Charles Lyell and Modern Geology

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."

The geologist who so emphatically affirmed the necessity of travel, early became an unconscious practiser of his own precept. When he was three months old his parents went from Kinnordy to Inveraray, whence they journeyed to the south of England, as far as Ilfracombe. From this place they removed to Weymouth and thence to Southampton. More than a year must have been thus spent, for their second child-also a son-was born at the last-named town. Mr. Lyell, the father, now took a lease of Bartley Lodge, on the New Forest-some half-dozen miles west of Southampton, where the family lived for twenty-eight years. His mother and sisters also left Kinnordy, and rented a house in Southampton. Their frequent excursions to Bartley Lodge, as Lyell observes, were always welcome to the children, for they never came empty-handed.

Kinnordy, however, was visited from time to time in the summer, and on one of these occasions, when Charles was in his fifth year, some of the family had a narrow escape. They were about a stage and a half from Edinburgh; the parents and the two boys in one carriage; two nursemaids, the cook, and the two youngest children, sisters, in a chaise behind. The horses of this took fright on a narrow part of the road and upset the carriage over a very steep slope. Fortunately all escaped unhurt, except one of the maids, whose arm was cut by the splintered glass. The parents ran to the rescue. "Meanwhile, Tom and I were left in the carriage. We thought it fine pastime, and I am accused of having prompted Tom to assist in plundering the pockets of the carriage of all the buns and other eatables, which we demolished with great speed for fear of interruption."[3] This adventure, however, was not quite his earliest reminiscence; for that was learning the alphabet when he was about three years old.

Charles was kept at home till he had nearly completed his eighth year, when he was sent with his brother Tom to a boarding-school at Ringwood. The master was the Rev. R. S. Davies; the lads were some fifty in number, the Lyells being about the youngest. They seem, however, not to have been ill-treated, though their companions were rather a rough lot, and they were petted by the schoolmaster's daughter. The most sensational incident of his stay at Ringwood was a miniature "town and gown" row, a set fight between the lads of the place and of the school, from which, however, the Lyells were excluded as too young to share in the joys and the perils of war. But the fray was brought to a rather premature conclusion by the joint intervention of foreign powers-the masters of the school and the tradesmen of the town. In those days smuggling was rife on the south coast, and acting the part of revenue officers and contrabandists was a favourite school game; doubtless the more popular because it afforded a legitimate pretext for something like a fight. The fear of a French invasion also kept this part of England on the qui vive, and Lyell well remembered the excitement caused by a false alarm that the enemy had landed. He further recollected the mingled joy and sorrow which were caused by the victory of Trafalgar and the death of Nelson.

The brothers remained at Ringwood only for about two years, for neither the society nor the instruction could be called first-class; and they were sent, after a rather long holiday at home, to another school of about the same size, but much higher character, in Salisbury. The master, Dr. Radcliffe, an Oxford man, was a good classical scholar, and his pupils came from the best families in that part of England. In one respect, the young Lyells found it a change for the worse. At Ringwood they had an ample playground, close to which was the Avon, gliding clear and cool to the sea, a delightful place for a bathe. In a few minutes' walk from the town they were among pleasant lanes; in a short time they could reach the border of the New Forest. But at Salisbury the school was in the heart of the town, its playground a small yard surrounded by walls, and, as he says, "we only walked out twice or three times in a week, when it did not rain, and were obliged to keep in ranks along the endless streets and dusty roads of the suburbs of a city. It seemed a kind of prison by comparison, especially to me, accustomed to liberty in such a wild place as the New Forest." One can sympathise with his feelings, for a procession of schoolboys, walking two and two along the streets of a town, is a dreary spectacle.

But an occasional holiday brought some comfort, for then they were sent on a longer excursion. The favourite one was to the curious earthworks of Old Sarum, then in its glory as a "rotten borough," one alehouse, with its tea-gardens attached, sending two members to Parliament. On these excursions more liberty seems to have been permitted. The boys broke up the large flints that lay all about the ground, to find in them cavities lined with chalcedony or drusy crystals of quartz. But the chief interest centred around a mysterious excavation in the earthwork, "a deep, long subterranean tunnel, said to have been used by the garrison to get water from a river in the plain below." To this all new-comers were taken to listen to the tale of its enormous depth and subterranean pool. Then, when duly overawed, they felt their hats fly off their heads and saw them rolling out of sight down the tunnel. An interval followed of blank dismay, embittered, no doubt, by dismal anticipations of what would probably happen when they got back to the school-house. Then one of the older boys volunteered to act the sybil and lead the way to the nether world. Of course they "regained their felt and felt what they regained"-literally, for the hole was dark enough, though we may set down the "many hundred yards" (which Lyell says that he descended before he recovered his lost hat) as an instance of the permanent effect of a boyish illusion on even a scientific mind.

But the restrictions of Salisbury made the liberty of the New Forest yet more dear. Bartley was an ideal home for boys. It was surrounded by meadows and park-like timber. A two-mile walk brought the lads to Rufus Stone, and on the wilder parts of the Forest. There they could ramble over undulating moors, covered with heath and fern, diversified by marshy tracts, sweet with bog-myrtle, or by patches of furze, golden in season with flowers; or they could wander beneath the shadows of its great woods of oak and beech, over the rustling leaves, among the flickering lights and shadows, winding here and there among tufts of holly scrub, always led on by the hope of some novelty-a rare insect fluttering by, a lizard or a snake gliding into the fern, strange birds circling in the air, a pheasant or even a woodcock springing up almost under the feet. The rabbits scampered to their holes among the furze; a fox now and again stole silently away to cover, or a stag-for the deer had not yet been destroyed-was espied among the tall brake. Those, too, it must be remembered, were the days when boys got their holidays in the prime of the summer, at the season of haymaking and of ripe strawberries. They were not kept stewing in hot school-rooms all through July, until the flowers are nearly over and the bright green of the foliage is dulled, until the romance of the summer's youth has given place to the dulness of its middle age. In these days it is our pleasure to do the right thing in the wrong place-a truly national characteristic. We all-young and old-toil through the heat and the long days, and take holiday when the autumn is drawing nigh and Nature writes "Ichabod" on the beauty of the waning year.

