which are found on the Baltic shore. Next
he places him on the site of the pile-built villages
which once fringed the shores of Swiss and Italian
lakes. Here weapons of iron, of bronze, and of stone
are hidden in peat or scattered on the lake-bed. But
these log-built settlements, such as those which Hero-
dotus described at Lake Prasias in Roumelia, are not
the only remnants of an almost prehistoric people, for
nearer home we find analogous constructions in the
crannoges of Ireland — islets partly artificial, built of
timber and stone. Lyell then passes on from Europe
to the valleys of the Nile and Mississippi, and so to
the " carses " of Scotland. In the last case canoes
buried in the alluvial deposits, as in the lowland by
the Clyde, indicate that some physical changes, slight
though they may be, have occurred since the coming
of man. But none of these researches lead us back
into a very remote past ; they keep us still lingering,
as it were, on the threshold of history. The weapons
which have been described, even if made of stone,
exhibit a considerable amount of mechanical skill, for
many of them are fashioned and polished with much
care, while they are associated with the remains of
creatures which are still living at no great distance, if
not in the immediate vicinity. Accordingly he con-
ducts his reader, in the next place, to the localities
where ruder weapons only have been found, fashioned

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 187

by chipping, and never polished — namely, to the
caves of Belgium and of Britain, of Central and of
Southern France, and to the gravel beds in the valleys
of the Somme and the Seine, of the Ouse and other
rivers of Eastern and Southern England. These fur-
TTJjlJlJIIlIir!^^^' ""yH^ftf"^ tih^'^- ^^^^ was contemporary
with several extinct animals, such as the mammoth
and the woolly rhinoceros, or with others which now
inhabit only arctic regions, such as the reindeer and
~tho musksheep, and that the A^iUcys since then have
been deepened and altered in contour. This evidence, ^
stratigraphical as well as palseontological, proves that (
important changes have occurred since man first ap- \
peared, not only in climate, but also in physical \
geography.

The Glacial Epoch is the subject of the second
part of the book. Its pages contain an admirable
sketch of the deposits assigned to that age in Eastern
England, Scandinavia, the Alps, and North America,
with special descriptions of the loess of Northern
Europe, the drifts of the Danish island of Moen, so
like those near Cromer, and the parallel roads of
Glenroy, which Lyell now supposes to have been
formed in a manner similar to that of the little
terrace by the Marjalen See.

The third part deals with " the origin of species as
bearing on man's place in Nature." It is a recanta-
tion of the views which he had formerly maintained.
In all his earlier writings, including the ninth edition
of the "Principles," he had expressed himself dis-
satisfied with the hypothesis of the transmutation of
species, and had accepted, though cautiously and not
without allowing for considerable power of variation,

188 CHARLES LYELL

that of specific centres of creation. Now, after a full
review of tlie question, lie gives his reasons for aban-
doning his earlier opinions and adopting in the main
those advocated by Darwin and Wallace. Neverthe-
less, through frankly avowing his change of view, he
advances cautiously and tentatively, like a man over
treacherous ice — so cautiously, indeed, that Darwin is
not wholly satisfied with his convert, and chides him
good-hum ouredly for his slow progress and over-
much hesitation. But this very hesitation was as
real as the conversion : Jthe one was the outcome of
Ly ell's thoroughly judicial habit of mind, the other
was ^probf, perhaps the strongest that could be
given, of that mind's freshness, vigour, and candour.
The book ends with a chapter on " man's place in
Nature." On this burning question the author speaks
with great caution, but comes to the conclusion that
man, so far as his bodily frame is concerned, cannot
claim exception from the law which governs the rest
of the animal kingdom; and he ends^ with a few
words on the theological aspect of the question : " It
may be said that, so far from having a materialistic
tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth,
at successive geological periods, of life — sensation —
instinct — the intelligence of the higher mammalia
bordering on reason — and, lastly, the improvable
reason of man himself, presents us with a picture of
the ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter."

* " Antiquity of Man," chap. xxiv.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 189

CHAPTER XL

THE EVENING OF LIFE.

The second and third editions of the "Antiquity
of Man " were not mere reprints, since new materials
were constantly coming in and researches were con-
tinued ; for during the summer of 1863 Sir Charles
was rambling about Wales, visiting the caves of Gower
in Pembrokeshire, and of Cefn in Denbighshire, the
peats of Anglesea, and the boulder clay and shell-
bearing sands near the top of Moel Tryfaen. He also
went over to Paris, apparently about this time, to
inquire into the authenticity of specimens — bones
with notches upon them — which were supposed to
prove man contemporaneous with the Cromer Forest
Beds of England, and therefore pre-glacial. Shorter
journeys were to Osborne (by Royal command), to
Suffolk, and to Kent.

While engaged on the above-named book, he had
persistently refused more than one position of honour
—such as a Trusteeship at the British Museum, to be
a candidate for the representation of the University of
London in Parliament, even an honorary degree from
the University of Edinburgh because he was too
busy to undertake the journey. In 1861, also, he
seems to have received a warning that he was
beginning to grow old, for he became rather seriously
unwell, and was ordered to Kissingen in Bavaria to
take a course of the waters. But during the same
period two acceptable honours were received — namely,

190 CHARLES LYELL

the Corresponding Membership of the Institute of
France, in 1862, and an order of Scientific Merit from
the King of Prussia in the following year.

The years, as must be the case when life's evening
shadows are lengthening, begin to be more definitely
chequered with losses and with rewards. In his letters,
references to the death of friends become frequent. In
1862 Mrs. Horner, Lady Lyell's mother, died, and in
1864 her father, Leonard Horner, with whom, even
for some years before becoming his son-in-law, Lyell
had been in constant friendly correspondence, passed
away in his eightieth year. In the same year Lyell
was raised to the rank of baronet, and also occupied
the presidential chair at the meeting of the British
Association at Bath.

His address deals principally with two topics —
one local, thermal springs, especially those of Bath ;
the other general, the glacial epoch and its relation
to the antiquity of man. He refers, however, in the
concluding paragraph to the marked change which,
within his memory, opinion had undergone, in regard
to catastrophic changes and the origin of species, and
to the discovery of the supposed fossil Eozoon Cana-
dense in the crystalline Laurentian rocks of Canada.
This singular structure appeared to him — as it did to
Sir W. Logan, who had brought specimens for exhibi-
tion at the meeting — to be a fossil organism,^ and thus
to indicate the existence of living creatures at a much

* The nature of Eozoon, whether it be the remains of a foraminifer
of unusual size and peculiar habit of growth, or merely a very excep-
tional arrangement of its constituent minerals, has been since the
above-named date a fruitful subject of controversy. For some years
the balance of opinion was in favour of an organic origin ; now it
seems to be distinctly tending in the other direction.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 191

earlier period than hitherto had been supposed. But
in stating this opinion he checks himself characteris-
tically with these words : " I will not venture on
speculations respecting ' the signs of a beginning,' or
' the prospects of an end ' of our terrestrial system —
that wide ocean of scientific conjecture on which
so many theorists before my time have suffered ship-
wreck."

