THE CENTURY SCIENCE SERIES
Edited by SIR HENRY E. ROSCOE, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.

CHARLES LYELL
AND MODERN GEOLOGY

Charles Lyell

THE CENTURY SCIENCE SERIES

Charles Lyell
AND MODERN GEOLOGY

BY

PROF. T. G. BONNEY

D.Sc., LL.D., F.R.S., etc.

New York
MACMILLAN & CO.
1895

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 difficulties 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 unwearied 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, determined 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 as possible. I have striven to show how Charles Lyell studied, how he worked, how he accumulated observations, how each journey had its definite purposes. Accordingly, I have often given his words in preference 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 themselves to his eyes, and how ideas were maturing in his mind. Regarded 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 occasional 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 geologist. 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.

Charles Lyell
AND MODERN GEOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.

CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLDAYS.

Caledonia, stern and wild, may be called "meet nurse" 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,[1] 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 "English 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[2] he 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 fragment 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 recollections, 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 practiser 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 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 demolished with great speed for fear of interruption."[3] 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 completed his eighth year, when he was sent with his brother Tom to a boarding-school at Ringwood. 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 Ringwood 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 conclusion 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; doubtless 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 excitement 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 England. In one respect, the 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 feelings, 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 chalcedony 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 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 Rufus 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 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 welcome 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" instinct, which is strong in most boys. He began with the lepidoptera, but before long took an interest in 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 collector knows, than the New Forest, and some of the schoolboy's "finds" afterwards proved welcome to so 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, perhaps 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: "Whatever some may say or sing of the happy recollections of their schooldays, I believe the generality, 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 preferring 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 combatants 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," he says, "much 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, obtained 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 commemorated, 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, like 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 climber 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Born 1767, died 1849 (also son of a Charles Lyell); educated at St. Andrew's and at St. Peter's College, Cambridge, where he proceeded to the degree of B.A. in 1791 and M.A. in 1794.

[2] 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.

[3] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 3.

CHAPTER II.

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 library, 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 Francillon'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, and bivalves." He was also greatly interested by the fossils in Dr. Arnold's collection at Yarmouth, particularly by the "alcyonia" found in flints.[4] A few days later he again dwells on geology, and speculates 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 'Rest-harrow' and other plants. 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 Yarmouth gains—viz. Cromer, Pakefield, Dunwich, Aldborough, etc., etc. With Dunwich I believe it is Fuit Ilium."[5]

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.

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 Iona. With the caves in the former island he was greatly impressed; and he noted the columns of basalt, which, he said, were "pentagonal" in form, quite different from the "four-square" jointing of the red granite at the south-west end of Mull. With the ruins of Iona 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 geological 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 Continental 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 Dôle, 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 mountains and the Grampians of his 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 Rhone," 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 beautiful 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."[6]

At Chamouni, Lyell made the most of his time, for in three days he walked up to the Col de Balme, climbed the Brévent, and made his first glacier expedition, to the well-known oasis among the great fields of snow and ice which is called the Jardin. Everywhere 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 Apollo."[7] 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 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 Neuchâtel to Bâle, and then followed the picturesque route along the river, by the tumultuous rapids of Laufenburg and the grand falls of the Rhine, to Schaffhausen, 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 consequences 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 flea-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 Brünig Pass to Meyringen. From this place they made an excursion to the Giessbach Falls, and saw the Alpbach in flood after 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 Giétroz Glacier, had burst 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 beneath sand. The lower storey of the hotel had been filled with mud and débris, 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 peculiar 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 proceeded from a neighbouring mountain.[8] This they intended to visit on their return. But at Florence the diary ends abruptly, for the note-book which contained the rest of it was unfortunately lost.

We have given this summary of Lyell'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. Considering 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Probably they were fossil sponges.

[5] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 43.

[6] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 69.

[7] Now generally called Parnassius Apollo; but very likely he captured more than one species of the genus.

[8] 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.