At Salisbury, Lyell had two new experiences-the sorrows of the Latin Grammar and the joys of a bolster-fight. But his health was not good; a severe attack of measles in the first year was followed in the second by a general "breakdown," with symptoms of weakness of the lungs. So he was taken home for three months to recruit. This was at first a welcome change from the restrictions of Salisbury; but, as his lessons necessarily were light, he began to mope for want of occupation; for, as he says, "I was always most exceedingly miserable if unemployed, though I had an excessive aversion to work unless forced to it." So he began to collect insects-a pursuit which, as he remarks, exactly suited him, for it was rather desultory, gave employment to both mind and body, and gratified the "collecting" instinct, which is strong in most boys. He began with the lepidoptera, but before long took an interest in other insects, especially the aquatic. Fortunately his father had been for a time a collector, and possessed some good books on entomology, from the pictures in which Charles named his captures. This was, of course, an unscientific method, but it taught him to recognise the species and to know their habits. There are few better localities for lepidoptera, as every collector knows, than the New Forest, and some of the schoolboy's "finds" afterwards proved welcome to so well known an entomologist as Curtis. But when Charles returned to school he had to lay aside, for a season, the new hobby; for in those days a schoolboy's interest in natural history did not extend beyond birds'-nesting, and his little world was not less, perhaps even more frank and demonstrative than now, in its criticism of any innovation or peculiarity on the part of one of its members.

The school at Salisbury appears to have been a preparatory one, so before very long another had to be sought. Mr. Lyell wished to send his two boys to Winchester, but found to his disappointment that there would not be a vacancy for a couple of years; so after instructing them at home for six months, he contented himself with the Grammar School at Midhurst, in Sussex, at the head of which was one Dr. Bayley, formerly an under-master at Winchester. Charles, now in his thirteenth year, found this, at first, a great change. The school contained about seventy boys, big as well as little, and its general system resembled that of one of the great public schools. He remarks of this period of his life: "Whatever some may say or sing of the happy recollections of their schooldays, I believe the generality, if they told the truth, would not like to have them over again, or would consider them as less happy than those which follow." He was not the kind of boy to find the life of a public school very congenial. Evidently he was a quietly-disposed lad, caring more for a country ramble than for games; perhaps a little old-fashioned in his ways; not pugnacious, but preferring a quiet life to the trouble of self-assertion. So, in his second half-year, when he was left to shift entirely for himself, his life was "not a happy one," for a good deal of the primeval savage lingers in the boys of a civilised race. It required, as he said, a good deal to work him up to the point of defending his independence; thus he was deemed incapable of resistance and was plagued accordingly. But at last he turned upon a tormentor, and a fight was the result. It was of Homeric proportions, for it lasted two days, during five or six hours on each, the combatants being pretty evenly matched; for though Lyell's adversary was rather the smaller and weaker, he knew better how to use his fists. Strength at the end prevailed over science, though both parties were about equally damaged. The vanquished pugilist was put to bed, being sorely bruised in the visible parts. Lyell, whose hurts were mostly hidden, made light of them, by the advice of friends, but he owns that he ached in every bone for a week, and was black and blue all over his body. Still he had not fought in vain, for, though the combat won him little honour, it delivered him from sundry tormentors.

The educational system of the school stimulated his ambition to rise in the classes. "By this feeling," he says, "much of my natural antipathy to work, and extreme absence of mind, was conquered in a great measure, and I acquired habits of attention which, however, were very painful to me, and only sustained when I had an object in view." There was an annual speech-day, and Charles, on the first occasion, obtained a prize for his performance. "Every year afterwards," he continues, "I received invariably a prize for speaking, until high enough to carry off the prizes for Latin and English original composition. My inventive talents were not quick, but to have any is so rare a qualification that it is sure to obtain a boy at our great schools (and afterwards as an author) some distinction." Evidently he gave proofs of originality beyond his fellows; since he won a prize for English verse, though he had written in the metre of the "Lady of the Lake" instead of the ordinary ten-syllabic rhyme. On another occasion he commemorated, in his weekly Latin copy, the destruction of the rats in a neighbouring pond, writing in mock heroics, after the style of Homer's battle of the frogs and mice.

The school, like all other collections of boys, had its epidemic hobbies. The game of draughts, coupled unfortunately with gambling on a small scale, was followed by chess, and that by music. To each of these Charles was more or less a victim, and his progress up the school was not thereby accelerated. Birds'-nesting also had a turn in its season. His love for natural history made him so keen in this pursuit that he became an expert climber of trees. But his schooldays on the whole were uneventful, and he went to Oxford at a rather early age, his brother Tom having already left Midhurst in order to enter the Navy.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Born 1767, died 1849 (also son of a Charles Lyell); educated at St. Andrew's and at St. Peter's College, Cambridge, where he proceeded to the degree of B.A. in 1791 and M.A. in 1794.

[2] In 1835, the Canzoniere, including the Vita Nuova and Convito; a second edition was published in 1842; in 1845 a translation of the Lyrical Poems of Dante.

[3] Life, Letters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 3.

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