The address contains more than one passage that
is well worth quotation, but the following has so wide
a bearing, and is so significant as to the effects of early
influences, that it should not be forgotten : —

"When speculations on the long series of events which
occurred in the Glacial and post-Glacial periods are indulged
in, the imagination is apt to take alarm at the immensity of
the time required to interpret the monuments of these ages, all
referable to the era of existing species. In order to abridge
the number of centuries which would otherwise be indis-
pensable, a disposition is shown by many to magnify the rate
of change in prehistoric times, by investing the causes which
have modified the animate and inanimate world with extra-
ordinary and excessive energy. It is related of a great Irish
orator of our day, that when he was about to contribute some-
what parsimoniously towards a public charity, he was per-
suaded by a friend to make a more liberal donation. In doing
so, he apologised for his first apparent want of generosity by
saying that his early life had been a constant struggle with
scanty means, and that ' they who are born to affluence cannot
easily imagine how long a time it takes to get the chill of
poverty out of one's bones.' In like manner, we of the living
generation, when called upon to make grants of thousands of
centuries in order to explain the events of what is called the
modern period, shrink naturally at first from making what
seems to be so lavish an expenditure of past time. Throughout
our early education we have been accustomed to such strict
economy in all that relates to the chronology of the earth and
its inhabitants in remote ages, so fettered have we been by

192 CHARLES LYELL

old traditional beliefs, that even when our reason is convinced
and we are persuaded that we ought to make more liberal
grants of time to the geologist, we feel how hard it is to get
the chill of poverty out of our bones." *

A presidential address to the British Association
is no light task ; but, in addition to this, Lyell was
now engaged upon a new edition of the " Elements (or
Manual) of Geology," which for some time had been
urgently demanded; the last edition also of the
" Principles " — though 5,000 copies had been printed —
was practically exhausted. The former work was
cleared off before the end of the year, the book
appearing in January, 1865, and the latter was at
once taken vigorously in hand, as we see from a letter
questioning Sir John Herschel about the earth-pillars
on the Rittnerhorn, near Botzen, and on the influence
which changes in the shape of the earth's orbit and
the position of its axis would have upon climate — a
view which had been advocated by Dr. Croll. Lyell,
it will be remembered, had originally regarded geo-
graphical conditions as the only factors which modi-
fied climate, but he was evidently impressed by
CroU's argument, and ready, if his mathematics
were correct, to admit astronomical changes as an
independent, though probably less potent, cause of
variation.

The Christmas of 1864 and the following New
Year were spent in Berlin, and in the summer of
1865 he had again recourse to Kissingen. Though
he writes that the waters "did him neither harm
nor good," he was at any rate well enough after the
" cure " to undertake a rather lengthy tour with Lady

* Report of Brit. Assoc, 1864, p. xxiv.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 193

Lyell and his nephew^ Leonard, in the course of
which he examined for himself the wonderful earth-
pillars near Botzen, and visited the Marjalen See, that
pretty lake held up by the ice of the great Aletsch
Glacier, in order to see whether it threw any light on
the origin of the parallel roads of Glenroy. He was
satisfied that it did, for he found there a large terrace
" exactly on a level with the col which separates the
valley " occupied by the lake from that of the Viesch
glacier. On his return to England, he writes a long
letter to Sir John Herschel, discussing the origin of
these earth-pillars, and making inquiries as to the
precise points from which his friend, more than forty
years before, had made some elaborate drawings. The
expedition, as well as the letter, to quote Lyell's own
words, were pretty well for a man who was " battling
with sixty-eight years." He complains, however, of
little more than occasional attacks of lumbago, and
a necessity for taking great care of himself ; but his
eyes were now more troublesome than they had been,
and for the last year he had been driven to avail
himself of the services of a secretary,t with the result
that he seemed to have acquired a new lease of his
eyes, and to be able, for ordinary purposes, to use
them almost as well as formerly.

After his return from the Continent Sir Charles
was working hard at the new edition of the " Prin-
ciples," which obviously gave him much trouble, for
letters still remain which were written to Herschel
on questions relating to climate and astronomy; to

* Colonel Lyell's eldest son, the present baronet,
t He was fortunate in obtaining the help of Miss Arabella Bucklej^
a lady of congenial tastes in literature and science,
M

194 CHARLES LYELL

Hooker, Wallace, and Darwin on the transmutation of
species, the distribution and migration of plants and
animals, the effects of geographical changes, and even
on such matters as the Triassic reptilia of Elgin and
Warwickshire, Central India and the Cape. At last
the first volume of the new and much - enlarged
edition (tenth) was published in November, 1866,
the second volume not appearing till 1868. Few
men at that time of life could have accomplished
such a piece of work, especially if they had been
compelled, as Lyell was, to read with the eyes and
write with the hands of others. But even now,
in regard to field work, he was stiU able to see
things for himself, and, though less vigorous than
formerly, to undertake journeys of moderate length.
In 1866, in company with his nephew Leonard, he
examined the Glacial and late Tertiary deposits of
the Suffolk coasts ; looked once more at the sec-
tions of Jurassic rocks in the Isle of Portland and
the neighbourhood of Weymouth, and doubtless
speculated on the origin of the Chesil Bank and of
the Fleet. One honour fell to him in this year,
which, doubtless, only the accident of his long ser-
vice on the Council had previously kept from him
— namely, the WoUaston Medal of the Geological
Society.

In 1867 he was strong enough to visit the Paris
Exhibition, after which he went to Forfarshire, and
attended the meeting of the British Association at
Dundee. In the following year he was present at
the same gathering in Norwich, besides making
various shorter journeys in England and spending
September in Pembrokeshire with Lady Lyell and

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 195

his brother's family,"^ in whose company evidently
he took much pleasure.

In the spring of 1868 he was again in the field,
examining the splendid plant remains of Eocene age
in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth and Poole, and
the shallow- water deposits of the Purbeck group
ripple-marked and sun-cracked, together with the
traces of their ancient forests. Over these he became
as enthusiastic as any young geologist. At this time
also, apparently, he visited the Blackmore Museum f
at Salisbury, and himself found reindeer antlers in
the neighbouring gravels at Fisherton. In the autumn
they again stayed at Tenby with Colonel Lyell's family,
when one of the latter was attacked by a serious
illness. But Sir Charles was able to take his nephew
Leonard to St. David's, and examine the magnificent
sections of fossiliferous Cambrian rocks, under the
guidance of Dr. H. Hicks, whose name is inseparably
connected with the geology of this district.

Comparatively few records are preserved of the
last six years of his life ; still they are enough to
show that his interest in science never flagged. The
few letters which have been printed show no signs
of declining mental strength. Though his bodily
powers had become less vigorous, though his sight was
weak, and his limbs were less firm than in the olden
times, he was by no means ready to be laid altogether
on the shelf. For instance, in the spring of 1869 he
went back to the coast of Suffolk and Norfolk, to

* The relationship was unusually close, for Colonel Lyell had
married another Miss Horner.

f For a description of this fine collection of prehistoric antiquities,
see « Flint Chips," by E. T. Stevens, 1870.

