Charles Lyell and Modern Geology

Returning to Geneva, the party travelled by Lausanne and Neuchâtel to Bâle, and then followed the picturesque route along the river, by the tumultuous rapids of Laufenburg and the grand falls of the Rhine, to Schaffhausen, whence they turned off to Zurich. Here he writes of the principal inn that it "partook more than any of a fault too common in Switzerland. They have their stables and cow-houses under the same roof, and the unavoidable consequences may be conceived, till they can fall in with a man as able – as 'Hercules to cleanse a stable.'"

From Zurich they crossed the Albis to Zug. The other members of the party went direct to Lucerne, but Lyell turned aside to visit the spot where twelve years previously an enormous mass of pudding-stone had come crashing down from the Rossberg, had destroyed the village of Goldau, and had converted a great tract of fertile land into a wilderness of broken rock. He diagnosed correctly the cause of the catastrophe, and then ascended the Rigi. Here he spent a flea-bitten night at the Kulm Hotel, but was rewarded by a fine sunset and a yet finer sunrise.

At Lucerne he rejoined his relatives, and they drove together over the Brünig Pass to Meyringen. From this place they made an excursion to the Giessbach Falls, and saw the Alpbach in flood after a downpour of rain. This, like some other Alpine streams, becomes at such times a raging mass of liquid mud and shattered slate, and Lyell carefully notes the action of the torrent under these novel circumstances, and its increased power of transport. Parting from his relatives at the Handeck Falls, he walked up the valley of the Aar to the Grimsel Hospice, where he passed the night, and the next morning crossed over into the valley of the Rhone to the foot of its glacier, and then walked back again to Meyringen. He remarks that on the way to the Hospice "we passed some extraordinary large bare planks of granite rock above our track, the appearance of which I could not account for." This is not surprising, for he had not yet learnt to read the "handwriting on the wall" of a vanished glacier. Its interpretation was not to come for another twenty years, when these would be recognised as perhaps the finest examples of ice-worn rocks in Switzerland. Lyell was evidently a good pedestrian; for the very next day he walked from Meyringen over the two Scheideggs to Lauterbrunnen, ultimately joining his relatives at Thun, from which town they went on to Berne, where they were so fortunate as to see, from the well-known terrace, the snowy peaks of the Oberland in all the beauty of the sunset glow.

Then they journeyed over the pleasant uplands to Vevay, and so by the shore of the Lake of Geneva and the plain of the Rhone valley to Martigny, turning aside to visit the salt mines near Bex. They reached Martigny a little more than seven weeks after the lake, formed in the valley of the Dranse by the forward movement of the Giétroz Glacier, had burst its icy barrier, and they saw everywhere the ruins left by the rush of the flood. The road as they approached Martigny was even then, in some places, under water; in others it was completely buried beneath sand. The lower storey of the hotel had been filled with mud and débris, which was still piled up to the courtyard. Lyell went up the valley of the Dranse to the scene of the catastrophe, and wrote in his journal an interesting description of both the effects of the flood and the remnants of the ice-barrier. Before returning to Martigny he also walked up to the Hospice on the Great St. Bernard, and then the whole party crossed by the Simplon Pass into Italy, following the accustomed route and visiting the usual sights till they arrived at Milan.

The next stage on their tour – and this must have been in those days a little tedious – brought them to Venice. The Campanile Lyell does not greatly admire, and of St. Mark's he says rather oddly, "The form is very cheerful and gay"; but on the whole he is much impressed with the buildings of Venice, and especially with the pictures. On their return they went to Bologna, and then crossed the Apennines to Florence. Everywhere little touches in the diary indicate a mind exceptionally observant – such as notes on the first firefly, the fields of millet, the festooned vines seen on the plain, or the peculiar sandy zone on the northern slopes of the hills. He also mentions that shortly after crossing the frontier of Tuscany they passed near Coviliajo, "a volcanic fire" which proceeded from a neighbouring mountain.8 This they intended to visit on their return. But at Florence the diary ends abruptly, for the note-book which contained the rest of it was unfortunately lost.

We have given this summary of Lyell's journal in some detail, but even thus it barely suffices to convey an adequate idea of the cultured tastes, wide interests, and habits of close and accurate observation disclosed by its pages. It shows, better perhaps than any other documents, the mental development of the future author of the "Principles of Geology." Few things, as he journeys, escape his notice; he describes facts carefully and speculates but little. As he wanders among the Alpine peaks, he makes no reference to convulsions of the earth's crust; as he views the ruin wrought by the Dranse, he says naught of deluges.

