THE LIFE OF LYELL.
The study of existing nature and its changes undertaken in
order to comprehend the past changes during geological ages—The
uniformity of natural operations under law—Catastrophes
abolished—The succession of life on the globe, and that of the
tertiary ages explained—The antiquity of man and of the great
ice age considered.
Charles Lyell was born in Forfarshire, at Kinnordy, on November 14th,
1797. His father was an able, wealthy, well-educated gentleman; and his
mother, a Yorkshire lady, had the usual good sound sense of the women of
that county. He was the eldest of ten children, the whole of whom grew
up; and he, as is commonly the case in large families, was a good son and
brother, and a most independent man in mind and action.
Charles Lyell’s family resided, for years, in the south of England after
his birth, and the boy was sent to school early; and in his amusing
history of his schoolboy days, which is given in the “Life of Sir Charles
Lyell,” edited by his sister-in-law, Mrs. Lyell, he went through all
the fun and trouble, the games by day and the bolsterings by night, the
keeping of pets, and the petty warfares of the English schoolboy. When
eleven years of age, Lyell got into indifferent health at school after
measles, and this necessitated his being less pressed at his lessons. He
was fond of study, however, and this enforced idleness made him take to
some of his father’s amusements, that of entomology.
Young Lyell studied butterflies, and chased them in the fields and
woodlands of the New Forest in Hampshire. He soon began to study the
changes of form which insects undergo in their short lives, and to
watch, hour after hour, the habits of the water-beetles and other
aquatic insects. After spoiling a considerable number of hats in chasing
butterflies, Lyell was supplied with a net and a cabinet in which to
place his stores of insect wealth. Oddly enough, some of the varieties of
the butterflies which young Lyell collected were of use in after years to
Curtis the entomologist. The boy had no companions in these “un-English”
amusements, and was very grateful for the assistance of his father’s head
servant, who knew a few plants by sight, and helped his young master.
“Instead of sympathy,” wrote Lyell, “I received from almost every one
beyond my home, either ridicule, or hints that the pursuits of other boys
were more manly. Whether did I fancy that insects had no feeling? What
could be the use of them? The contemptuous appellation of ‘butterfly
hunting’ applied to my favourite employment always nettled me.” However,
Lyell persisted, and when he got back to school he used to work at his
favourite subject out of school hours.
Finding a number of expensive books in his father’s library on
entomology, with beautiful plates in them, the boy’s common sense
told him that somebody prized all this knowledge, and that it must be
valuable. Oddly enough, he took to reading Linnæus for descriptions of
insects, and hunted up pictures of his captured butterflies in the plates
of the more modern authors. Recovered in health, and fairly strong, Lyell
was sent at thirteen years of age to school at Dr. Bayley’s, preparatory
to being sent to the great school at Winchester. The new school was at
Midhurst, in Sussex, and it had all the demerits of the schools of the
day, fighting, fagging, and bullying being rampant. Lyell came off well,
although a weak and short-sighted boy. Nevertheless, he stated that the
method of teaching got rid of “most of my natural antipathy to work and
extreme absence of mind, and I acquired habits of attention, which were,
however, painful to me, and only sustained when I had an object in view.”
It is evident that at this time, 1811-1813, Lyell’s heart was not
altogether in his classics and mathematics, and that he was reading other
subjects which were more pleasing to him. At the early age of seventeen,
Lyell entered Exeter College, Oxford, and whilst working fairly well
at his studies, cultivated music, and entered thoroughly into all the
politics and literary fellowships of the undergraduates. His love of
nature persisted, and he began to direct his thoughts to the past, and to
learn something about fossils. Thus he found out the house of Sowerby,
the conchologist, by finding at the door an ammonite, well known to
Oxford geologists. Subsequently, when on a visit to Mr. Dawson Turner,
of Norwich, he met a Javanese traveller, Dr. Arnold. Mr. Dawson Turner
had a fine collection of Norwich and Suffolk fossils. Lyell writes to his
father to say, “I have copied for Buckland, part of his paper, being a
list of those which are described, and shall copy the rest.” It appears
that the seed was sown by attending a course of lectures on geology,
at Oxford, given by the celebrated Dr. Buckland, and it is no little
thing for that great university to be able to assert that its teaching
developed the greatest system of geology ever brought forward. Lyell
geologized over Norfolk, and in his conversations with his host and Dr.
Arnold, it appeared that he had got hold of the idea, the elaboration of
which is at the very bottom of his future great work. Lyell studied what
is now in progress in nature so as to comprehend what occurred in the
past times of the earth. Modern changes are the examples by which ancient
changes can alone be studied. He quotes in a letter to his father, the
following saying of Buckland and of White: “Local information, from
actual observation, tends more to promote natural history science, than
all that is done by the speculations and compilations of voluminous
authors.” Dr. Arnold made collections of Norfolk fossils, and catalogued
them, whilst his young friend endeavoured to make a geological map of the
county. In the vacation Lyell and two friends went to Staffa, and his
description of the grand columns of the old volcanic stone shows how he
enjoyed and comprehended the scene.
In 1818 the family of the Lyells made a tour in France, Switzerland, and
Italy, and the notes, letters, and diaries of the eldest son have been
preserved, and they show how gradually, yet surely, he was educating
himself for that path which he, subsequently, never deserted. France
was not very lively, but he noticed the country more than the people,
and observed the country changed with the soil. He spent his first
Sunday at Paris, and went to the Jardin des Plantes the first thing on
Monday morning, but was disappointed by not hearing Cuvier lecture. In
the evening he went to see the great fountains at Versailles, where
Wellington was dining with some French marshals. Day after day the
wonderful sights of Paris were visited; but Lyell, whenever he had the
opportunity, slipped off to the Jardin des Plantes. He was much struck
with the collection of comparative anatomy, which he said might tempt
anyone who had the opportunity of staying in Paris, to take up ardently
the study of anatomy. He studied Cuvier’s work on fossil remains, and
on the geology of the country round Paris. One of his visits was to
Cuvier’s lecture room, which he described as filled with fossil remains,
among which are those glorious relics of a former world. Leaving Paris,
Lyell travelled by post, and noticed the geology and rocks of the
monotonous country to the Jura Mountains. He was mightily puzzled about
the rocks of the Jura, and enjoyed that magnificent scene of the Alps
from the top of the hills over which he was travelling. He wrote, “In
descending the Jura from Lavatey to Gex, we had a most magnificent view
of a vast extent of country. Below us the Lake of Geneva and the Canton
de Vaud; before us the Savoy Alps towering up to the clouds, and in spite
of their great distance and the height on which we stood, extended in a
long line before us like an army of giants, Mont Blanc rising high above
all in the middle as their chief. We saw the Dent du Midi to our left,
shooting up his two remarkable peaks, with many more of extraordinary
and picturesque forms.” On visiting the Valley of Chamouni, we find
Lyell naming the rocks of the different well known scenes, according
to the accepted terms of the mineralogists of the day, and this is a
satisfactory proof that he had been studying geology very effectually,
by himself, before he left England. He saw his first glacier, of any
importance, and was immensely struck with the changes it was producing in
the valley.