196 CHARLES LYELL

resume work which he had been unable to complete
on his last visit.

Starting at Aldborough, where Pliocene deposits
are still exposed, from the Coralline Crag up to
the Chillesford group, they examined the coasts by
Southwold and Kessingland to Lowestoft, seeing "a
continuous section, for miles unbroken, of the deposits
from the upper part of the Pliocene to the glacial drift."
The Kessingland cliffs afforded good sections of the
" Forest Bed," the deposit which on former occasions
he had studied in the neighbourhood of Cromer. It
was covered by several yards of stratified sand, and
that by glacial drift, " with the usual ' boulders ' of
chalk, flint, lias, sandstone, and other sedimentaries,
with crystalline rocks from more distant places."
Passing on into Norfolk, they followed this " Forest
Bed " and the overlying boulder clay, and they found
in the latter, near Happisburgh, some fragments ot
sea-shells, and one perfect valve of Tellina solidula
in a band of gravel, "like a fragment of an old
sea-beach," intercalated in the glacial clay. As the
origin of this clay has been, of late years, a subject
of dispute, it may be interesting to quote Sir Charles's
conclusion : — " I suppose, therefore, we must set it
down as a marine formation ; and underneath it, from
Happisburgh to Cromer, comes the famous lignite
bed and submarine forest, which must have sunk
down to allow of the unquestionable glacial formation
being everywhere superimposed." "^

On revisiting Sherringham (a village about five
miles along the coast to the west of Cromer), he found
a striking instance of that " sea change " to which

* Life, Letters, and Journals, n. p. 440.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 197

in his early days he had called attention. " Leonard
and I " (he writes to Sir C. Bunbury) " have just
returned from Sherringham, where I found that the
splendid old Hythe pinnacle of chalk, in which the
flints were vertical, between seventy and eighty feet
high, the grandest erratic in the world, of which I
gave a figure in the first edition of my " Principles,"
has totally disappeared. The sea has advanced on
the lofty cliff so much in the last ten years, that it
may well have carried away the whole pinnacle in
the thirty years which have elapsed since our first
visit."

Another letter, bearing date in the next month,
to Darwin shows that in his seventy-second year his
mind was fresh and keen as ever. It discusses an
article written by Wallace in the Quarterly Review,
and indicates the difference in regard to natural selec-
tion between Ly ell's own standpoint and that of his
correspondent. The following extract may serve to
show the general tenor of the remarks : — " As I feel
that progressive development in evolution cannot
be entirely explained by natural selection, I rather
hail Wallace's suggestion that there may be a
Supreme Will and Power, which may not abdicate
its functions of interference, but may guide the
forces and laws of Nature." In another passage he
refers to a controversy which had been recently
started by Professor (afterwards Sir A.) Ramsay, and
over which geologists have been fighting ever since
— viz. whether lake-basins are excavated by glaciers.
The passage is worth quoting, for it puts the issue
in a form which after a quarter of a century is
virtually unchanged: —

198 . CHARLES LYELL

" As to the scooping out of lake-basins by glaciers, I have
had a long, amicable, but controversial correspondence with
Wallace on that subject, and I cannot get over (as, indeed, I
have admitted in print) an intimate connection between the
number of lakes of modern date and the glaciation of the
regions containing them. But as we do not know how ice can
scoop out Lago Maggiore to a depth of 2,600 feet, of which all
but 600 is below the level of the sea, getting rid of the rock
supposed to be worn away as if it was salt that had melted, I
feel that it is a dangerous causation to admit in explanation of
every cavity which we have to account for, including Lake
Superior. They who use it seem to have it always at hand,
like the 'diluvial wave or the wave of translation,' or the
' convulsion of nature or catastrophe ' of the old paroxysmists."*

In the summer he took a longer tour, going first
to Westmoreland and then to Forfarshire; after
which, in company with Lady Lyell and his nephew,
he went to see the old rocks of Ross-shire, above
InchnadamfF and Ullapool, and, as he returned^ once
more visited the parallel roads of Glenroy.

But, in the meantime, notwithstanding the diffi-
culties mentioned above, he still kept working at
his books. He was noAv engaged in modifying the
"Elements of Geology." Of this, to quote the pre-
face afterwards published, he had published " six
editions between the years 1838 and 1865, beginning
with a small duodecimo volume, which increased
with each successive edition, as new facts accumu-
lated, until in 1865 it had become a "large and
somewhat expensive work." He therefore deter-
mined, in accordance with the advice of friends, " to
bring the book back again to a size more nearly
approaching the original, so that it might be within
the reach of the ordinary student." This was done

* Life, Letters, and Journals, ii. p. 443.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 199

by the omission of certain theoretical discussions and
all such references to Continental geology as were not
absolutely necessary.^

In 1870 Sir Charles continued to travel, though
within the limits of these islands, for he inade one
journey along the coast of North Devon, and a second
one to Scotland, in the course of which he visited
the Isle of Arran, and on his return halted first at
Ambleside and then at Liverpool, to attend the meet-
ing of the British Association, which began on the
14th of September. The following year he paid an
April visit to Tintagel, the Land's End, and other
parts of Cornwall, and in the summer went to the
North of England. Writing from Penrith to Sir C.
Bunbury, he remarks " that he had much enjoyed
his ' tour of inspection,' and had tried to make it
a tour of rest, which is difficult." Naturally so, for
he had been Avorking his way from Buxton on the
look-out for glacial deposits and studying especially
the stratified drifts on the hills east of Macclesfield,
1,200 feet above the sea. His remarks on these show
that he appreciated fully both the significance of
the marine fossils which they contain and the theo-
retical difficulties caused by the absence of such
remains in other deposits, whether in Derbyshire
or the Lake District, or in the lowland between
this locality and Moel Tryfaen, seventy-four miles
away.

The tenth edition of the "Principles" had been

♦ The book, thus abbreviated, and entitled " The Student's
Elements of Geology," was published in 1871. A second edition ap-
peared in February, 1874 ; a third, revised by Mr. Leonard Lyell and
others, in 1878 ; and a fourth, edited by Prof. P. M. Duncan, in 1885.

200 CHARLES LYELL

quickly sold, and Sir Charles was now employed in
the preparation of another one. In this less change
was necessary than on the last occasion ; still, the rapid
increase of knowledge, more especially in regard to
the temperature and currents of the sea, obliged
him to make considerable alterations in the parts
which dealt with these subjects and with ques-
tions of climate, so that he recast or rewrote five
chapters.

