CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE
I.Childhood and Schooldays[9]
II.Undergraduate Days[19]
III.The Growth of a Purpose[27]
IV.The Purpose Developed and Accomplished[44]
V.The History and Place in Science of the "Principles of Geology"[73]
VI.Eight Years of Quiet Progress[100]
VII.Geological Work in North America[130]
VIII.Another Epoch of Work and Travel[152]
IX.Steady Progress[168]
X.The Antiquity of Man[184]
XI.The Evening of Life[189]
XII.Summary[206]

Charles Lyell
AND MODERN GEOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.

CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLDAYS.

Caledonia, stern and wild, may be called "meet nurse" of geologists as well as of poets. Among the most remarkable of the former is Charles Lyell, who was born in Forfarshire on November 14th, 1797, at Kinnordy, the family mansion. His father, who also bore the name of Charles,[1] was both a lover of natural history and a man of high culture. He took an interest at one time in entomology, but abandoned this for botany, devoting himself more especially to the study of the cryptogams. Of these he discovered several new species, besides some other plants previously unknown in the British flora, and he contributed the article on Lichens to Smith's "English Botany." More than one species was named after him, as well as a genus of mosses, Lyellia, which is chiefly found in the Himalayas. Later in his life, science, on the whole, was supplanted by literature, and he became engrossed in the study of the works of Dante, of some of whose poems[2] he published translations and notes. Thus the geologist and author is an instance of "hereditary genius."

Charles was the eldest of a family of ten—three sons and seven daughters, all of whom grew up. Their mother was English, the daughter of Thomas Smith, of Maker Hall in Yorkshire, "a woman of strong sense and tender anxiety for her children's welfare." "The front of heaven," as Lyell has written in a fragment of autobiography, was not "full of fiery shapes at his nativity," but the season was so exceptionally warm that his mother's bedroom-window was kept open all the night—an appropriate birth-omen for the geologist, who had a firmer faith than some of his successors in the value of work in the open air. He has put on record only two characteristics of his infancy, and as these can hardly be personal recollections, we may assume them to have been sufficiently marked to impress others. One if not both was wholly physical. He was very late in cutting his teeth, not a single one having appeared in the first twelvemonth, and the hardness of his infant gums caused an old wife to prognosticate that he would be edentulous. Also, his lungs were so vigorous and so habitually exercised that he was pronounced "the loudest and most indefatigable squaller of all the brats of Angus."