The travellers got back to England in September, and at the end of the Long Vacation Lyell returned to Oxford. There he remained till December, 1819, when he proceeded to the degree of Bachelor of Arts, obtaining a second class in Classical Honours. Considering that he had never been a "hard reader," and that he appears to have spent much of his "longs" in travel – a practice which, though good for general education, counts for little in the schools – the position indicates that he possessed rather exceptional abilities and a good amount of scholarship. Though Oxford had been unable to bestow upon him a systematic training in science, she had given a definite bias to his inclination, and had fostered and cultivated a taste for literature which in the future brought forth a rich fruitage.

CHAPTER III.

THE GROWTH OF A PURPOSE

Shortly after he had donned the bachelor's hood Lyell came to London, was entered at Lincoln's Inn, and studied law in the office of a special pleader. Science was not forsaken, for in March, 1819, he was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society, and about the same time joined the Linnean Society. Before very long his legal studies were interrupted. His eyes became so weak that a complete rest was prescribed; accordingly, in the autumn of 1820, he accompanied his father on a journey to Rome. During this but little was done in geology, for the travellers spent almost all their time in towns.

On his return, so far as can be inferred from the few letters which have been published, Lyell continued to work at geology, and at Christmas, 1821, was seeking in vain for freshwater fossils in the neighbourhood of Bartley. In the spring of 1822 he investigated the Sussex coast from Hastings to Dungeness, and studied the effects of the sea at Winchelsea and Rye. In the early summer of 1823 he visited the Isle of Wight, and in a letter to Dr. Mantell suggested that the "blue marl"9 in Compton Chine is identical with that at Folkestone, and compared the underlying strata with those in Sussex, clearing up some confusions, into which earlier observers had fallen, about the Wealden and Lower Greensand. He was now evidently beginning to get a firm grip on the subject – a thing far from easy in days when so little had been ascertained – and this year he read his first papers to the Geological Society – one, in January, written in conjunction with Dr. Mantell, "On the Limestone and Clay of the Ironsand in Sussex"; the other in June, "On the Sections presented by Some Forfarshire Rivers." Also, on February 7th, he was elected one of the secretaries of that Society, an office which he retained till 1826. This is a pretty clear proof that he had begun to make his mark among geologists, and was well esteemed by the leaders of the science.

No sooner had he returned from the Isle of Wight than he started for Paris, going direct from London to Calais, in the Earl of Liverpool steam packet, "in 11 hours! 120 miles! engines 80 horse-power for 240 tons." In the last letter written to his father before quitting England he refers to our neighbours across the Channel in the following terms: "My opinion of the French people is that they are much too corrupt for a free government and much too enlightened for a despotic one." That was written full seventy years ago; perhaps even now, were he alive, he would not be disposed to withdraw the words.

At Paris he was well received by Cuvier, Humboldt, and other men of science, attended lectures at the Jardin du Roi, and saw a good deal of society. His letters home often contain interesting references to matters political and social – such as, for example, the following remarks which he heard from the mouth of Humboldt: "You cannot conceive how striking and ludicrous a feature it is in Parisian society at present that every other man one meets is either minister or ex-minister. So frequent have been the changes. The instant a new ministry is formed, a body of sappers and miners is organised. They work industriously night and day. At last the ministers find that they are supplanted by the very arts by which a few months ago they raised themselves to power."10 Lyell more than once expresses a regret, which, indeed, was generally felt in scientific circles, that Cuvier had lost caste by "dabbling so much with the dirty pool of politics"; and himself works away at geology, studying the fossils of the Paris basin in the museums, and visiting the most noted sections in order to add to his own collection and observe the relations of the strata.