It was published in January, 1872 ; and in the
summer of that year, no doubt in view of a new
edition of the " Antiquity of Man," he went to the
south of France, with Lady Lyell and Professor T.
M'K. Hughes, to examine the Aurignac cave. Here
several human skeletons had been discovered some
years before, apparently entombed with the bones
of various extinct mammals, such as the cave-bear
and lion, the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros — in
short, with a fauna characteristic of the palaeolithic
age. But was this really the date of the interment ?
Some distinguished geologists were of opinion that,
though the cave had been then occupied by wild
beasts, its floor had been disturbed, and the corpses
buried in neolithic times. On this point Lyell was
unable to obtain conclusive evidence, and was obliged
to confine himself to a statement of the facts and
arguments on either side of the question.^

Shortly after the publication of this new edition
of the "Antiquity of Man" in January, 1873, an un-
expected and irreparable bereavement darkened the
evening of his days. On April 24th Lady Lyell, the
companion and helpmate of forty years, was taken

* " Antiquity of Man " (fourth edition), chap. vii.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 201

from him after a few days' illness from an inflam-
matory cold."^ The shock was the more severe
because the loss was so unforeseen. Lady Lyell was
twelve years his junior, and had always enjoyed good
health t — "youthful and vigorous for her age," as he
writes — so that he "never contemplated surviving
her, and could hardly believe it when the calamity
happened." He bore the blow bravely, consoling
himself by reflecting that the separation, at his
age — nearly seventy-six — could not be for very long,
and, as he writes to Professor Heer, of Zurich, en-
deavouring, " by daily work at my favourite science,
to forget as far as possible the dreadful change which
this has made in my existence."

Lady Lyell was a woman of rare excellence.
"Strength and sweetness were hers, both in no
common degree. The daughter of Leonard Horner,
and the niece of Francis Horner, her own excellent
understanding had been carefully trained, and she
had that general knowledge and those intellectual
tastes which we expect to find in an educated English-
woman; and from her childhood she had breathed
the refining air of taste, knowledge, and goodness.
Her marriage . . . gave a scientific turn to her
thoughts and studies, and she became to her hus-
band, not merely the truest of friends and the most

* She had been suffering from influenza, but had accompanied
her husband and nephews to Ludlow at the beginning of the month.
They became uneasy at her increasing debility, and returned to town
on the 14th ("Life, Letters, and Journal of Sir C. Bunbury," iii.
p. 9).

t He mentions, on January 5th, 1856, that she had not been
well enough to breakfast with him, " for the second time only since
ourmarriage."

202 CHARLES LYELL

affectionate and sympathetic of companions, but a
very efficient helper. She was frank, generous, and
true ; her moral instincts were high and pure ; she was
faithful and firm in friendship ; she was fearless in
the expression of opinion without being aggressive ;
and she had that force of character and quiet energy
of temperament that gave her the power to do all
that she had resolved to do. . . . She had more
than a common share of personal beauty; but had
she not been beautiful she would have been lovely,
such was the charm of her manners, which were the
natural expression of warmth and tenderness of heart,
of quick sympathies, and of a tact as delicate as a
blind man's touch." ^

He was not, however, left to bear in solitude the
burden of darkening sight and of a desolated home.
His eldest sister, Miss Lyell, came from Kinnordy to
take care of his house and watch over him in these
last years with an affectionate devotion ; and in her
company and that of Professor Hughes he even
carried out the plan, which had been already in con-
templation, of once more going on to the Continent
and of visiting Professor Heer, at Zurich.

He worked on, as well as slowly increasing in-
firmities allowed, after his return to England, fully
occupied in preparing a second edition of the
" Student's Elements " and a new one of the " Prin-
ciples." t In June, 1874, he again visited Cambridge,
this time to receive the degree of LL.D. — an

* Quoted from an obituary notice by G. S. Hillard, Esq., in
the Boston {U.S.) Daily Advertiser (printed in Life, Letters, and
Journals, ii. p. 467).

t This was published after his death. He had completed one
volume ; the other was revised by his nephew Leonard.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 203

honour which that University had been strangely
slow in conferring upon him.^ It was then too
evident that his strength was declining, for he be-
came quickly fatigued by any exertion of body
or mind; nevertheless, he was able soon after-
wards to make once more the journey to Forfarshire,
and to visit there several of his earlier geological
haunts. In some of these little excursions he had as
his companion Mr. J. W. Judd,t with whose recent
researches into the ruined volcanoes of Tertiary age
and the yet earlier stratified rocks in the Western
Isles of Scotland Sir Charles was hardly less in-
terested than he would have been in the days when
the " Principles " was a new book. Three or four
letters written about this time have been printed J
which show, from their vigour and freshness, that the
mind was still keen and bright, though the bodily
machinery was becoming outworn. After his return
to town he even ventured, on November 5th, to dine
at the Geological Club,§ of which he had been a
member from its foundation, on its fiftieth anniversary
meeting, and " spoke with a vigour which surprised
his friends."

The tale, however, is nearly told; the sands of
life were running low. "His failing eyesight and
other infirmities now began to increase rapidly, and
towards the close of the year he became very feeble.

* About the same time he was admitted to the freedom of the
Turners' Company in the City of London.

f Now Professor Judd, F.R.S,, of the Royal College of Science,
South Kensington.

X Life, Letters, and Journals, ii. pp. 453-459.

§ The Club consists of a certain number of Fellows of the
Geological Society, who dine together before the evening meetings.

204 CHARLES LYELL

But his spirit was ever alive to his old beloved
science, and his affectionate interest and thought for
those about him never failed. He dined downstairs
on Christmas Day with his brother's family, but
shortly after that kept to his room."

On February 22nd, 1875, Charles Lyell entered
into his rest. The end may have been slightly
accelerated by two causes — one, the death, from in-
flammation of the lungs, after a short illness, of his
brother,"^ Colonel Lyell, who, up to that time, had
visited him almost daily ; the other, the shock given
to his enfeebled system by accidentally falling on the
stairs a few weeks before. But in no case could it
have been long delayed; the bodily frame was out-
worn ; the hour of rest had come.

His fellow- workers in science felt unanimously
that but one place of sepulture was worthy to receive
the body of Charles Lyell — the Abbey of Westminster,
our national Valhalla. A memorial, bearing many
important signatures, was at once presented to Dean
Stanley, who gave a willing consent, and the inter-
ment took place with all due solemnity on Saturday
the 27 th. The grave was dug in the north aisle of
the nave, near that of Woodward, one of the pioneers
of British geology and the founder of the chair of that
science in the University of Cambridge. It is marked t
by a slab of Derbyshire marble, which bears this
inscription : —

* His brother Thomas, who had retired from the Navy with the
rank of captain, had died (unmarried) some years before at the
jointure house (Shiel Hill), Kinnordy, where he had resided with
one of his sisters.

t A marble bust, a copy by Theed of the original executed by
Gibson, is placed near the grave.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 205

CHARLES LYELL,

Baronet, F.R.S.,

Author of

"The Principles of Geology."

Born at Kinnordy, in Forfarshire,

November 14, 1797 ;

Died in London,

February 22, 1875.

Throughout a long and laborious Life

He sought the Means of Deciphering

The fragmentary Records

Op the Earth's History

In the patient Investigation

Of the present Order of Nature,

Enlarging the Boundaries of Knowledge

And leaving on Scientific Thought

An Enduring Influence.

" O Lord, how great are Thy Works,

And Thy Thoughts are very deep."

Psalm xcii. 5.

