Heroes of science

by P. Martin Duncan

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.