He returned to England towards the end of September, and no doubt spent the next few months in working at geology as far as his eyes, which were becoming stronger, permitted. The summer of 1824 was devoted to geological expeditions. In the earlier part he took Mons. Constant Prévost, one of the leaders of geology in France, to the west of England. Their special purpose was to examine the Jurassic rocks, but they extended their tour as far as Cornwall. Afterwards Lyell went to Scotland, where he was joined by Professor Buckland; and the two friends, after spending a few days in Ross-shire, went to Brora, and then returned from Inverness by the Caledonian canal. This gave them the opportunity of examining the famous "parallel roads" of Glenroy, which were the more interesting because they had already seen something of the kind near Cowl, in Ross-shire. Afterwards they went up Glen Spean and crossed the mountains to Blair Athol, visiting the noted locality in Glen Tilt, where Hutton made his famous discovery of veins of granite intrusive in the schists of that valley, and then they made their way to Edinburgh. Here much work was done, both among collections and in the field, and it was lightened – as might be expected in a place so hospitable – by social pleasures and friendly converse with some of the leading literary and scientific men.

Four years of comparative rest and frequent change of scene had produced such an improvement in the condition of his eyes that he was able to resume his study of the law, and was called to the Bar in 1825. For two years he went on the Western Circuit, having chambers in the Temple and getting a little business. But, as his correspondence shows, geology still held the first place in his affections,11 and papers were read to the Society from time to time. Among them one of the most important, though it was not printed in their journal, described a dyke of serpentine which cut through the Old Red Sandstone on the Kinnordy estate.12 But, as is shown by a letter to his sister, written in the month of November, he had not lost his interest in entomology. At that time the collectors of insects in Scotland were very few in number, and the English lepidopterists welcomed the specimens which Lyell and his sister had caught in Forfarshire. The family had left Bartley Lodge in the earlier part of the year and had settled in the old home at Kinnordy. About this time also Lyell began to contribute to the Quarterly Review, writing articles on educational and scientific topics. This led to a friendship with Lockhart, who became editor at the end of 1825, and gave him an introduction to Sir Walter Scott. A Christmas visit to Cambridge introduced him to the social life of that university.

In the spring of 1827 his ideas as to his future work appear to have begun to assume a definite form. To Dr. Mantell13 he writes that he has been reading Lamarck, and is not convinced by that author's theories of the development of species, "which would prove that men may have come from the ourang-outang," though he makes this admission: "After all, what changes a species may really undergo! How impossible will it be to distinguish and lay down a line, beyond which some of the so-called extinct species have never passed into recent ones!" The next sentence is significant: "That the earth is quite as old as he [Lamarck] supposes has long been my creed, and I will try before six months are over to convert the readers of the Quarterly to that heterodox opinion."14 A few lines further on come some sentences which indicate that the leading idea of the "Principles" was even then floating in his mind. "I am going to write in confirmation of ancient causes having been the same as modern, and to show that those plants and animals, which we know are becoming preserved now, are the same as were formerly." Hence, he proceeds to argue, it is not safe to infer that because the remains of certain classes of plants or animals are not found in particular strata, the creatures themselves did not then exist. "You see the drift of my argument," he continues; "ergo, mammalia existed when the oolite and coal, etc., were formed."15 The first of these quotations strikes the keynote of modern geology as opposed to the older notions of the science; what follows suggests a caution, to which Darwin afterwards drew more particular attention, though he turned the weapon against Lyell himself, viz. "the imperfection of the geological record."

A letter to his father, also written in the month of April, shows that, while he has an immediate purpose of opening fire on MacCulloch,16 who had bitterly attacked in the Westminster Review Scrope's book upon Volcanoes, he has "come to the conclusion that something of a more scientific character is wanted, for which the pages of a periodical are not fitted." He might, he says, write an elementary book, like Mrs. Marcet's "Conversations on Chemistry," but something on a much larger scale evidently is floating on his mind. In this letter also he discusses his prospects with his father, who apparently had suggested that he should cease from going on circuit; and argues that he gains time by appearing to be engaged in a profession, for "friends have no mercy on the man who is supposed to have some leisure time, and heap upon him all kinds of unremunerative duties." Lyell was not devoid of Scotch shrewdness, and doubtless early learnt that when it is all work and no pay men see your merits through a magnifying glass, but when it comes to the question of a reward, they shift the instrument to your defects.