Many books have been written about Mont Blanc, its botany and its
glaciers, but none have ever equalled, in truthfulness and freshness
of description, the diary of Lyell. He seized upon all the remarkable
points to be noticed, and shone both as a botanist and geologist. He,
moreover, did not forget his old entomological tastes, for he chased
butterflies in the valley of the Arve, and was delighted with the Alpine
rhododendrons, and the little _ranunculus glacialis_. On the Grimsel
Lyell saw “some extraordinary large bare pieces of granite-rock, which
I could not account for,” and was puzzled by the redness of the snow in
some places. Afterwards on the Wengern Alp, he saw a fine avalanche fall
over a precipice on to a ledge below. He went to the Valais to see the
result of the great flood the previous June, and witnessed the results of
the enormous force of running water, carrying with it sand and stone, on
everything against which it came in contact.
Lyell then crossed the Alps and visited the Italian lakes and the
principal towns of Italy, but more as an antiquarian than a geologist.
The long journey bore fruit, for the constant proofs of changes ever
progressing in nature, which were brought before Lyell’s notice,
influenced his mind in a very decided manner. He became opposed to the
convulsionist doctrines of sudden and violent changes having occurred,
and furthered the ideas taught by Hutton, that the alterations on the
surface of the earth are slow and constant, and have been uniform for
ages. In 1819 Lyell took his B.A. degree at Oxford, obtaining a second
class in classical honours, and in the same year he became a fellow of
the Geological Society of London, and of the Linnæan Society. On leaving
Oxford he was entered at Lincoln’s Inn, and resided in London, and
studied law in a special pleader’s office. His eyes became weak, and he
was advised to give up reading for a time, and to join his father in a
visit to Rome in 1820. In 1822 Lyell was in full correspondence with the
most prominent geologists of the day, and he was doing original work, for
his letters show that he was interesting himself about the fresh water
strata of the Isle of Wight, and about the bones found in Kirkdale cave,
of hyæna, elephant, rhinoceros, etc. His enthusiasm and ability to work
were recognized in the very remarkable selection the Geological Society
made in 1823. For he was then elected one of the secretaries, and his
friends were Mantell and Buckland. The same year he went to Paris to see
the French geologists and Cuvier. Cuvier was very polite, and introduced
Lyell to Madlle. Duvancel, his step-daughter, and Lyell spoke very well
of her ability and engaging manners. He met Humboldt and Laplace and
Arago, the mathematicians and astronomers of the day.
In 1824 Lyell was interesting himself about Dean Coneabeare’s discovery
of a plesiosaurus at Lyme Regis, and the fossil was brought in triumph
to the rooms of the Geological Society, then established at 20, Bedford
Street. Then he started on a geological excursion in the west of England
with M. Prévost, and subsequently went to his birthplace and geologized
in Scotland.
Lyell was called to the bar in 1825, and went the western circuit for two
years, and in 1826 he became a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1827
he wrote an article in the _Quarterly Review_, showing how thoroughly he
identified himself with the school of geology that taught the necessity
of studying the past from the modern example of slow and gradual changes
on the earth by forces which have always been in existence. In 1828
appeared his papers on the excavation of valleys by ordinary agencies,
such as the sun’s heat, frost, rain, running water and the atmosphere.
A very remarkable book on the Geology of Central France, with especial
reference to the extinct volcanoes and lava flows of the Auvergne, was
written by Mr. Scrope, and its criticism was the foundation of the
article in the _Quarterly Review_ just noticed. Lyell was so impressed
with the grand descriptions in the book, that he determined to persuade
Mr. and Mrs. Murchison to accompany him on a tour into the region. Two of
Lyell’s letters to his father are so characteristic that they may well
find a place here.
Clermont-Ferrand.
_May 26th, 1828._
MY DEAR FATHER,
I have just returned again to Clermont, from an expedition
of five days, and we have discovered that there is no end
to the work to be done in this country, and that it is of
the most interesting description. The first day was spent in
ascending some of the lofty volcanic Puys near here. Mrs.
Murchison accompanied us, and then returned to Clermont, where
she employed herself, during our absence, in making panoramic
sketches, receiving several of the gentry and professors, to
whom he had letters, in the neighbourhood, and collecting
plants and shells, etc., while Murchison and I, with my man,
went on in a patache, a one-horse machine on springs. We first
visited Pontgibaud and the Sioule, to see the excavations made
by that river in the grand lava-current of the Come, which
descended from the central range, and dispossessed the river
of its bed. The scenery was beautiful. Just as we were leaving
the place, the peasants offered to take us to a volcano farther
down the river. As no Puy was mentioned in Desmarest’s accurate
map, nor by Scrope, we thought their account a mere fable; but
their description of the cinders, etc. was so curious, that we
had the courage to relinquish our day’s scheme, and proceed
again down the river.
You may imagine our surprise when we found, within a ride of
Clermont, a set of volcanic phenomena entirely unknown to
Buckland, Scrope, or the natives here. A volcanic cone, with a
stream of basaltic lava issuing out on both sides, and flowing
down to the gorge of the Sioule. This defile was flanked on
both sides by precipitous cliffs of gneiss, and the river’s
passage must have been entirely choked up for a long time. A
lake was formed, and the river wore a passage between the lava
and the granitic schist, but the former was so excessively
compact, that the schist evidently suffered most. In the
progress of ages, the igneous rock, one hundred and fifty
feet deep, was cut through, and the river went on and ate its
way, thirty-five, forty-five, and in one place eighty-five
feet into the subjacent granitic beds, leaving on one bank a
perpendicular wall of basaltic lava towering over the gneiss.