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. His eyes became so weak that a complete rest was prescribed; 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 neighbourhood of Bartley. In the spring of 1822 he investigated 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"[9] in Compton Chine is identical with that at Folkestone, and compared the underlying strata with those in Sussex, clearing up some confusions, into which earlier observers had fallen, 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 little had been ascertained—and this year he read his first papers to the Geological Society—one, in January, written in conjunction with Dr. Mantell, "On the Limestone and Clay of the Ironsand in Sussex"; the other in June, "On the Sections presented by Some Forfarshire Rivers." Also, on February 7th, 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 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 industriously 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."[10] 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 September, and no doubt 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 Prévost, 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. Afterwards 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 something 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,[11] 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.[12] 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 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 contribute to the Quarterly Review, writing articles on educational and scientific topics. This led to a friendship 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[13] 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."[14] A few lines further on come some sentences which 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 continues; "ergo, mammalia existed when the oolite and coal, etc., were formed."[15] The first of these quotations strikes the keynote of modern geology as opposed to the older notions of the science; what follows suggests 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 MacCulloch,[16] who had bitterly attacked in the Westminster Review Scrope's book upon Volcanoes, he has "come to the conclusion 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 elementary book, like Mrs. Marcet's "Conversations on Chemistry," but something on a much larger scale 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 unremunerative 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. Mantell early in 1828. About this time also Murchison, with whom he was planning a long visit to Auvergne,[17] appears among his correspondents. Herschel[18] tells him how he and Faraday had melted in a furnace "granite into a slag-like lava"; Hooker[19] 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 carriage, with post horses." As far as Moulins 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 Roman empire;[20] others in almost every stage of dissection by the scalpels of nature. Streams of lava, still rough and clinkery, have poured themselves over the plateau and have run down the valleys till they have reached the plain of the Allier, 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.

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, labelling 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." Murchison, 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 phenomena which Lyell had already observed on a small one in the marls of the loch at Kinnordy. Thence they went on through the Ardêche and examined the "pet volcanoes of the Vivarais," as they had been termed by Scrope. The Murchisons 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 Rhône, went along the Riviera to Nice, having been delayed for a time at Fréjus, where Murchison had a sharp attack of malarious fever. It was an exceptionally dry summer, and the town in consequence 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 constantly 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; they 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 laminated shales full of fossils, most of which were identical with creatures still living in the Mediterranean. These masses attained a thickness of 800 feet, and 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 deluges or earth shatterings—had been needed in order to form them. If the torrents from the Maritime 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 supplied 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 existing 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."[21]

One important result of this journey was a conjoint 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 Rome, on his return thither, in the following January[22]:—

"My letters from geological friends are very satisfactory 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 Rome; visiting local geologists, studying their collections 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 covered with 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 appreciable change in the fauna inhabiting the Mediterranean. Except for this, the island was "an admirable illustration of Mont Dore." He made an excursion also to the Temples of Pæstum, wonderful from the weird beauty of their ruins, on the flat plain between the Apennines and the sea, but with interest geological as well as archæological, 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 Government, "the inquisitorial suppression of all cultivation of science, whether moral or physical," the idle, happy-go-lucky habits of the common people, the prevalent mendicancy, universal dishonesty, and 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, as he was dressed and had the manners of a gentleman, 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, Signor; la sua eccellenza mi scusera, ma io sono Romano!'"[23] The old proverb, what is bred in the bone will out in the flesh, still holds good; but we may doubt whether 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 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 classification of the little-known deposits of the Sicilian lowland, and in addition he lost no opportunity of studying the relations of the volcanic masses, wherever they occurred, 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 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 19th 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 knowledge of Deshayes, one of the most eminent conchologists 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 entomological 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."[24]

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. Mantel[25]:—

"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 'Diluvialists,' 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 was very piano. Conybeare's memoir is not strong by any means. He admits three deluges before the Noachian! and Buckland adds God knows how many catastrophes 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[26]:—

"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 'Reliquiæ Diluvianæ'[27] 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 Diluvialists and Fluvialists, and concludes with these words[28]:—

"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!"

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Now recognised as gault. The identification named above was soon found to be correct.

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

[11] He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1826.

[12] 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 attention had been paid to it, fewer mistaken statements and hypotheses would have attained the dignity of appearing in print.

[13] 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.

[14] Probably referring to an article on Scrope's "Geology of Central France," 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 appeared in the Quarterly Review, Oct. 1827, vol. xxxvi. p. 437.

[15] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 169.

[16] 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 sympathy with palæontology or with the views to which Lyell inclined. He died in 1835.

[17] 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.

[18] Sir John F. W. Herschel, the second of the illustrious astronomers of that name.

[19] Sir W. J. Hooker.

[20] 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 interpreted as referring to volcanic eruptions somewhere in Auvergne. This, however, is disputed by many authorities. (See Geological Magazine, 1865, p. 241.)

[21] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 199.

[22] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 238.

[23] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 215.

[24] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 252.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ut suprà, p. 253.