Sir Charles, by his will, left to the Geological
Society of London the die, executed by Mr. Leonard
Wyon, of a medal to be cast in bronze, and awarded
annually to some geologist of distinction, whether
British or foreign. He further left a sum of two
thousand pounds, free of legacy duty, to the Society,
in trust, the interest of it to be applied as follows : —
Not less than one- third of it to accompany the medal,
and the remainder to be given, in one or more
portions, for the furtherance of the science. Sir
Charles was succeeded in the family estates by his
nephew Leonard, the eldest son of Colonel Lyell, who
lives at Kinnordy, but has rebuilt the house. He was
created a baronet in 1894.

206 CHARLES LYELL

CHAPTER XII.

SUMMARY.

In stature, Sir Charles Lyell "^ was rather above the
middle height, somewhat squarely built, though not
at all stout, with clear-cut, intellectual features, and
a forehead, broad, high, and massive. He would have
been a man of commanding presence, if his extremely
short sight had not obliged him to stoop and peer
into anything he wished to observe. This defect,
in addition to the weakness of his eyes was a serious
impediment in field work. As Professor Ramsay
remarked in 1851, after spending a few days with him
in the south of England, he required people to point
things out to him, and would have been unable to
make a geological map, "but understood all when
explained, and speculated thereon well."t This defect
of sight, according to Sir J. W. Dawson, who had
been his companion in more than one excursion in
Canada, was at times even a source of danger. The
expression of his face was one of thoughtful power
and gracious benignity. J "In his work, LyeU was
very methodical, beginning and ending at fixed hours.
Accustomed to make use of the help of others on

* In this paragraph I have ventured to quote largely, and more or
less verbatim, from the words of Miss Buckley (Lyell's secretary) in
the article on his life, written by my friend Professor G. A. J. Cole,
in the *' Dictionary of National Biography," vol. xxxiv.

t ** Life of Sir A. Eamsay," by Sir A. Geikie, chap. v.

J Vidi tantum, when his powers were beginning to fail, but it is
this expression which is stamped on my mind as characteristic of
the face in Charles Lyell, and, I may add, also in Charles Darwin.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 207

account of his weak sight, he was singularly uncon-
scious of outward bodily movement, though highly sen-
sitive to pain. When dictating, he was often restless,
moving from his chair to his sofa, pacing the room, or
sometimes flinging himself full length on two chairs,
tracing patterns on the floor, as some thoughtful or
eloquent passage flowed from his lips. But though
a rapid writer and dictator, he was sensitively con-
scientious in the correction of his manuscript,
partly from a strong, sense of the duty of accuracy,
partly from a desire to save his publisher the expense
of proof corrections. Hence passages once finished
were rarely altered, even after many years, unless
new facts arose."

The characteristic with which anyone who spent
some time in Charles Lyell's company was most im-
pressed, was his thirst for knowledge, combined with
a singular openness, and perfect fairness of mind. He
was absolutely free from all petty pride, and from
" that common failing of men of science, which causes
them to cling with such tenacity to opinions once
formed, even in the face of the strongest evidence."^
Ramsay wrote of him,t " We all like Lyell much ; he
is anxious for instruction, and so far from affecting
the bigwig, he is not afraid to learn anything from
anyone. I The notes he takes are amazing." No

* J. W. Dawson, cited in the " Dictionary of National Biography."

t Ut supra.

X I may add my own testimony. When the second edition of the
" Student's Elements " was passing through the press, I ventured to
write to him about one or two petrological details, which I thought
might he more precise. Though at that time I had published but
few papers, I received more than one kind letter with the request
that I would read some of the proof-sheets of the book and suggest
alterations.

208 CHARLES LYELL

man could have given a stronger proof of candour
and plasticity of mind and of his care for truth alone
than Lyell did in dealing with the question of the
origin of species. From the first he approached it
without prejudice. So long as the facts adduced by
Lamarck and others appeared to him insufficient to
support their hypotheses, he gave the preference to
some modification of the ordinarily accepted view —
that a species began in a creative act — but after read-
ing Darwin's classic work,^ and discussing the subject
in private, not only with its author, but also with Sir
J. Hooker and Professor Huxley, he was convinced
that Darwin was right in his main contention, though
he held back in regard to certain minor points, for
which he thought the evidence as yet insufficient.
Of his conduct in this matter, Darwin justly wrote :
" Considering his age, his former views, and position
in society, I think his action has been heroic."t Dean
Stanley, in the pulpit of Westminster Abbey, on the
Sunday following the funeral, summed up in a few
eloquent sentences the great moral lesson of Ly ell's
life. " From early youth to extreme old age it was to
him a solemn religious duty to be incessantly learn-
ing, fearlessly correcting his own mistakes, always
ready to receive and reproduce from others that
which he had not in himself Science and religion
for him not only were not divorced, but were one
and indivisible." J

To ascertain the truth, and to be led by reason not
by impulse, that was Lyell's great aim. Sedgwick

* " The Origin of Species," published in 1859.
t " Life and Letters of C. Darwin," ii. p. 326.
X Quoted in Life, Letters, and Journals, ii. p. 46 U

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 209

once^ criticised his work in terms which, in one
respect, seem to me curiously mistaken : " Lyell . . .
is an excellent and thoughtful writer, but not, I think,
a great field observer ... his mind is essentially de-
ductive not inductive." The former criticism, as has
been already admitted, is just, but the latter, pace
tanti viri, seems to me the reverse of the truth.
Surely there never was a geologist whose habits and
methods were more strictly inductive than Ly ell's. He
would spare no pains, and hardly any expense, to ascer-
tain for himself what the facts were ; he abstained
from drawing any conclusion until he had accumu-
lated a good store ; he compared and marshalled them,
and finally adopted the interpretation with which
they seemed most accordant. This interpretation,
however, would be modified, or even rejected, if new
and important facts were discovered. Surely this is
the method of induction ; surely this is the mode of
reasoning adopted by Darwin and by Newton, and even
by Bacon himself. But Sedgwick, great man as he was,
almost unrivalled in the field, more brilliant, though
less persevering than Lyell, was not always quite free
from prejudices ; and it may be noted that he more
than once stigmatises an opinion which he dislikes by
declaring it not to be in accordance with inductive
methods. Sir Joseph Hooker's judgment was far
more accurate : " One of the most philosophical of
geologists, and one of the best of men " f ; or that of
Charles Darwin himself : " The science of geology is
enormously indebted to Lyell — more so, as I believe,
than to any other man who ever lived." J

♦ In 1866. " Life and Letters of Sedgwick," ii. p. 412.
t " Life, Letters, and Journal of Sir C. Bunbury," iii. p. 66.
X *' Life and Letters of C. Darwin," i. p. 76.
N