In the Vivarrais, where similar phenomena had been observed,
Herschel had remarked a bed of pebbles between the lava and the
gneiss, marking the ancient river-bed, but Buckland endeavoured
to get over this difficulty by saying that these pebbles might
have covered a sloping bank when the river filled the valley,
and that this bank may have always been high above the river
bed; for if the sloping sides of a valley, said the Professor,
be covered with pebbles, as they often are, and the valley is
filled with lava, and then the lava cut through and partially
removed, there will of course be a line of pebbles at the
junction of the lava and the rock beneath, but these pebbles
will not mark an ancient river bed. Now, unluckily for the
doctor in this case, he has no loophole; an old lead mine, said
to have been worked by the Romans, happens to have exactly laid
open the line of contact, and the pebble bed of the old river
is seen going in under the lava, horizontally, for nearly fifty
feet. This is an astonishing proof of what a river can do
in some thousands or hundred thousand years by its continual
wearing. No deluge could have descended the valley without
carrying away the crater and ashes above.
Six hundred or seven hundred feet higher, is an old plateau of
basalt, and if this flowed at the bottom of the then valley,
the last work of the Sioule is but a unit in proportion to the
other. There are several of the Clermont savans who, since they
discovered how much we were interested with this, have given
us to understand they intended to publish on it, but no doubt
they will take a year before they launch out in the expense of
a patache to Pontgibaud. Murchison certainly keeps it up with
more energy than anyone I ever travelled with, for Buckland,
though he worked as hard, always flew about too fast to make
sure of anything. Mons. Le Coq, the botanist, a clever young
man, assures me that the geology of the soils does not affect
the botany of Auvergne. I shall get some specimens from him
for Dr. Hooker, I expect. None to be bought, at least this
year, for it seems there may be hereafter. It is a wonderful
fact that _Glaux maritima_ grows round some saline springs
here. Busset, an engineer, who is mapping Auvergne, has forced
us to dine with him to-morrow. As we know his object to be to
get geology out of us, of which he knows nothing, M. fears it
will be a bore, but the man is evidently clever. We shall get
barometric heights from him, and a map of our little volcanic
district, and if he pumps unreasonably, I shall find a
difficulty in expressing myself in French. We are to meet Count
Le Serres there, a gentlemanlike and well-informed naturalist,
who has a property on Mont Dore, and knows more geology than
anyone we have met here, professors not excepted. He organized
a geological society here, and they chose Count Montlosier
as president; but the Jesuits took alarm, and, declaring
that Montlosier had written a book against Genesis, got the
Prefect and Mayor and Government to oppose, and at last put
the thing down; at least it merged in the regular scientific
Etablissement de la Ville, and Montlosier is just coming out
with a book against the Jesuits, a more popular subject in
France at present than geology. We are to visit him at his
château near Mont Dore. We like the people and the country.
Believe me, your affectionate son,
CHARLES LYELL.
TO HIS FATHER.
Bains de Mont Dore, Auvergne.
_June 6th, 1882._
MY DEAR FATHER,
I am at this moment arrived here, after passing three
delightful days at Count de Montlosier’s, an old man of
seventy-four, in full possession of faculties of no mean order,
and of an imagination as lively as a poet’s of twenty-five. I
stayed a day longer than the Murchisons, as I was determined to
have one more trial to find a junction between the granite of
the Puy chain and the fresh water formations of the Limagne,
and I actually found it; and my day’s work alone will throw a
new light on the history of this remarkable country. I believe
most of the granite to have made its appearance at the surface
at a later period than even the fresh water tertiary beds have,
though they contain the remains of quadrupeds. The scenery
of Mont Dore is that of an Alpine valley, deep, with tall
fir woods, high aiguilles above, half covered with snow, and
cataracts and waterfalls. A watering-place with good views at
the bottom of the valley. I shall send Hall back from here, as,
although he has been useful, I do not think the advantage will
overbalance the additional expense. Le Coq has promised some
plants for certain, and Hall has done pretty well in insects.
Believe me, your affectionate son,
CHARLES LYELL.
Lyell was not sparing of criticism so far as his friend Murchison’s
habits were concerned, as may be gleaned in the following letter:—
TO HIS MOTHER.
Bains de Mont Dore, Auvergne.
_June 11th, 1828._
MY DEAR MOTHER,
We have been so actively employed, I may really say so
laboriously, that I assure you I can with great difficulty
find a moment to write a letter. This morning we got off,
after breakfast at five o’clock, on horseback, to return from
St. Amand to this: arrived at seven o’clock. But one day we
rode fifty-five miles, which I shall take care shall be the
last experiment of that kind, as even the old Leicestershire
fox-hunter was nearly done up with it. But I have really gained
strength so much, that I believe I and my eyes were never in
such condition before; and I am sure that six hours in bed,
which is all we allow, and exercise all day long for the body,
and geology for the mind, with plenty of the vin du pays, which
is good here, is the best thing that can be invented in this
world for my health and happiness. Murchison must have been
intended for a very strong man, if the sellers of drugs had not
enlisted him into their service, so that he depends on them
for his existence to a frightful extent, yet withal he can
get through what would knock up most men who never need the
doctor. He has only given in one day and a half yet. On one
occasion we were on an expedition together, and as a stronger
dose was necessary than he had with him, I was not a little
alarmed at finding there was no pharmacy in the place, but at
last we went to a nunnery, where Mdlle. la Supérieuse sold all
medicines without profit—positively a young, clever, and rather
good-looking lady, who hoped my friend would think better of
it, as the quantity would kill six Frenchmen. M. was cured, and
off the next morning, as usual. The mischief is, that he has
naturally a weak though a sound stomach, and if he possessed a
more than ordinary share of self-denial, and was very prudent,
and after much exercise did not eat a good dinner when set
before him—if, in short, he would take the advice which many
find it easy to give him, he would be well. He has much talent
for original observation in geology, and is indefatigable, so
that we make much way, and are thrown so much in the way of the
people, high and low, by means of our letters of introduction,
and our pursuits, that I am getting large materials, which I
hope I shall find means of applying. Indeed, I really think I
am most profitably employed on this tour, and as long as things
go on as well as they do now, I should be very sorry to leave
off; particularly as, from our plan of operation, which is
that of comparison of the structure of different parts of the
country, we work on with a continually increasing power, and in
the last week have with the same exertion done at least twice
as much in the way of discovery, and in enlarging our knowledge
of what others had done, as in any preceding. I expect it will
be at least three weeks before we can have done with Central
France, and then we hope to work south towards Nice, down the
Rhone, keeping always in analogous formations, and then to the
Vicentin, if possible, though this is very uncertain, as we can
never see far before us, either as to time or place, directing
our course according to the new lights we are gaining.
