Heroes of science

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.

Lyell was not sparing of criticism so far as his friend Murchison’s habits were concerned, as may be gleaned in the following letter:—

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.