Gradually the plan of the future book assumed a more definite shape in his mind, as we can see from a letter to Dr. Mantell early in 1828. About this time also Murchison, with whom he was planning a long visit to Auvergne,17 appears among his correspondents. Herschel18 tells him how he and Faraday had melted in a furnace "granite into a slag-like lava"; Hooker19 begs him to notice the connection between plants and soils as he travels; his father urges him to take his clerk with him to act as amanuensis and save his eyes, which might be affected by the glare of the sun, and to help him generally in collecting specimens and carrying the barometers. Early in the month of May he started for Paris, where he met Mr. and Mrs. Murchison, and the party left for Clermont Ferrand in a "light open carriage, with post horses." As far as Moulins the roads were bad, but as they receded from Paris and approached the mountains "the roads and the rates of posting improved, so that we averaged nine miles an hour, and the change of horses [was] almost as quick as in England. The politeness of the people has much delighted us, and they are so intelligent that we get much geology from them." Clermont Ferrand became their headquarters for some time, and Lyell's letters to his father are full of notes on the geology of the district, one of the most interesting in Europe. The great plateau which rises on the western side of the broad valley of the Allier is studded with cones and craters – some so fresh that one might imagine their last eruptions to have happened during the decline of the Roman empire;20 others in almost every stage of dissection by the scalpels of nature. Streams of lava, still rough and clinkery, have poured themselves over the plateau and have run down the valleys till they have reached the plain of the Allier, while huge fragments of flows far larger and more ancient have been carved by the action of rain and rivers into natural bastions, and now may be seen resting upon stratified marls, crowded with freshwater shells and other organisms, – the remnants of deposits accumulated in great lakes, which had been already drained in ages long before man appeared on the earth.

The two geologists worked hard, for who could be idle in such a country as this? They often began at six in the morning and rested not till evening, though the summers are hot in Auvergne, and this one was exceptionally so. Lyell writes home, "I never did so much real geology in so many days." Mrs. Murchison also was "very diligent, sketching, labelling specimens, and making out shells, in which last she is a valuable assistant." Sometimes they went farther afield, visiting Pontgibaud and the gorge of the Sioul, where they found a section previously unnoticed, which gave them a clear proof that a lava-stream had dammed up the course of a river by flowing down into its valley, and had converted the part above into a lake. This again had been drained as the river had carved for itself a new channel, partly in the basalt, partly in the underlying gneiss. Here, then, was a clear proof that a river could cut out a path for itself, and that forces still in operation were sufficient, given time enough, to sculpture the features of the earth's crust. Notwithstanding the hard work, the outdoor life suited Lyell, who writes that his "eyes were never in such condition before." Murchison, too, was generally in good health, but would have been better, according to his companion, if he had been a little more abstemious at table and a worse customer to the druggist.

From Clermont Ferrand the travellers moved on to the Cantal, where they investigated the lacustrine deposits beneath the lava-streams all around Aurillac. These deposits exhibited on a grand scale the phenomena which Lyell had already observed on a small one in the marls of the loch at Kinnordy. Thence they went on through the Ardêche and examined the "pet volcanoes of the Vivarais," as they had been termed by Scrope. The Murchisons now began to suffer from the heat, for it was the middle of July. Nevertheless, they still pushed on southwards, and after visiting the old towns of Gard and the Bouches du Rhône, went along the Riviera to Nice, having been delayed for a time at Fréjus, where Murchison had a sharp attack of malarious fever. It was an exceptionally dry summer, and the town in consequence was malodorous; so after a short halt, they moved on to Milan and at last arrived at Padua, working at geology as they went along, and constantly accumulating new facts. From Padua they visited Monte Bolca, noted for its fossil fish, the Vicentin, with its sheets of basalt, and the Euganean Hills, where the "volcanic phenomena [were] just Auvergne over again." Then the travellers parted, the Murchisons turning northward to the Tyrol, while Lyell continued on his journey southward to Naples and Sicily.