We shall leave this place in a day or two. I like it well
enough, but it is certainly too early in the season to enjoy
it; and Mrs. Murchison suffers from the cold and damp, though
she has not often complained in this tone.
Mont Dore is partially covered with snow, and almost always
with clouds, and the transition in coming up here from the
low country is violent. Yesterday we rode up from the climate
of Italy to that of Scotland. It is the most varied and
picturesque country imaginable. There are innumerable old
ruins for sketches, with lakes, cascades, and different kinds
of wood, so that we wonder more and more that the English
have not found it out. The peasantry are very obliging,
industrious, well-fed, and clothed, and to all appearance are
the very happiest I ever saw. We have crossed the chain of
Puys, the Limagne, and the valleys leading from Mont Dore,
in all directions. The people in the higher regions begin to
talk French—at least there are generally some who have served
in the armies, and their children catch some from them. Their
own language has a good deal of the old Provençal in it, and a
great many of the terminations are Italian. In short, we often
find a demand in Italian succeed when French misses fire; but
all our ammunition often fails to produce any impression. The
population is dense, and bears no other resemblance to other
parts of France that ever I saw. In the mountains a large
portion do not believe that Napoleon is dead, especially the
old soldiers. There is an almost entire want of gentry here,
but as it does not arise from absenteeism, but from the great
sub-division of property, it evidently produces no ill effects
on the character and well-being of the people.
Give my love to all at Kinnordy, and believe me
Your affectionate son,
CHARLES LYELL.
After visiting the south of France with Murchison, Lyell prepared to
cross the Alps and to see Vesuvius, he being impressed with the necessity
of studying that grand modern example in order to understand, perfectly,
the extinct volcanoes they had been studying in the Auvergne. He wrote
his father—“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.” This was always his point, and it
certainly was not Murchison’s.
When at Vesuvius, Lyell recognized the similarity of some very old
volcanic dykes of Scotland with those recently exposed in the old crater.
Etna was visited, and he was delighted at finding sea-shells, resembling
those now living on the floor of the Mediterranean close by, some three
hundred feet above sea level. Whilst at Naples, and in the midst of the
highly suggestive scenery of the beautiful neighbourhood, Lyell wrote to
Murchison a very characteristic letter, which should be well pondered
over even by wealthy men who enter into the studies of nature, and which
might be read with benefit by those people who on this not over civilized
earth, hold the purse-strings of the world and treat scientific teachers
with gross meanness. With all his advantages Lyell could not undertake
the research which made him famous, which has tended to elevate our
conception of the laws of nature, and which has done so much to lead
geologists along the right path, without caring much for pecuniary
matters.
He wrote, “I will tell you fairly that it is at present of no small
consequence to me to get a respectable sum for my volume, not only to
cover expenses for present and future projected campaigns, but because
my making my hobby pay the additional costs which it entails, will
alone justify my pursuing it with a mind sufficiently satisfied with
itself, and so to feel independent and free to indulge in the enthusiasm
necessary for success. I shall never hope to make money by geology,
but not to lose, and _tax others_ for my amusement; and unless I can
secure this, it would, in my circumstances, be selfish in me to devote
myself as much as I hope to do to it.” These sentiments did Lyell great
honour. “My work is in part written, and all planned. It will not pretend
to give even an abstract of all that is known in geology, but it will
endeavour to establish the principle of reasoning on the science. All my
geology will come in as illustrative of my views of those principles,
and as evidence strengthening the system necessarily arising out of
the admission of such principles, which as you know, are neither more
nor less than, that _no causes whatever_ have, from the earliest time
to which we can look back to the present, ever acted, but those _now
acting_; and that they never acted with different degrees of energy from
that which they now exert. If I can but earn the wherewith to carry on
the war, or rather, its _extraordinary costs_, depend upon it I will
waste no time in book-making for lucre’s sake.”
Lyell’s long-expected book on the “Principles of Geology” was published
in 1830, and it made a very considerable sensation, and was warmly
combated and abused. Now it is admitted as the most conclusive and
useful of introductory books, fit for a youth, and eminently good in
its tone. Then the man, ever on the move, left for the Pyrenees, and
studied the formations there, and especially devoted himself to the
explanation of ripple-marks in the hundreds of feet of rock, and noticed
the effects of water-borne and air-carried sand in accumulating flats
of ripples one over the other. In 1831 Lyell accepted the position of
Professor of Geology in King’s College, London, and he gave courses of
lectures there in 1832 and 1833; and he became engaged to Mary, the
eldest daughter of Mr. Leonard Horner, a geologist of considerable
reputation, and a thoroughly liberal-minded man. Mr. Horner was a great
friend of Lyell’s before the engagement, and was a most painstaking man
and a great manager at the Geological Society. Lyell’s letters to Miss
Horner are most interesting, and show how admirable a woman she was
and how she stimulated him to follow out his great destiny. His work
on the “Principles” became a great pecuniary success, and he laboured
hard at King’s College, and was much annoyed at the decision of the
council at the College, not to allow women to attend his lectures, which
were a great success. Married, Lyell started for Germany, the Rhine,
and Switzerland. Coming home to London, he set to work at his lectures
at the Royal Institution, where ladies were admitted, and at King’s
College, where they were not. He had two hundred and fifty people to
hear his introductory lecture at King’s College, and it dwindled down
to fifteen in a few days, not from any want of care or excellence in
Lyell, who was ever bitter against the establishment for their refusal
to advance female education. He retired from the professorship as soon
as he found that it interfered with his researches, and never again took
any part in academical teaching. The trouble he took about his lectures
was great, and he went to great expense in having diagrams well drawn.