[27] "Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, or Observations on Organic Remains contained in Caves, Fissures, and Diluvial Gravel, and on other Geological Phenomena attesting the Action of an Universal Deluge." By Professor Buckland. 1823.

[28] Ut suprà, p. 254.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PURPOSE DEVELOPED AND ACCOMPLISHED.

The summer of 1829 was spent at Kinnordy, when the quarries of Kirriemuir and the neighbouring districts 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 company with Sedgwick, was exploring the geological structure of the Eastern Alps and the basin of the Danube. They appear to have kept up communication with Lyell, 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.[29]

"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 working 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 immensely 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 zoologically 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 building in one place, she makes a great batch there.... All the 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.[30]

"Sedgwick and Murchison 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 Hutton supposed, some igneous, some altered secondary. Mica schist in Alps lies over organic remains. No rock in the Alps older than lias.[31] Much of Buckland's dashing paper on Alps wrong. A formation (marine) found at foot of Alps, between Danube and Rhine, thicker than all the English secondaries united. Munich is in it. Its age probably between chalk and our oldest tertiaries. I have this moment received a note from C. Prévost by Murchison. He has heard with delight and surprise of their Alpine novelties, and, alluding to them and other discoveries, he says: 'Comme nous allons rire de nos vieilles idées! Comme nous allons nous moquer de nous-mêmes!' 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 separé, d'une manière si tranchée, les temps ante-des-temps Post-Diluviens."'"

A short time afterwards, in a letter addressed to Mr. Leonard Horner, Lyell declines to become a candidate for the Professorship of Geology and Mineralogy at the London University,[32] which was first opened in the autumn of the previous year. Evidently 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.[33] "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 Surface 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 condescension 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 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,[34] to whom advance sheets of the book had been forwarded, in order that he might review it in the Quarterly, 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 metaphysical 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 nebulæ 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 of all possible effects 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 geographical 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 concluding 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, together with some experts—are always very prone to assume the meaning of certain fundamental terms to be exactly that which they desire, and then to proceed deductively to a conclusion as if their questionable 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 weighing, 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 permissible, which, in most other matters, would be generally 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 inductive 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 characters 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 "catastrophic" 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 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 surface, 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 Vendée. 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 Bagnères de Luchon he may hear whether his book is out.[35] 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 the old Wernerian school, who ... thinks the interest of the subject greatly destroyed by our new innovation, especially our having almost cut mineralogy and turned it into a zoological science."[36] 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[37]:—

"The quiet and perfect order and calmness that reigned at Bourbon, Vendée, and Bordeaux and Toulouse during the heat of the elections, afford 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 shopkeepers 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 independent 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 Ariège to the picturesque old 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 mountains more precipitous—the scenery, in short, is more like that around Interlaken or in the valley of Lauterbrunnen, 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 eastwards through the curious little mountain republic of Andorre to Luchon; while Lyell, who seems to have been proof against the sun, recrossed the watershed into the valley of the Tet and descended it to Perpignan. Information obtained in this town encouraged him to go direct to Barcelona, where the Captain-General, the Conde D'Espagne, a distinguished soldier and diplomatist, gave him a courteous reception, 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 Canigou. 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 district 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[38]:—

"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 previously existing levels accompanied or has followed the introduction 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 Brèche 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 descended some distance on the Spanish side of the Brèche, in order to make a more complete investigation of the structure of the chain, sleeping at a 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.[39] In this he gives suggestions for making a number of experiments in order to produce by artificial means such rock-structures 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 drawings 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 stratification 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 formations.[40] Lastly, I came to find out that all these 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 deposits in next volume, which, although not half so original, will perhaps surprise them more."[41] 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)[42] 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 "sometimes 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 attacked by the "Diluvialists," while it has been highly praised by the bulk of geologists. He is about to move, he writes, into chambers in Raymond 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 little 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 independence 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."[43] 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 of the clergy in the Established Church. The appointment was in the hands, exclusively, of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of London and of Llandaff, and two "strictly orthodox doctors." Llandaff, Lyell was informed, hesitated, but Conybeare,[44] 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 conclusions logical or otherwise, there was no reason to infer that I had made my theory from any hostile feeling towards revelation"[45]—a conclusion, marked by a wise caution, which representatives of the Church of England would have done well to bear in mind on more than one subsequent 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; displays 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 countries." A third event of the year—which also happened in the earlier 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 educational 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 eundem degree,[46] and the presence of his father and brother, as well as of his friend Conybeare, in London, all of whom required to be lionised. The letter[47] (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 discovery 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 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 scattered group of projecting crags, the highest of which is 1,401 feet above the sea. On the eastern side are extensive 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 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 volcanic district of the Eifel. Here the cones, all comparatively 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 scoriæ and ashes, of various and some of great antiquity (as proved by associated organic remains), 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."[48]

