It is sad to relate that, owing to a carriage accident, Scrope's wife became a confirmed invalid and he had no child to succeed to the estate. Though cut off by other duties from the geological world, Scrope maintained his correspondence with his old friend Lyell, and, as we shall see in the sequel, was able to render him splendid service by the luminous though discriminating reviews of the Principles of Geology in the Quarterly Review. Throughout his life, however, Scrope preserved a love of geology, and occasionally contributed to the literature of the science; and in his closing years, when unable to travel himself, he gave to others the means of carrying on the researches in which he had from the first been so deeply interested.
Fortunately for science, Lyell's devotion to geological study was not, like Scrope's, interrupted by the claims made upon him by social and political questions. Feeling though he did, with his friend, the deepest sympathy in all liberal movements, and being especially interested in the reform of educational methods, his geological work always had the first claim on his time and attention, and nothing was allowed to interfere with his scientific labours.
Charles Lyell was the eldest son of a Scottish laird, whose forbears, after making a fortune in India, had purchased the estate of Kinnordy in Strathmore, on the borders of the Highlands. Lyell's father was a man of culture, a good classical scholar, a translator and commentator on Dante, and a cryptogamic botanist of some reputation.
Lyell's mother, an Englishwoman from Yorkshire, was a person of great force of character; this she showed when, on coming to Kinnordy, she found drunkenness so prevalent among the lairds of this part of Scotland, as to cause a fear on her part, that her husband might be drawn into the dangerous society: she therefore induced him, when their son Charles was only three months old, to abandon their Scottish home, and settle in the New Forest of Hampshire. Thus it came about that the future geologist, though born in Scotland, became, by education, habits and association, English.
Charles Lyell's attention was first drawn to geology by seeing the quartz-crystals and chalcedony exposed in the broken chalk-flints, which he, as a boy of ten, used to roll down, in company with his school-fellows, from the walls of Old Sarum. Like Charles Darwin, too, he became an ardent and enthusiastic collector of insects, and grew to be a tall and active young fellow, a keen sportsman, with only one drawback—a weakness of the eyes which troubled him through all his after life.
It was when at the age of seventeen he went to Oxford and came under the influence of Dr Buckland that Lyell first became deeply engrossed in geology.
Lyell used to tell many amusing stories of the oddities of his old teacher and friend Buckland. In his lectures, both in the University and on public platforms, Buckland would keep his audience in roars of laughter, as he imitated what he thought to be the movements of the iguanodon or megatherium, or, seizing the ends of his long clerical coat-tails, would leap about to show how the pterodactyle flew. Lyell became greatly attached to Buckland, who used to take him privately on geological expeditions. On one of these occasions, they were dining at an inn, where a gentleman at another table became greatly scandalised by Buckland's conversation and manners. The professor, seeing this, became more outrageous than ever, and on parting with Lyell for the night took the candle and placed it between his teeth, so as to illuminate the mouth-cavity exclaiming, 'There Lyell, practise this long enough and you will be able to do it as well as I do.' When Buckland had retired, the stranger revealed himself to Lyell as an old friend of his father's, adding 'I hope you will never be seen in the company of that buffoon again.' 'Oh! Sir,' said the startled undergraduate, 'that is my professor at Oxford!' But Buckland did not always originate the fun, for Lyell told me that, when the professor visited Kinnordy in his company, he led him a long tramp under promise of showing him 'diluvium intersected by whin dykes,' and, in the end, pointed to fields in a boulder-clay country separated by gorse ('whin') hedges ('dykes').
Buckland, as shown by his Vindiciae Geologicae (1820) and his Bridgewater Treatise (1836), was the most uncompromising of the advocates for making all geological teaching subordinate to the literal interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis; and in his Reliquiae Diluvianae (1823) he stoutly maintained the view that all the superficial deposits of the globe were the result of the Noachian deluge! He was indeed the great leader of the Catastrophists, and it is not surprising to find Lyell, while still under his influence, scoffing at 'the Huttonians[32].'