His retirement was a great loss to the College, which now admits ladies
to certain lectures. In 1834, Lyell travelled in Sweden and examined
into the rise of the land in Scandinavia, and whilst enjoying his hard
geological work—for he was well received by everybody, and taken to see
everything—his letters show how he missed his gentle and sympathizing
wife. On his return home Lyell received one of the Royal Society medals
for his work on the “Principles of Geology,” and in 1838 became President
of the Geological Society. About this time his attention was strongly
drawn to the relative numbers of living species found in the strata which
had been formed during the last geological or tertiary age. In working
at Sicily he had found that in the latest beds in which the shells were
hardly fossilised, all the species were still living. That is to say,
he collected shells which were of course dead, but they were similar to
others which were alive on the floor of the sea close by. The individual
had died, but the kind or species was still alive. He examined the latest
strata in England, the crag of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, and found
that the proportion of recent shells—that is to say, of dead individuals
belonging to living species—is great. Some of the shells belonged to
kinds which are not now living, and are extinct. He wrote, “I think we
may lay it down as a rule, that if any given tertiary deposit in which
we have found a few species of shells only, of which one half, or a
third, or even less, are recent, and those recent ones inhabit the seas
immediately adjoining, the formation will be pliocene.” This word was one
of three invented by Dr. Whewell, of Cambridge, at Lyell’s suggestion
to explain the gradual development of the recent animals and plants
during the past history of the globe. The other terms were “miocene”
and “eocene.” The most ancient deposit which was supposed by Lyell to
contain evidences of existing genera was at the dawn of the last great
geological period, the tertiary. It was called eocene from ηως, dawn,
καὶνος, recent. The next deposits overlying these older ones contained,
according to his estimate, seventeen per cent. of living species, all
the rest being extinct; and they were called miocene, from μεῖον, less,
and καὶνος, recent; expressing a minor proportion of recent species to
that found in the topmost and most recent tertiary deposits. These last
contain a large proportion of recent species, and are called pliocene,
πλεὶον, more, and καὶνος, recent. It was a grand theory, which has
remained almost unaltered, and it influenced the progress of geology,
for it plainly inferred that the living things of the present have been
linked with those of the past time by direct descent; that many forms of
life have become extinct, and that there is some wonderful law relating
to this.
About this time many were the geological heresies, and the lovers of the
notion of the violent actions of nature evolved theories about volcanoes
and the occurrence of vast waves to account for the presence of the great
masses of rock which are found strewn far and wide and away from their
sources. These Lyell successfully antagonized. He then published the
“Elements of Geology,” and his time was fully occupied in the meetings
of the Geological Society, in criticising work, and in genial scientific
society.
In the autumn of 1841 Lyell crossed the Atlantic, and spent thirteen
months in the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia. He worked hard as
an observer and recorder, and his comparisons between the strata in the
New and Old World are full of interest. Writing from Philadelphia to his
father-in-law, Mr. Horner, he says, “Here I am working away in quarries
of greensand and picking up belemnites and other cretaceous fossils;”
and then to Dr. Mantell, “After staying two days we went by New York
and the Hudson to Albany, where I began my explorings in the silurian
strata, and from whence I examined the valley of the Mohawk. The Falls
of Niagara were as beautiful as I expected, perhaps scarcely so grand,
but in geological interest far beyond my most sanguine hopes. So I shall
send a paper on the proofs of their recession to the Geological Society.
I will not dwell on them now. After spending some time there, I examined
seriatim, all the silurian groups and the old red and coal on the borders
of Pennsylvania. Returning to Albany, I went south to Philadelphia,
and spent four days in collecting in the different divisions of the
greensand, and in New Jersey. The analogy of the genera, and even of the
species of the European chalk, is most striking.”
One of his duties in the United States, was to give a course of lectures
at the Lowell Institute, at which his audiences amounted to two thousand.
He also went north, and made some most important investigations with
Dr. Dawson, then a comparatively unknown school missionary struggling
to learn something about nature, and now one of the most distinguished
geologists in the world. They dug out roots called by fossilists
stigmariæ, which once supported huge trees called sigillariæ in the days
of the coal formation, and they measured foot by foot many hundreds of
yards of the cliffs of the now celebrated place called Toggins, in Nova
Scotia. There they found rows of trees, one over the other, erect, and
indicating that, when the part of the earth now cut into by the sea and
exposed as a cliff was formed, there was a series of ages, each having
its forest, each of which was overwhelmed, and thus forest after forest
accumulated. Amongst the trees were some hollow ones, and they contained
little fossils, such as shells and scales. They were objects of interest,
but it was not until later on that Lyell and Dawson saw their importance.
This subterranean forest exceeds in extent and quantity of timber all
that have been found in Europe put together. The new deposit of red sand
of the numerous estuaries there afforded them endless instruction. “At
this place, Truro, the tide is said to rise seventy-five feet, and we see
the bottom of a deep salt-water sea, its rippled sands, shells and holes
of _Mya_ and _Tellina_ and their tracks, footmarks of birds and worms,
the manner in which the clays crack and are marked with the rain, and
sometimes shells included recently in solid models of claystone. I have
also learned more about the geological effects of drifting ice in the
last ten days than in all the Canadian tour.”
Lyell returned to England, and, after a short rest, started for the
north of Ireland. He wrote to his sister: “We have just returned from a
walk over the grand pavement (Giant’s Causeway), the effect of which was
as picturesque as the evening sun and some white breakers rolling and
foaming over the black rocks could make it. Much as I have been pleased
with the sight, it strikes me that there are parts of Staffa away from
Fingal’s Cave, and which travellers have seldom leisure to visit, which
are even finer in precisely the same style. The geology of Antrim is very
interesting—so many formations, such as chalk, green sand, lias, new
red—and the coal being represented by such distinctly characterized and
yet such thin sets of strata, compared to the same groups elsewhere; and
then the grand trap or basaltic mass covering and cutting through them
all.”
Often slightly political in his ideas, Lyell wrote much about the Irish
peasantry, and spoke of them as the quick, obliging, and fine-looking
natives of the Green Island. He remarked, in 1843, “One cannot help
fearing that the anti-English spirit has sunk deep into the hearts of
the millions here, for they read nothing but O’Connell’s newspapers,
from which he artfully excludes, without appearing to them to do so,
every other foreign or domestic topic of interest except repeal and Irish
grievances—a great proportion of them now bygone.”
He kept steadily at work preparing his American travels for publication,
and in a note to a friend regarding the nature of coal, he instanced the
swamps of Virginia. “The Virginian morasses allow, under a hot sun, great
accumulations of black vegetable matter, nearly like peat, and which
might make coal. The shade of _Cupressus distichi_, Thuya, and water oaks
shut out the sun, and ferns and mosses draw in the damp air beneath,
while the heat causes evaporation, and evaporation cold. One swamp which
I saw is forty miles long by twenty broad. Thousands of prostrate trees
are in the peat.” Some investigators held that the atmosphere must have
contained a large amount of carbonic acid gas during the ages in which
coal was being formed out of decaying vegetation, but Lyell, adhering
to his strictly uniformitarian views, denied this, and considered the
Virginian swamps to be explanatory of the formation of coal.