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.[49] 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 Constantine 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[50]:—

"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 a class of university students in a lecture on the philosophy of the human mind. But then the practical application was enforced 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 interfered 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 Reform Bill, visits of friends, geological researches, walks on the hills to search for plants or for insects, the habits of the Kinnordy bees, or the accomplishments 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[51] a piece of advice from his old friend, Dr. Fleming, which is enough to make a modern professor of geology sigh for "the good old times." He said to Lyell:

"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 unavoidably controversial to have thrown over you the moral protection 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 régime. 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, affords 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, 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."[52]

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 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."[53] 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 his scientific work enough to provide for the extra expenses which this work entails, and yet to command sufficient time to advance his knowledge and reputation. 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 themselves 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 regarded 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 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 all-but universal deluges. As a further encouragement, 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 undertake 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 d'une manière suivie, 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 up the Rhine, and travelled by successive stages to Heidelberg, but they were 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 Höllenthal, 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 1833 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 correspondence: probably it was so with Lyell; at any rate, a single letter, dated January 5th, gives the only information of his doings between September, 1832, and April, 1833. In this letter, however, he mentions that the 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 invitation 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 urbi 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 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 neutralising 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 important section of their adherents and to expose the College to the danger of being charged with lending itself to heretical teaching.[54]

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 255.

[30] Ut suprà, p. 256.

[31] 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 are very different from the metamorphism of those crystalline schists which have a stratified origin.

[32] Now "University College," London, having been incorporated by Royal Charter under that title in November, 1836.

[33] Ut suprà, p. 258.

[34] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. pp. 269-271.

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

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

[37] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 276.

[38] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 283.

[39] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 296.

[40] Subsequent experience has shown that, while the above observations are beyond all question in the case of ordinary sedimentary rocks, structures curiously 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.

[41] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 303.

[42] Ut suprà, p. 305.

[43] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 313.

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

[45] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 316.

[46] 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.

[47] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 318.

[48] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 328.

[49] Ut suprà, 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.

[50] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 331.

[51] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 342.

[52] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 347.

[53] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 358.

[54] Lyell resigned the Professorship after he had finished the course.

CHAPTER V.

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 palæontology, 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 immediately connected with the book itself. A brief 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, 1832; 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 important 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 rewrote 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 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 ninth, in June, 1853, followed the same pattern. A longer interval elapsed before the appearance of the tenth edition, and this was published 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 with that discussing the connection between climate and the geography of the earth's surface; and a chapter, practically new, was inserted, which considered "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.[55] 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 derivation 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 selection, 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 concerning 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 Porcupine, 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 secluded 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 life had been supposed 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.

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 life. 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, however, was left incomplete. The first volume had been passed for the press, but the second was still unfinished; 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 inevitable, a little of that literary charm and that sense of freshness which was at first so marked a characteristic. 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 material 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" 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 perspicuity, 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 sufficient to account for all the climatal variations that geology requires; in the later editions, the possible co-operation of astronomical changes is admitted. 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 incorporated 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 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 comparatively 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 perspective 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 "Principles"; for at that early date few persons had made any effort to arrange the facts of Nature in a connected 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 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 movements 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."[56]

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 persecuted and became a power in the state, was adverse on the whole to progress in physical or natural science. With the decline of the Roman empire a great darkness fell upon the civilised world; art, science, literature 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 questionings 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 "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 importance 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 impeded, 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)[57]:—

"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 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 construction 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 principally 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 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 schoolmen 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 unjustly 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 distinguished, 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.

"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."[58]

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 infallibility, with the right to decide ex cathedrâ 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 Scriptures; the stronger laboured on patiently, gathering evidence, strengthening their arguments and dissecting the fallacies by which they were assailed, until the popular prejudice should be allayed and men be calm enough to listen to the voice of truth. It was 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 recrudescence 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 reasoning which commonly passed current for geological science. Chief and earliest among these men, Vallisneri, also an Italian, about a century before Lyell'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 the ocean formerly had extended over the whole earth and after remaining there for a long time had gradually subsided. This conclusion, though inadequate as an expression of the truth, was much more philosophical than that of an universal and comparatively 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 parts of his work, that all the stratified rocks are derived from volcanic ejections. Nevertheless, geology, by the middle of the eighteenth century, had evidently begun to pass gradually, though very slowly, from the stage of crude and fanciful hypotheses 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 foundations 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 Freiberg, 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 attending 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 precipitates 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 contrast cannot be better indicated than in the words of the latter.[59]