210 CHARLES LYELL

Lyell felt a keen interest in the broader aspect of
political questions, and this not only in his own
country,"^ though he took little or no share in party
struggles, for the vulgarity of the demagogue and the
coarseness of the hustings were offensive to a man of
such refinement. His opinions harmonised with his
scientific habits of thought, always progressive, but
never extravagant. He was in favour of greater
freedom in education, of the restriction of class
privileges, and of an extension of the franchise, but
he saw clearly that anything like universal suffrage,
as the world is at present constituted, would only
mean giving a preponderating influence to those least
competent to wield it ; that is, to the more ignorant
and easily deluded. As in such cases the glib tongue
would become more potent than the voice of reason,
the demagogue than the statesman, he feared that the
standard of national honour would be almost inevi-
tably lowered, and national disaster be a probable
result. That all men are equal and entitled to an
equal share in the government — a dogma now re-
garded in some circles as almost sacred — would have
been repudiated by him with the quiet scorn of a
man who prefers facts to fancies, and inductive reason-
ing to sentimental rhapsody. A partisan he could
not be, for he saw too clearly that in political matters
truth and right were seldom a monopoly of any side,
and though by no means wanting in a certain quiet
and restrained enthusiasm, he had almost an abhor-
rence of fanaticism. One example may serve for

* He maintained for many years an interesting correspondence
with Mr. Gr. Ticknor, of Boston, U.S.A., in which he often discusses
political questions, both British and American.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 211

many, to indicate the way in which he regarded both
this spirit and any difficult question. Naturally he
had a strong dislike to slavery ; he fully recognised
the injustice and wrong to the negro, and the evil
effects upon the master. Nevertheless, after visiting
the Southern States, and giving the impressions of
his journey, he thus expresses himself : " The more I
reflected on the condition of the slaves, and en-
deavoured to think on a practical plan for hastening
the period of their liberation, the more difficult the
subject appeared to me, and the more I felt astonished
at the confidence displayed by so many anti-slavery
speakers and writers on both sides of the Atlantic.
The course pursued by these agitators shows that,
next to the positively wicked, the class who are
usually called ' well-meaning persons ' are the most
mischievous in society." He then points out how a
strong feeling against slavery had been springing up
in Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland ; how the
emancipation party had been gaining ground, and
slavery steadily retreating southwards, but " from the
moment that the abolition movement began, and that
missionaries were sent to the Southern States, a re-
action was perceived— the planters took the alarm —
laws were passed against education — the condition of
the slave was worse, and not a few of the planters,
by dint of defending their institutions against the
arguments and misrepresentations of their assailants,
came actually to delude themselves into a belief
that slavery was legitimate, wise, and expedient — a
positive good in itself." "^ At a subsequent period he
speaks of Mrs. Beecher Stowe's famous book, " Uncle

* " Travels in North America," chap. ix.

212 . CHARLES LYELL

Tom's Cabin," as "a gross caricature." But in the
great struggle between the Northern and Southern
States, his sympathies went with the former. It was
the fairness of his criticisms, and his hearty appre-
ciation of the good side in American institutions,
that won him many friends and made his books
welcome on that side of the Atlantic.

Lyell's views on religious questions accorded, as
might be expected, with the general bent of his
mind. He was a member of the Church of England,^
appreciated its services, the charm of music, and the
beauty of architecture, but he failed to understand
why nonconformity should entail penalties, whether
legal or social. His mind was essentially undogmatic ;
feeling that certainty was impossible in questions
where the ordinary means of verification could not
be employed, he abstained from speculation and
shrank from formulating his ideas, even when he
was convinced of their general truth.

He was content, however, to believe where he
could not prove, and to trust, not faintly, the larger
hope. So he worked on in calm confidence that the
honest searcher after truth would never go far astray,
and that the God of Nature and of Revelation was
one. He sought in this life to follow the way of
righteousness, justice, and goodness, and he died in
the hope of immortality.

As he disapproved of any approach to persecution
on the ground of religion, so he objected strongly to

* In the later part of his life he appears to have sympathised
more with the " Unitarians," for he attended the services at Dr.
Mnrtineau'8 chapel in Little Portland Street, though I am not aware
that he formally seceded from the Church of England.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 213

the exclusive privileges which in his day were enjoyed
by the Church of England, especially to its virtual
monopoly of education. On this point he several
times expresses himself in forcible terms ; as, for
instance, in these words : " The Church of England
ascendency is really the power which is oppressive
here, and not the monarchy, nor the aristocracy.
Perhaps I feel it too sensitively as a scientific man,
since our Puseyites have excluded physical science
from Oxford. They are wise in their generation.
The abject deference to authority advocated con-
scientiously by them can never survive a sound
philosophical education."^ To this party — or to the
" Catholic movement," as it is now often called — in
the Church of England, Lyell had a strong dislike ;
he deemed their claims to authority unwarrantable,
their practices in many respects either childish or
superstitious.

As we have endeavoured to bring out in the course
of this volume the guiding principles of Lyell's work,
a brief recapitulation only is needed as a conclusion.
That work was regulated by two maxims : the one,
" Go and see " ; the other, " Prefer reason to autho-
rity." To the first maxim he gave expression more
than once, while he was always inculcating it by
example. Imitating the well-known saying of De-
mosthenes in regard to oratory, he emphatically

♦ Life, Letters, and Journals, voL ii. pp. 82-127. It must
however, "be remembered that the High Church party were not alone
in their opposition ; indeed, after a time, they were more tolerant
of geologists than the extreme "Evangelical" school. I have some
cuttings from the Record newspaper, dated about 1876, which are
interesting examples of narrow-minded ignorance and theological
arrogance.

214 CHARLES LYELL

declares that in order to form comprehensive views
of the globe, the first, the second, and the third requi-
site is " travel."^ What he preached, he practised ;
about a quarter of the last fifty years of his life must
have so been spent. Of the second maxim also he
was a living example. It was his practice not only to
see for himself, but also to judge for himself, in all
questions other than those necessarily reserved for
specialists ; his rule, that thought should be free from
the fear of man, but subject to the laws of reasoning.
As a young man he had advocated, almost single-
handed, scientific views which were unpopular alike
with the older authorities in geology and with the
supposed friends of religion ; he had protested against
the invocation of catastrophic destruction and cata-
clysmal flood in order to clear away difficulties in the
past history of the earth ; in other words, against an
appeal to miracle, when a cause could be found in the
existing order of Nature ; and he had disputed the
right of any priesthood, whether Romanist or Pro-
testant, to hold the keys of knowledge. He vindicated,
against all comers, his claim — nay, his birthright — to
sit, as an earnest student, at the feet of Nature to
listen and to learn, as she chose to teach, whether by
the acted drama of the living world or by the silent
record of the rocks. He was, in short, more observer
than theorist, more philosopher than poet, more a
servant of reason than a dreamer of dreams.

His example is one well worthy of remembrance
at the present epoch. The " whirligig of time " has
brought its revenges, and has introduced into geology

* Life, Letters, and Journal, i. p. 233. *' Principles," i. 69
(eleventh edition).

