That Buckland greatly influenced Lyell in his youth, especially by inoculating him with his splendid enthusiasm for geology, there can be no doubt; and Lyell, far as he departed in after life from the views of his teacher, never forgot his indebtedness to the Oxford professor. Even in 1832, in publishing the second edition of the first volume of his Principles, he dedicated it to Buckland, as one 'who first instructed me in the elements of geology, and by whose energy and talents the cultivation of science in the country has been so eminently promoted[33].'
On leaving Oxford in 1819, at the age of twenty-two, Lyell joined the Geological Society. What were the dominant opinions at that time on geological theory among the distinguished men, who were there laying the foundations of stratigraphical geology, we have already seen. Lyell, in his frequent visits to the continent, became a friend of the illustrious Cuvier, whose strong bias for Catastrophism was so forcibly shown in his writings and conversation.
What then, we may ask, were the causes which led Lyell to abandon the views in which he had been instructed, and to become the great champion of Evolutionism?
It has often been assumed that Lyell was led by the study of Hutton's works to adopt the Uniformitarian' doctrines. But there is ample evidence that such was not the case. As late as the year 1839, Lyell wrote of Hutton, 'Though I tried, I doubt whether I fairly read half his writings, and skimmed the rest[34]'; and he emphatically assured Scrope 'Von Hoff has assisted me most[35].'
The fact is certain that Lyell, quite independently, arrived at the same conclusions as Hutton, but by totally different lines of reasoning.
As early as 1817, when Lyell was only twenty years of age, he visited the Norfolk coast and was greatly impressed by the evidence of the waste of the cliffs about Cromer, Aldborough, and Dunwich; and three years later we find him studying the opposite kind of action of the sea in the formation of new land at Dungeness and Romney Marsh. All through his life there may be seen the results of these early studies in a tendency which he showed to overrate marine action; the chief defect in his early views consisting in not fully realising the importance of that subaerial denudation—of which Hutton was so great an exponent. But it was in his native county of Forfarshire that Lyell found the most complete antidote to the Catastrophic teachings. Buckland had taught him that the 'till' of the country had been thrown down, just 4170 years before, by the Noachian deluge: while Cuvier had asserted that the study of freshwater limestones proved them to differ from any recent deposit by their crystalline character, the absence of shells and the presence of plant-remains, as well as by the occasional occurrence in them of bands of flint. As the result of this, Cuvier and Brongniart had declared that the freshwater of the ancient world possessed properties which are not observed in that of modern lakes[36]. Lyell visited Kinnordy from time to time between 1817 and 1824, and found on his father's estate and other localities in Strathmore a number of small lakes, lying in hollows of the boulder clay. These were being drained and their deposits quarried for the purpose of 'marling' the land; the excavations thus made showed that, under peat containing a boat hollowed out of the trunk of a tree, there were calcareous deposits, sometimes 16 to 20 feet in thickness, which passed into a rock, solid and crystalline in character as the materials of the older geological formations and containing the stems and fruits of the freshwater plant Chara (Stone wort).
With the help of Robert Brown the botanist, and of analyses made by Daubeny, with the advice of his life-long friend, Faraday, Lyell was able to demonstrate that from the waters of the Forfarshire lakes, containing the most minute proportions of calcareous salts, a limestone, identical in all respects with those of the older rocks of the globe, had been deposited, with excessive slowness, by the action of plant-life[37]. He was thus enabled to supply a complete refutation of the views put forward by Buckland and Cuvier.
Thus while Hutton had been led to his conclusion concerning evolution in the inorganic world, by studying the waste going on in the weathered crags and the flooded rivers of his native land, Lyell's conversion to the same views was mainly brought about by the study of changes due to the action of the sea along the English coasts, and by studying the evidence of constant, though slow, deposition of limestone-rocks, by the seemingly most insignificant of agencies.
Lyell however did not by any means neglect the study of the action of rain and rivers. During his visits to Forfarshire, he had his initials and the date cut by a mason on many portions of the rocky river-beds about his home. Fifty years afterwards (in 1874) I visited with him the several localities, to ascertain what amount of waste had resulted from the constant flow of water over these hard rocks. It was in most cases singularly small, the inscriptions being still visible, though deprived of their sharpness; even the sandy detritus carried along by the streams, being buoyed up by the water, had not been able in half a century to wear away a thickness of half-an-inch of the hard rock. The most singular result we noticed was, that the leaden small shot fired by sportsmen, in the Highland tracts, whence these streams flowed, had collected in great numbers in hollows formed by the young geologist's inscriptions.
By his father's request, Lyell after leaving Oxford studied for the bar, but there is no doubt that his main interest was in geological study. He had made the acquaintance of Dr Mantell, and carried on a number of researches in the south of England either alone or with that geologist[38]. Four years after joining the Geological Society, in which he was a constant worker, he became one of the secretaries. This was in 1823 when he was only 26 years of age. His frequent visits to Paris and to various parts of the continent enabled him to exchange ideas with many foreign naturalists, and it is clear from his correspondence that at this early period he had abandoned the Catastrophic doctrines of his teachers and friends.