Some four months had now been spent, almost without interruption, in hard work and the daily questioning of Nature. The results had surpassed even Lyell's anticipations; they had thrown light upon the geological phenomena of the remote past, and cleared up many difficulties which, hitherto, had impeded the path of the investigators. On the coast of the Maritime Alps Lyell had found huge beds of conglomerate, parted one from another by laminated shales full of fossils, most of which were identical with creatures still living in the Mediterranean. These masses attained a thickness of 800 feet, and were displayed in the sides of a valley fifteen miles in length. They supplied a case parallel with that of the conglomerates and sandstones of Angus, and indicated that no extraordinary conditions – no deluges or earth shatterings – had been needed in order to form them. If the torrents from the Maritime Alps, as they plunged into the Mediterranean, could build up these masses of stratified pebbles, why not appeal to the same agency in Scotland, though the mountains from which they flowed, and the sheet of water into which they plunged, have alike vanished? The great flows of basalt – some fresh and intact, some only giant fragments of yet vaster masses – the broken cones of scoria, and the rounded hills of trachyte in Auvergne, had supplied him with links between existing volcanoes and the huge masses of trap with which Scotland had made him familiar; while these basalt flows – modern in a geological sense, but carved and furrowed by the streams which still were flowing in their gorges – showed that rain and rivers were most potent, if not exclusive, agents in the excavation of valleys. "The whole tour," thus he wrote to his father, "has been rich, as I had anticipated (and in a manner which Murchison had not), in those analogies between existing nature and the effects of causes in remote eras which it will be the great object of my work to point out. 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."21

One important result of this journey was a conjoint paper on the excavation of valleys in Auvergne, which was written before the friends parted, and was read at the Geological Society in the later part of the year. Lyell writes thus to one of his sisters from Rome, on his return thither, in the following January22: —

"My letters from geological friends are very satisfactory as to the unusual interest excited in the Geological Society by our paper on the excavation of valleys in Auvergne. Seventy persons present the second evening, and a warm debate. Buckland and Greenough furious, contra Scrope, Sedgwick, and Warburton supporting us. These were the first two nights in our new magnificent apartments at Somerset House." He adds, "Longman has paid down 500 guineas to Mr. Ure, of Dublin, for a popular work on geology, just coming out. It is to prove the Hebrew cosmogony, and that we ought all to be burnt in Smithfield."

On the way to Naples, Lyell made several halts: at Parma, Bologna, Florence, Siena, Viterbo, and Rome; visiting local geologists, studying their collections of fossil shells, keeping his eye more especially on the relations which the species exhibited with the fauna still existing in the Mediterranean, and losing no opportunity of examining the ancient volcanic vents and the crater lakes, which form in places such remarkable features in the landscape. "The shells in the travertine," he writes, "are all real species living in Italy, so you perceive that the volcanoes had thrown out their ash, pumice, etc., and these had become covered with lakes, and then the valleys had been hollowed out, all before Rome was built, 2,500 years and more ago."

On reaching Naples, he climbed Vesuvius, and saw for the first time the lava-streams and piles of scoria of a volcano still active; while the wonderful sections of the old crater of Somma furnished a link between the living present and the remote past – between Italy and Auvergne. He visited Ischia, where another delightful surprise awaited him, for on its old volcano, Monte Epomeo, he found, at a height of 2,000 feet above the sea, marine shells which belonged "to the same class as those in the lower regions of Ischia." They were contained in a mass of clay, and were quite unaltered. This was a great discovery, for the existence of these fossils "had not been dreamt of," and it showed that the land had been elevated to this extent without any appreciable change in the fauna inhabiting the Mediterranean. Except for this, the island was "an admirable illustration of Mont Dore." He made an excursion also to the Temples of Pæstum, wonderful from the weird beauty of their ruins, on the flat plain between the Apennines and the sea, but with interest geological as well as archæological, because of the blocks of rough travertine with which their columns are built. These he studied, and he visited the quarries from which they were hewn. His letters frequently contain interesting references to the tyranny of the Government, "the inquisitorial suppression of all cultivation of science, whether moral or physical," the idle, happy-go-lucky habits of the common people, the prevalent mendicancy, universal dishonesty, and general corruption. One instance may be worth quoting – it indicates the material with which "United Italy " has had to deal. He wanted to pre-pay the postage of a letter to England. The head waiter at his hotel had said to him, "'Mind, if it is to England you only pay fifteen grains' (sous). I thought the hint a trait of character, as they are all suspicious of one another. The clerk demanded twenty-five. I remonstrated, but he insisted, and, as he was dressed and had the manners of a gentleman, I paid. When I found on my return that I had been cozened, I asked the head waiter, with some indignation, 'Is it possible that the Government officers are all knaves?' 'Sono Napolitani, Signor; la sua eccellenza mi scusera, ma io sono Romano!'"23 The old proverb, what is bred in the bone will out in the flesh, still holds good; but we may doubt whether the standard of virtue is quite so high as the speaker intimated in certain other provinces which Piedmont has acquired at the price of the cradle of the royal house and some of the best blood of the nation.