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 215

a class of students almost unknown in the days when
Lyell was in his vigour. The developments of miner-
alogy and palaeontology, helpful and valuable as they
have been by making geology more of an exact science
and, in some cases, substituting order for confusion,
have tended to produce students very familiar with
the apparatus of a laboratory or the collections of a
museum, but not with the face of the earth. This,
in itself, would not be necessarily hurtful, because
the field of geology is so wide that there is room for
all ; but it leads sometimes to an undue exaltation of
trifles, to an over-estimation of the " mint, anise, and
cummin " of science, to a waste of time upon what
is called the literature of the subject. This last often
means either searching much chaff for a few grains
of wheat, or spending much labour with the hope
of discovering whether A or B was the first to confer
a name upon a species; the priority perhaps being
only of a few months, and that name neither particu-
larly appropriate nor euphonious. Partly from this,
partly from other causes, the importance, nay, the
absolute necessity of travel, for the education of a
geologist is now too often forgotten. In this science
there are many questions — some of them almost
fundamental — for which no perquisitions in a library,
no research in a laboratory, no studies in a museum,
however conscientiously patient and painstaking they
may be, can be accepted as an adequate preparation ;
questions in which Nature is at once the best book,
the best laboratory, and the best museum, and ex-
perience is the only safe teacher. What would Lyell
have said to men — and such might now be named
— who undertook to discuss wide geological problems

216 CHARLES LYELL

with the most limited experience ; who, for example,
posed as authorities upon what ice can or cannot
do, without having even seen a glacier ; or speculated
on the most intricate questions in petrology without
having studied more than some corner of this island,
or, indeed, without any precise knowledge of that ?
Would not he — averse as he was to speaking severely
— have censured them for talking about things which
they could not possibly understand, and for darkening
counsel by words without knowledge ?

Lyell, no doubt, had exceptionally favourable oppor-
tunities. The eldest son of a wealthy man — who con-
tentedly acquiesced in his seeking fame rather than
fortune, and supplied him with the necessary funds —
his time was his own, as he had not only enough
for his ordinary wants, but also could afford to travel
as much as he desired. His social position was suffi-
ciently good to facilitate his access to those who had
already attained to eminence. He was blessed with
a sympathetic and helpful wife, and they had no
children. Thus they were perfectly free, both in the
disposal of their time at home and in their peregrina-
tions abroad. Besides these things they both enjoyed
good health. Lyell's constitution was not, indeed, so
robust that he could take liberties; he had to be
careful about "cakes and ale," and to lead a fairly
regular life,"^ but by so doing he was able to be always
in good condition for his work. His eyes, in fact,
were his only trouble ; and who is there who has not

* He admits tliat when Lord Enniskillen and Murchison had
seduced him, after a Geological Society meeting, to partake of
pterodactyl (woodcock) pie and drink punch into the small hours, his
■work suffered for four or five days afterwards.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 217

got his own " thorn in the flesh " ? Lyell also was
happy in all his domestic relations. His letters
indicate that all the family — on both sides — were
on affectionate terms, and contain few references to
anxieties and troubles, such as the sickness and death
of those dear to him, until his life approached the
period when such trials become inevitable.

Thus free from the impediments which have
beset many other men of marked ability, such as
weak health and physical suffering, the wearing
anxiety of an invalid wife or a sickly family, the
harassing cares of pecuniary losses or of an insuffi-
cient income, Lyell had an exceptional chance. But
other men have the same and do not use it ; they
are crippled by this burden or diverted by that allure-
ment, and "might have been" too often becomes their
epitaph. Lyell never faltered in the course which,
comparatively early in life, he had marked out for
himself With that steady persistency and quiet
energy which are characteristic of the Lowland Scot,
he put aside all temptations and everything which
threatened to interfere with his work. While neither
recluse nor hermit, neither churlish nor unsociable,
nay, while thoroughly enjoying witty and intellectual
society, he allowed nothing to distract him from his
main purpose. Convinced that there was a work which
he could do, and a name which he could win, he was
willing, for sake of this, to nm risks and to make sacri-
fices. He did not indeed despise fame, but he never
condescended to unworthy arts to obtain it ; he held
that the labourer was worthy of his hire, but with
him it was always " the work first, and the wage
second," whether that were coined gold or laurel

218 CHARLES LYELL

wreath. He was singularly free from all petty
jealousies, and ready to learn from all who could
teach him anything, but he was no weakling, swayed
by every breath of wind, for he reached his conclu-
sions slowly and cautiously, and never stopped to ask
whether they would be popular. "Forward, for
truth's sake," that was the motto of his life.

In yet another way was Lyell felix opportunitate
vitce. In his days, geology might be compared to a
country which had been for some time discovered but
was not yet explored. Settlements had been estab-
lished here and there; in their neighbourhood some
ground had been cleared, and a firm base of opera-
tions had been secured, but around and beyond was
the virgin forest, the untrodden land. At almost every
step the traveller met with some fresh accession to his
knowledge or a new problem to solve. He could feel
the allurement of expectation or the joy of discovery
even in countries otherwise well known ; where now
he can hope only to pick up some tiny detail or to
plunge into some interminable controversy. If he
now desires " fresh fields and pastures new," he must
wander beyond the limits of civilised lands ; for
within these every crag is hammer-marked, and the
official geologist is at work making maps. But not
only this, LyeU lived in the days when the literature
of his science was of very modest dimensions. This
had its obvious drawbacks, but it had also its ad-
vantages, which, perhaps, were more than compensa-
tions. At the present day the conscientious student
is in danger of being overwhelmed by the mass ot
papers, pamphlets and books, from all lands and in
all languages — which he is expected, if not to read,

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 219

at least to scramble through before venturing to
write on any subject. Fifty years ago it required a
very limited amount of study — often only a few hours'
research — to put the geologist in possession of all that
was known, so that he approached his theme very
much as a mathematician attacks a problem. This
burden of scientific literature, seeing that life is short
and human strength is limited, threatens to stifle the
progress of science itself, and we can hardly venture
to expect that any more great generalisations will be
made in geology or palaeontology, unless a man arise
who is daring enough to subordinate reading to think-
ing, and so strong in his grasp of principles that he
can make light of details.

It has been sometimes said that Lyell was not an
original thinker. Possibly not ; vixere fortes ante
Agamemnona is true in science no less than in
national history ; there were mathematicians before
Newton, philosophic naturalists before Darwin, geo-
logists before Lyell. He did not claim to have dis-
covered the principle of uniformity. He tells us
himself what had been done by his predecessors in
Italy and in Scotland : but he scattered the mists of
error and illusion, he placed the idea upon a firm
and logical basis; in a word, he found uniformi-
tarianism an hypothesis, and he left it a theory.
That surely is a more solid gift to science, a better
claim to greatness, than any number of brilliant guesses
and fancies, which, after coruscating for a brief season
to the amazement of a gaping crowd, explode into
darkness, and are no more seen. But to a certain
extent Lyell has thrown his own work into the shade.
The fame of his books causes his numerous scientific

220 CHARLES LYELL

papers ^ to be overlooked ; particularly his contribu-
tions to the history of coalfields and to the classifi-
cation of the Tertiary deposits. Moreover, into these
books he was constantly incorporating new and
original matter. We may be fairly familiar with the
"Principles" and the "Elements," but we fail to
realise until we have read his " Life " and the ac-
counts of his two tours in America how much those
books are made up from the results of actual ex-
perience and personal study in the field.