Lyell went to see the skeleton, brought by a German named Koch from
the Missouri, of a very large mastodon, and was wonderfully amused to
notice how this savant had made it up out of fragments. “He has turned
the huge tusks the wrong way—horizontally, has made the first pair of
ribs into collar-bones, and has intercalated several spurious dorsal
and tail vertebræ, and has placed the toe-bones wrong to prove, what
he really believes, that it was web-footed. I think he is a mixture of
an enthusiast and an impostor, but more of the former, and amusingly
ignorant. His mode of advertising is a thousand dollars reward for
anyone who will prove that the bones of his Missourium are made of wood.
He is soon to take them to London, when you will have a treat, and see a
larger femur (thigh-bone) than that of Iguanodon.” He was delighted with
the Americans.
Lyell revisited America in 1845, and on returning across the Atlantic
in 1846, narrowly escaped shipwreck on an iceberg; but he made an
interesting observation about one great berg. “It had a large rock,
twelve feet square, on the top, and much gravel and sand on its side.
The bergs were from fifty to four hundred feet in height, pyramidal,
pinnacled, dome-shaped, single-peaked, double-peaked, flat-topped, and of
every form and most picturesque, and only a quarter of a mile off us.”
The lesson was not lost, for Lyell had thus ocular proof concerning
how stones of huge size and gravity, can travel far from their proper
location. And as these icebergs capsize or melt he was confirmed in
his views that many deposits of huge stones and gravels in the form of
“drift” have been produced in this manner.
Having now attained great eminence, Lyell began to write and agitate
about the scientific teaching of the Universities, and his opinion of
the decidedly unprogressive character of them was proved to be correct
when only four heads of houses out of twenty-four were at Oxford to
receive the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He urged
strongly the necessity of placing the lay teacher on the same pecuniary
level as the clergy. Moreover, he made a vigorous attempt to have truly
scientific presidents of the Royal Society, and not only noblemen of high
and royal standing. The Queen honoured Lyell with her regard, and Prince
Albert used to get him to talk about America and the Americans, listening
always with great interest. He was knighted for his distinguished
services to science, and the conferring of this dignity pleased the whole
scientific world.
In 1849 Sir Charles Lyell was re-elected president of the Geological
Society, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Sumner, attended at
the annual dinner given on the occasion. After the expiration of his
presidency, Lyell again went to the United States, and, returning,
visited Teneriffe, the Grand Canary, and Palma, arriving in England in
1854.
In 1855 and the two following years Sir Charles and Lady Lyell travelled
much on the continent, and always with a view of studying existing nature
so as to comprehend the past. He was gratified by finding that most of
the rising teachers in Germany were using his books as text books for
their lectures, and that the doctrines of Hutton he had elaborated were
so much appreciated. In Switzerland, Lyell interested himself more than
ever about the great remains of former ice action on the rocks. He was
at one time disposed to believe that certain masses of mud containing
angular stones, derived from a distance, could have been produced by the
sea, but not finding any remains of marine animals, or evidence of such
action as the ice would produce in rounding and waterwearing stone, he
began to examine the influence of glaciers in wearing rocks and carrying
the rubbish down with them. He was of course aware that there had been an
age of cold in Switzerland, corresponding to the glacial epoch of Europe
to the north, and he was therefore prepared to find some proofs of the
former great extension of glaciers beyond their present limits. He was
disposed to believe that the Alps were higher than they now are in that
age of cold. In order to account for the former action of ice and the
production of huge moraines, in comparison with which those now found
at the glacier foot are pigmies, Lyell wrote: “In the glacial period,
when the weight of ice was enormously greater, when in the region of the
Alps there was so little melting, when glaciers at present only ten,
fifteen, and twenty miles long, and from three hundred to one thousand
feet deep, were fifty to one hundred, and even one hundred and fifty
miles long, and four thousand feet deep (and if there is any truth at
all in the generally received theory of the old Swiss glaciers, such
must have been their gigantic dimensions), one may readily grant that
the pressure and friction were so much in excess of what we now see as
to explain the contrast between the ice work done in the olden times,
and that accomplished in our own days, to say nothing of the probably
disproportionate length of the periods compared.” He noticed an old
terminal moraine, in advance of the new one of the Rhone glacier, covered
with wild plants, some in full flower, and cut through in two places by
the river; its height was only fifteen feet, and its width ninety feet.
He went underneath the Viesch glacier in the Upper Vallais, and beyond
it; in consequence of its having melted much, he saw a rounded and domed
surface of granite, smooth, and with straight furrows a quarter of an
inch deep exactly in the direction of the onward movement of the glacier.
On the Ruffelhorn, on the right lateral moraine, that is on the surface
of the ice close to the rocks, he saw a splendid mass of granite, angular
in shape, and measuring fifty-nine feet long, forty-nine feet wide, and
forty-two feet high. Its sides were polished and furrowed. This huge mass
was being carried slowly down, by the glacier, and will be deposited at
its foot some day or other. Once it formed a part of the valley side, and
it fell on to the glacier, whose flanks had scrubbed it for many a long
day. He particularly noticed how the glaciers had been advancing of late
years (just as they are now receding).
Lyell followed out these researches on the south of the Alps, and he
first of all made many excursions, accompanied by Gastaldi, one of the
best of the scientific men of Turin, and by Michelotti, in order to
compare the shells which are found fossil in the middle tertiary strata
on the south of the Alps, with those of the molasse of Switzerland to
the north. He found that these strata, separated by the great mass of
the mountains, resembled each other somewhat mineralogically as well as
in their fossils, but he was not able to make out that they were exactly
of the same geological age, although it was highly probable. He wrote on
the glaciers ancient and modern of the southern slopes of the Alps, and
in relation to the former—“A comparison also of the extinct glaciers of
the Italian and Swiss sides of the Alps can better be made from Turin
than from any other place. Before my arrival I had seen, on the banks of
the Lago Maggiore, some good examples of erratics and of moraines which
had come from the Simplon, but these, as you might suppose, _a priori_
are far inferior to those which have descended from the Val d’Aosta, or
which belong to the mighty glacier derived from the combined snows of
the Mont Blanc and the Mont Rosa group of Alpine heights. This glacier,
although perhaps of less gigantic dimensions than that of the Rhone, has
certainly left, as Gastaldi first pointed out in a memoir on the subject,
a far more imposing monument of itself on the plains of the Po, than have
the extinct glaciers of the Rhone or the Rhine, in the lower country of
Switzerland.” He noticed that “J. D. Forbes has well shown in his book
on the Alps, that a glacier is a peculiarly sensitive instrument for
measuring the average of heat and cold, and that every slight difference
of temperature causes it to increase or lessen in height and length.”
