Heroes of science

by P. Martin Duncan

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.”