"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 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 Vivarais 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 conforming 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 scoriæ, 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 Auvergne, of which Lyell speaks in terms of high commendation. "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."[60]

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 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 of his friend and expositor, John Playfair, must never be separated. They were the Socrates and the Plato of that school of thought from which modern geology has been developed.[61] To quote the eloquent words of Sir Archibald Geikie[62]:—

"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 about. The waste of the land, which they traced everywhere, was found to give birth to soil—renovation of the surface thus springing Phœnix-like out of its decay. In the descent of water from the clouds to the mountains, and from the mountains 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 convincing evidence of the extent to which the solid earth has been altered and upheaved by the action of these subterranean fires."

Such were the leading principles of the "Huttonian theory," 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 defective 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 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."[63]

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 departments 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 and fossil species, and the inferences drawn in regard to their habits, accustomed the geologist to contemplate 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 confusion, 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."[64]

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, MacCulloch, Warburton and Wollaston; among the younger, De la Beche and Scrope, Sedgwick and Whewell. Murchison, though a few years Lyell'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 evening when Lyell, then one of its honorary secretaries, read his first paper—on the marl-lake at Kinnordy. 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 frequent 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 palæontological, 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 palæontologist; but at this particular epoch the paternal influence obviously declined, while that of the mother became inordinately strong. Wollaston and MacCulloch, 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 palæontology and stratigraphical geology as its associate 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 palæontological research, and thus were doubly prejudiced against the uniformitarian views. Buckland, Conybeare, Greenough, as we have already seen from incidental remarks in Lyell'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. Sedgwick 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 enthusiastic, 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, perhaps better than any general statements, the influences 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[65]: (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 geological phenomenon, namely, the passage from one independent sedimentary formation to another, characterised by a considerable difference in "organic 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 existing 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 culture, 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, published in 1823, and that on the Geology of Central France, published in 1826, had given the coup 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 investigation 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 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 confusion; 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 interlacing 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 "Principles" was published. By that date, as has been stated in the preceding chapters, he had made himself familiar in the course of his geological education with many parts of Britain, had laboriously investigated 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 Switzerland 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 neighbouring parts of Europe, he had rambled among the Alps and Pyrenees, examining their peaks and precipices, their snowfields, glaciers, lakes, and torrents, and watching the processes of destruction, transportation, and deposition of 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 write 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.

FOOTNOTES:

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

[56] "Principles of Geology," vol. i. p. 26 (eleventh edition).

[57] In Memoriam, cxxiii.

[58] "Principles of Geology," chap. iii. p. 37.

[59] "Principles of Geology," chap. iv.

[60] "Principles of Geology," chap. iv.

[61] Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" was first published in 1788, and in an enlarged form in 1795. Playfair's "Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory" appeared in the spring of 1802.

[62] Geikie's "Life of Murchison," chap. vii.

[63] "Principles of Geology," chap. iv.

[64] "Principles of Geology," chap. iv.

[65] Abridged from Lyell's summary: "Principles of Geology," chap. vii.

CHAPTER VI.

EIGHT YEARS OF QUIET PROGRESS.

Both courses of lectures ended[66] 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 Archæopteryx 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 development. Thence they travelled to Nürnberg and Bayreuth, visiting on their way the noted caves at Muggendorf, and returned to Bonn by way of Bamberg, Würtzburg, Aschaffenberg, and Frankfurt. In this journey, few localities of special interest were investigated, but, as Lyell's letters show, no opportunity was lost of discussing important questions with local geologists, or of examining sections in the field. But on the way back to England through Belgium a halt was made at Liége, 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 Liége 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 Liége, 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."[67]

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 ossements fossiles découverts dans les cavernes de la Province de Liége," 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, hyæna, and bear surrounded it on all sides.[68] 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,[69] 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, especially an examination into the evidence discovered in 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 interesting. Though the handiwork of primæval 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 primæval 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 civilisation; a deduction which is borne out by contrasting the capacity of the frontal with that of the occipital region." Professor Huxley sums up a careful discussion 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 appertain. "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 thoughtless brains of a savage."[70]

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 "Principles" 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 voyage up the Elbe. This is his brief summary: "Cliffs 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 Lübeck, 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 connected the two towns much merchandise would have gone overland, to the king's loss. At Lübeck 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 (Paludina) among common marine forms.[71]

From Copenhagen a rapid journey in Seeland and to Möen introduced him to a number of interesting 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 Copenhagen 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.