And pursuing the argument, remarks that as geologists had shown from
the nature of the fossil remains in lately formed gravels, that arctic
animals lived far south in Europe, shortly before the existing state of
things, we ought to find evidences of the cold climate which allowed
those animals to live so far south. These evidences are at hand in the
remains of the glaciers, which in those days extended far lower than they
do now, and were grander in extent. Thus a lofty mound or ridge, two
thousand feet high, called the Serra, running into the great alluvial
flat of the River Po, where maize and mulberries grow, is a huge terminal
moraine of an ancient glacier. Ice reigned supreme there in the glacial
period, and brought down the stone from the distant hills, and deposited
it on the Serra. In Forfarshire, Lyell had noticed the peculiar contorted
appearance of the beds of clay, gravel and sand of glacial formation,
and also in the mud cliffs of Norfolk. He was anxious to know whether
any of the ancient glacial heaps or moraines of the country south of the
Alps, showed similar indications of pressure and forcing along by ice.
“It happened that a railway was making from Turin to Ivrea, and although
they cut through the lowest part of the terminal moraines near Mazzi they
have thought it worth while to make a tunnel, through which we walked.”
Near the entrance, “I was delighted,” wrote Lyell, “to see that curious
folding of the strata, which will cause the same beds to be here pierced
by a perpendicular shaft, yet without the beds having participated in
the movement.” Full of this important subject he wrote fully on it.
“In order to appreciate the distinctive character of this colossal
moraine, you must reflect on the uniformity and evenness of the vast
plain of the Po all round it, for, although really inclined from the
Alps, it looks as level as the sea; then fancy the great mounds sloping
up at angles of 20° and 30° to heights of 500, 1000, 1500 and 2000
feet; then consider that at the very extremity, as near Caluso, there
are blocks of protogine which have come one hundred miles from Mont
Blanc; also that the whole assemblage of stones is not like that which
has issued from the Susa, or from any other valley, but confined to
rocks such as now strictly belong to the basin of the Dora Baltea; also
that the pebbles and fragments of stone, if of serpentine or any easily
striable rock, are all striated, at least nineteen-twentieths of the
whole, whereas in a recent glacier which has only travelled ten miles,
you might only find one in twenty of the same stone striated; and lastly,
think of the narrow vomitory which has disgorged this enormous quantity
of material, the ravine above Ivrea being as obviously the source of the
whole, as is the crater of Vesuvius the point from which its lavas have
issued. When Gastaldi read his paper to the Geological Society at Paris,
written jointly by him and Martens, Elie de Beaumont, who had many years
before visited the ground, objected entirely to their conclusion that it
was a moraine, but I never saw a stronger or more satisfactory case.
But in the same paper the authors hazarded an opinion that although the
old Alpine moraines stopped short after going a few leagues from the
Alps, yet at some former time erratics had been conveyed to the summit
of the Collina, just as “Pierre à Bot” and other blocks had been carried
by the old Rhone glacier to the flanks of the Jura. Now when I read this
at Zurich, I immediately recollected that in the valley of the Bormida,
when I passed from Savona to Alessandria in 1828, I had been astonished
at some very huge erratics of serpentine in the Miocene. Having never
seen blocks of such enormous dimensions in any tertiary formation, I was
relieved in 1828 at finding, in some spots on the Bormida, projecting
fragments of serpentine in places which the erosion of the valleys had
exposed to view. I concluded that they may not have travelled far, and
when I saw some large blocks on the Superga (in 1828), I immediately
suspected that as that hill consisted of beds of the same formation,
the blocks might have been washed out of the Miocene not far off. I
therefore now suggested this view to Gastaldi, and found that he was
by no means tenacious of his printed theory, although he said that the
blocks were many of them angular, of very great size, and accompanied
by Alpine loam. We then examined the beds of the Superga, both those
dipping to the north-west, and those to the south-east, and on both
sides of this anticlinal are strata containing fragments of stone of
various kinds, some not known in the neighbouring Alps or Apennines,
from two to eight feet in diameter. On our ascent to the Superga I saw
a thickness of sixty feet regularly stratified of this conglomerate,
in which were fragments consisting chiefly of serpentine, but some of
limestone, others of protogine granite, and one of the latter angular
and eight feet in diameter. In less than half an hour’s search, I found
two of the serpentine and one of the limestone pebbles with scratches,
which would be called glacial if they were found in a modern moraine,
though not such as you would select for examples for a museum. Still I
searched this year in some recent moraines quite as long without finding
better. As to the age of the beds, there is no doubt of their belonging
to the Lower Miocene, the marine fossils of which we collected in strata
both below and above them. These enormous blocks, therefore, were brought
into their present position by causes which acted in the Miocene age. I
know of no agency but that of ice which could have quietly let them down
upon subjacent beds of undisturbed fine marl and sand. Hence I conclude
that there was floating ice in the Lower Miocene period, and if the
few scratches I saw really imply glacial striation, the ice-rafts were
probably derived from glaciers which came down from mountains bordering
the glacial sea; perhaps from the Alps, for that chain must have existed
before the origin of a large part of the Lower Miocene. I have kept the
specimens I found of these Miocene striated stones to show Ramsay, who
will be interested in hearing, that in spite of some Brazilian genera of
trees and insects, and not a few palms, and some reptiles of good size,
and many other fossil genera found on both sides of the Alps and supposed
to imply a subtropical climate, I am not afraid to appeal to ice as the
only known cause capable of stratifying these great masses in the manner
in which they occur.”
The evidence of former changes in climate was thus strongly impressed on
Lyell’s mind, and the astonishing truth began to be strongly impressed
upon geologists by him, that not only has the area of Europe witnessed
ages of tropical heat, but also ages of considerable winter’s cold, and
that there has been more than one glacial period.