It has been also said that Lyell carried the prin-
ciple of " uniformity " a little too far. But, suppose
we concede this, does it amount to more than the
admission that he was human ? It is almost inevitable
that the discoverer or prophet of a great truth, who
has to encounter the storm and stress of controversy,
should state his case a little too strongly, or should
overlook some minor limitation. Suppose we grant
that Lyell was a little too lavish in his estimate of
the time at the disposal of geologists. The physicist
had not then intervened, with arguments drawn from
his own science, to insist that neither earth nor sun can
reckon their years by myriads of myriads, and even
now this controversy cannot be regarded as closed.
Suppose we grant that in accepting Hutton's dictum,
" I find in the earth no signs of a beginning," Lyell
was misled by appearances,t which have since proved
to be delusive, and that facts, so far as they go, point
rather in the contrary direction. Well, this point

* These were about seventy-six in number, the great majority-
written prior to the last twenty years of his life.

f Such as the seeming intercalation of crystalline schists with
fossiliferous rocks, or the immediate sequence of the two.

AND MODERN GEOLOGY. 221

also is not yet to be regarded as settled ; and of one
thing, at any rate, we may be sure, that if Lyell were
now living he would frankly recognise new facts, as
soon as they were established, and would not shrink
from any modification of his theory which these might
demand. Great as were his services to geology, this,
perhaps, is even greater — for the lesson applies to all
sciences and to all seekers after knowledge — that his
career, from first to last, was the manifestation of a
judicial mind, of a noble spirit, raised far above all
party passions and petty considerations, of an intellect
great in itself, but greater still in its grand humility ;
that he was a man to whom truth was as the ' pearl
of price,' worthy of the devotion and, if need be, the
sacrifice of a life.

INDEX.

Address to tlie Britisli Associa-
tion at Bath, 190
Alps, The, Glaciers of, 177
America, First visit to, 130

, Second visit to, 155

, Third visit to, 172

, Fourth visit to, 173

** Antiquity of Man " published,
185

, Synopsis of, 186

Aurignac Cave, The, Visit to,

200
Auvergne, Journey to, 33
Avicenna's treatise on minerals,
81

Bachelor of Arts, Degree of,

conferred on him, 26
Bar, Called to the, 30
Baronet, Created a, 190
Beaumont, Elie de, his theory

of mountain-chains, 96
Birth and birthplace. His, 9
Brittany, Tour in, 50
British Association, Address to,

190

Cave remains, Dr. Schmerling's
collection, 101

Continental researches in geo-
logy, 21

Cromer, Investigations at, 196

Cuvier, Meets with, in Paris, 28

Darwin and Lyell, 120

, his opinion of Lyell's

character, 208
Death of Lady Lyell, 200
■ Sir Charles Lyell, 204

Denmark and Southern Norway,
Researches in, 122

Deputy- Lieutenant of Forfar,
Appointment as, 58

Deshayes, the eminent con-
chologist, 42

Diluvialists and Fluvialists,
The, 43

Doctor of Laws degree con-
ferred on him, 202

Eifel, Visit to the volcanic dis-
trict of. 62

'* Elements of Geology" pub-
lished, 125

Engis skull. The, 102

Entomology, Early studies in,
15

Etna explored, 181

Family, The Lyell, 10

Father, His, 9

Fluvialists and Diluvialists,
The, 43

"Forest Bed," The, 196

Frascatoro, his views on geo-
logy, 83

Generelli's theories, 87
Geological Society, Elected a

Fellow of the, 27

, His first papers to the, 28

, Elected secretary of the,

28
, Elected President of the,

111
Geology, First studies in, 19
, Continental researches, 21

INDEX.

223

Glaciers of the Alps, His theory

of the, 177
Grand Canary, Voyage to, 174
Great Dismal Swamp, The,

explored, 141

Homer, Miss, Marriage with, 69
Humboldt, Meeting with, in

Paris, 28
Huttonian Theory, The, 91

Infancy, 10

Inscription on Lyell's tomb-
stone, 205
Ireland, Visit to, 152

Kessingland Cliffs and the

" Forest Bed," 196
King's College, Lectures at, 68
Knighted, 170

Law, The, Studies for, 27
Lectures at King's College, 68

at the Royal Institution, 71

Leonardo da Vinci, his conclu-
sions on geology, 83
Letter to Herschel on the

Origin of Species, 118
Lyell family, The, 10

, Lady, Death of, 200

, Sir Charles, Death of, 204

" Lyellia," The moss named, 9

Madeira, Voyage to, 173
Marriage to Miss Horner, His,

69
Medal of the Royal Society

presented to him, 111
Member of the Institute of

France, Elected, 190
Midhurst, School Days at, 16
Moel Tryfaen, Crags of, 61
Montreal and Quebec, Journey

to. 146

Moro's views, 87

Moss called " LyeUia," 9

Mother, His, 10

Naples, Visit to, 38

Narrow escape when a child,
11

New Orleans, Journey to, 161

Niagara Falls, His impressions
of, 134

Normandy and Brittany, Re-
searches in, 50

North America, Travels in,
130

" Omar the Learned," his ** Re-
treat of the Sea," 82

Order of Scientific Merit be-
stowed by the King of
Prussia, 190

Origin of Species, Letter to
Herschel on the, 118

Oxford, Undergraduate days
at, 19

Palma, Investigations at, 174
Personal characteristics of

LyeU, 206
"Plastic Force" dogma, The,

84
Political views. His, 210
President of the Geological

Society, Is elected. 111
"Principles of Geology," first

volume published, 57
, second volume published,

68
, third volume published,

72
, its' history and various

editions, 73
Professor of Geology at King's

College, 58
Pyrenees, Visit to the, 52

224

INDEX.

Quebec and Montreal visited, 146

Religious Questions, His views

on, 212
Ringwood, School days at, 12
Royal Institution,Lecturesat,71
Royal Society, Is elected a

Fellow of the, 30 (note)
, Medal of, presv^nted to

him. 111
Salisbury, School days at, 12
Sarum, Excursions to, 13
Scandinavia, Investigations in,

104
School days, 12

Scbmerling's collection of cave-
remains, 101
Scientific papers, large number

written by him, 220
Scrope's work on "Volcanoes,"

97
** Sea-serpent," Lyell's views

concerning it, 157
"Second Visit to North

America" published, 167

Stanley, Dean, his remarks
respecting Lyell's life-work,
208

Switzerland, First tour in, 21

Teneriffe, Researches at, 174
Tombstone, Lyell's, Inscription

on, 205
"Travels in North America"

published, 130

Undergraduate days, 19

Vallisneri's conclusions, 86
Views on reHgious questions,

Lyell's, 212
Vinci, Leonardo da, his con-
clusions on geology, 83

Wales, Visit to, 189

Werner's theories, 88

Will, Lyell's, 205

Wollaston Medal of the Geo-
logical Society presented to
him, 194.

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