After crossing the Sound to Malmö, Lyell spent about a fortnight in driving along an inland route through the southern part of Sweden to Norrköping, 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,[72] 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 everywhere, 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 Norrköping, 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 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 correspondence 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 Cardium 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 Södertelje—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 house? It is as true as the Temple of Serapis.[73] 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 Lübeck, 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 débâcle 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,[74] that I was not justified in writing any more until I had done all in my power to ascertain 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."[75]

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.[76]

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.[77] On reaching the coast he made an expedition by boat, and saw the bench-mark at Gullholmen, and rocks which had 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 Association 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 Malmö, Skanör, Trelleborg, and Ystad, the movement is distinctly in an opposite direction.[78]

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 occupation. 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 of 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 Society, 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 this question Lyell lays down a principle of classification 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 destination 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 à bot from the aiguilles round the Trient glacier to the slopes of the Jura, or to fling the 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 primæval 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, 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 discovered 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 crystalline schists in both cases were vastly more ancient than the fossiliferous limestone. It is only of 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 complete 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 absolutely 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 crystalline schist—changed practically past recognition—and leave its neighbour so far unaltered that its characteristic 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 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[79] 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[80]:—

"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; nevertheless, 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 completely 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 fifth 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 Geological Society, which involved the delivery of an address in the month of February and the preparation 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."

But one letter, of the few which have been preserved 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 mistake which Lyell had made in regard to a rather difficult physical question. In referring to this, the latter remarks that the clearness of the mathematical reasoning (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." Doubtless 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,[81] 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 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[82] at least of the circumstances which must be contemplated 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 precaution 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 its prey. Now if species come in in succession, such contrivances must sometimes be made, and such relations predetermined between species, as the Mantis for example, and plants not then existing, but which 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 subject 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 specimens 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."[83] The letter to Darwin,[84] which is quoted above, also contains a characteristic piece of advice.

"Don't accept any official scientific place if you can avoid 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 Geological Society] as long as I could. All has gone on smoothly, and it has not cost me more time than I anticipated; but my question 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 President 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.[85]

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 difficulty, 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 Linnæus' collection, since these, in some cases, had been wrongly identified by Lamarck and other palæontologists. 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 expeditions from Christiania, in the course of which he examined 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 Palæozoic) 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 observations. "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 immense difference in age, you would be half-staggered with the suspicion that all was made at one batch."[86]

From Copenhagen, on their return, they went to Lübeck 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 limestones 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 Münster 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."[87]

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 happened 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 meeting of the British Association. Here he was made President of the Geological Section, which appears to 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 attractiveness. 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 together 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, without 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 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 Beaumont's idea of the contemporaneity of parallel mountain 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[88]:—

"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 Dr. Fitton, who had written for the Edinburgh Review a criticism of the "Principles of Geology," in which he had expressed the opinion that Lyell had insufficiently 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;[89] 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 strata.[90] 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' because—although I was brought round slowly, against some of 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."[91]

In the following month Lyell attended a meeting of the British Association at Birmingham, and was invited, together with several of the leading men of 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[92] 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 a good writer, but if men will not read any one book written by scientific men on such a subject, they must take the consequences.' ... 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 interested 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."[93]

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.[94] 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[66] At King's College and at the Royal Institution. See pp. 71, 72.

[67] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 401.

[68] Huxley, "Man's Place in Nature," p. 121.

[69] 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.

[70] "Man's Place in Nature," p. 156.

[71] Turbo littoreus, Mytilus edulis, Cardium edule.

[72] The term, of course, is used here in the sense of either a slaty rock or a hard shale.

[73] The ruins of which (in the Bay of Baiæ) gradually sank after the middle of the fifth century until (probably towards the end of the fifteenth century) the floor was more than twenty feet under water. Since then it has risen up again.—"Principles of Geology," chap. xxx.

[74] 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.

[75] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 436.

[76] Lyell's specimens appear to have come from Kured, two miles north of Uddevalla, and only one hundred feet above the sea, but barnacles were obtained by Brongniart at two hundred feet.—"Principles of Geology," chap. xxxi.

[77] "Antiquity of Man," chap. iii.

[78] "Principles of Geology," ch. xxxi. "Antiquity of Man," ch. iii.

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