Lyell visited Vesuvius and Etna in 1858, and how carefully he noticed
every detail of the mountain structure, and how little he cared about
“roughing it” may be gleaned from extracts from his diary sent to his
wife:—
“Etna, _Casa Inglese_, Sept. 21, 1858.—Got off with two guides and two
muleteers and four mules, at half past seven, in bright sunshine, from
Nicolosi, and after a beautiful sunny ride of three hours through wooded
craters, protected from the heat by my umbrella, was gradually enveloped
in clouds. I saw a lava stream where the oaks had been surrounded by
lava, which had taken the form both of upright and prostrate trunks,
surrounding them with tuff, and the wood being burned up they are now
cylinders of scoriaceous lava. After a couple of hours we got above the
clouds, when about eight thousand feet high, but not till my hands were
numbed, for I could not believe for a long time in the necessity of my
putting on a cloak. After reaching this place, I set out with Angelo for
the top of Etna, leaving Guiseppe to cook. We had now and then a drifting
cloud, but on the whole splendid sunshine. I saw the spot at the foot of
the great line where the Catanians quarried ice from under a current of
lava. My guide saw the same thing some six years ago, while the eruption
of 1852 was in progress, in August and September: the sand and lava ten
feet thick, and four feet of ice below, and bottom not seen. Not far
above the ice I warmed my hands at a fumarole where the steam and some
sulphuretted hydrogen were given off at such a heat that I was obliged
to be careful how I put my fingers in. This welcome heat enabled me to
write. When we reached the edge of the crater the whole of Sicily was
hidden except the higher part of Etna, between us and Montagunoli. But
Lipari and Stromboli stood out in the sea very conspicuously. I made a
rough sketch of the two craters; the smaller one has lately, I believe,
fallen, and shows a section of some of the horizontal beds of lava,
with which it had been filled nearly to the top. It was a considerable
exertion climbing and going half round it after a seven hours’ ride,
and this makes the Casa Inglese, which is the roughest place I was ever
in, seem a hospitable mansion, as it saves our returning. The wind is
whistling round and somewhat through it, but Dr. Guiseppe, I hear, has
made it weather tight. There is no chimney and we have charcoal burners,
but if the wind always blows like this I am not, at any rate, guaranteed
from asphyxia.”
He got a list of one hundred and fifty shells of the newer pliocene
clay on which Etna rests. Nine-tenths of them he found were of species
belonging to the present floor of the Mediterranean Sea, and this, to his
delight, confirmed what he wrote, and what has already been alluded to,
regarding this deposit on a former occasion. At Bronte, Lyell saw the
place where a crowd assembled in 1842, to see the lava flow into a great
artificial reservoir of water. The torrent of melted stone came forward
with a front of more than thirty feet high, and falling suddenly into the
water, produced for a while no effect whatever, as if, as in the white
hot metal in Butigny’s experiment, it required to cool down before it
could cause explosion. At length it went off suddenly, and everybody but
one or two out of fifty or more in number was killed.
During the years of his journeys in America and Europe, Lyell had paid
special attention to the changes which were occurring on the surface of
the earth amongst the rocks and hills, valleys, rivers, and sea-shores.
He had dealt with inanimate nature largely. About the year 1859 he began
to consider the changes which have occurred in the living things of the
past, and to direct his attention to the subject of the antiquity of man
and to the possible origin of species. He wrote to a friend in his usual
half-jesting manner: “I have been much occupied with another geological
subject besides that which your niece, Ellen Twisleton, irreverently
calls the proving her to be first cousin to a turnip (a violet she
should have said); I mean the antiquity of man as implied by the flint
hatchets of Amiens, undoubtedly contemporaneous with the mammoth, and
also the human skeletons of certain caves near Liège, which I believe to
be of corresponding age. I regard the pyramids as things of yesterday in
comparison of those relics.” Lyell struggled long in his mind against the
theory of the great age of man on the earth, and converted himself to
the belief in it, and in 1861 he wrote, after examining the associated
remains of human art and extinct animals, such as the mammoth and hairy
rhinoceros in England, that “the late discoveries at Herne Bay and
Reculver convince me that man inhabited England when the Thames was a
tributary of the Rhine.” He published a work on the antiquity of man,
and then began to interest himself about the great age when ice reigned
supreme over much of the northern hemisphere. Writing to his nephew he
states: “On a hill called Moel Tryfaen (in North Wales), at a height of
thirteen hundred feet above the sea, I found twenty species of fossil
shells, all of living species, in sand and gravel fifty feet thick. You
would have known most of them familiarly.” Some of these shells were
of kinds now living close by in the sea, but others of kinds now living
within the arctic circle. “The shells show that Snowdon and all the
highest hills which are in the neighbourhood of Moel Tryfaen were mere
islands in the sea at a comparatively late period, or when these living
molluscs were flourishing.”
The researches of Lyell and Dawson in Nova Scotia have been noticed, and
it is interesting to know that they were rewarded by the discovery of an
air-breathing mollusc, and of several small amphibians of the age of the
coal period, in the hollow of a stump of a tree, which dated back to that
very ancient time. After the death of his friend Murchison, although the
effects of age and a life of hard study were not unfelt, Lyell followed
with great care the researches of Dr. Hicks relating to the oldest rocks
of England. Lyell was intensely interested at the discovery of highly
organized invertebrate animals in sandstones and shales, which hitherto
had only yielded some doubtful worm tracks and impressions of plants,
and he recognized the truth that no evidences of the beginning of living
things were presented to the geologist. The researches of Carpenter,
Thomson, and Agassiz concerning the natural philosophy and natural
history of the deep sea were gratefully acknowledged by Lyell, as most
important contributions to science, and the author of this memoir has a
lively remembrance of Sir Charles’s intense excitement when the news
first came that the sea was very cold at great depths.
Years passed on, and honours came to the hard-working, truth-loving
man. He was elected president of the British Association, and was made
a baronet. His sight began to fail, and it was a constant anxiety to
many who saw him about London, to witness his constant exposure to
danger. Availing himself of an excellent secretary, he still corresponded
largely, and attended scientific meetings. But the end was at hand, and
he lost his well-loved wife and then his brother. Dying from the results
of a fall, Lyell was buried in Westminster Abbey, as a representative man
of science. He was a brilliant example of a man who sought out truth, and
braved public opinion for its sake, and who enlightened the world, caring
little for ease and luxury, and assisting every fellow-labourer in the
great science of geology.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[1] The greater part of this memoir is taken from Miss Brightwell’s “Life
of Linnæus.” Van Voorst.
[2] Terebratulæ.
[3] A large Echinite (_Clypeus sinuatus_ of Leske), not unfrequently
employed as a “pound-weight” by the dairywomen.
[4] Named from its frequent use in the construction of ovens.
[5] Written by his biographer.
[6] Address to the Geological Society, at the Anniversary Meeting, Feb.
18, 1831, by the President, the Rev. Adam Sedgwick, M.A., F.R.S., etc.
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[Illustration]
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