Charles Lyell and Modern Geology

the "Principles" successfully launched, Mr. and Mrs. Lyel

gart and to Pappenheim, examining one or two collections at the former place, and the quarries of Solenhofen, near the latter. These were already noted for the abundant and well-preserved fossils obtained in the quarries worked for the well-known "lithographic stone," though the famous Arch?opteryx had yet to be found; that strange creature, feathered and like a bird, but with teeth in its beak and a tail like a reptile, which has supplied such an important link in the chain of evidence in favour of progressive development. Thence they travelled to Nürnberg and Bayreuth, visiting on their way the noted caves at Muggendorf, and returne

iduals of some species-the bears, for example, of which he has five species, one large, one new-that several entire skeletons will be constructed. Oh, that the Lewes chalk had been cavernous! And he has these, and a number of yet unexplored and shortly to be investigated holes, all to himself: but envy him not-you cannot imagine what he feels at being far from a metropolis which can afford him sympathy; and

ded it on all sides.[68] This relic proved-and since then numbers of similar cases have been discovered-that if the man of Engis were an antediluvian, and his corpse had been washed into the cave together with the drowned bodies of rhinoceros, and other animals,[69] that event, at any rate, must have corresponded with a great change in the habits of the larger mammalia, for they had been unable to return to haunts which once had been congenial. In other words, the foundation was being laid, now in 1833, for the next great advance in geological science, the contemporaneity of man and several extinct species of mammals,

bones. Yet from the latter numerous bones of the extremities were obtained, and these had belonged to three individuals. What inferences, then, can be drawn from this skull as to the intellectual rank of prim?val man? This question was discussed by its discoverer, and the evidence has been also considered by Professor Huxley. The former thus expressed his opinion, "that this cranium has belonged to a person of limited intellectual faculties, and we conclude thence that it belonged to a man of a low degree of civilisation; a deduction which is borne out by contrasting the capacity of the frontal with that of the occipital region.

ight occasionally have been too rough for her so we find, in a journal written for her perusal, a full sketch of a tour which proved, as he had anticipated, to be fruitful in scientific results. His first halt was at Hamburg, where, on his arrival, with characteristic energy he dashed off at once in a carriage to examine a section below Altona which he had marked down on his voyage up the Elbe. This is his brief summary: "Cliffs sixty or seventy feet high. Filled three pages of note-book. Saw the source of the great Holstein granite blocks. Gathered shells thrown ashore by the Elbe." From Hamburg he drove to

k, like those at Maestricht in Holland, and at Meudon near Paris. All these limestones possess an exceptional interest, for they contain a mixture of Secondary with Tertiary fossils, and thus help to fill up the wide gap between these two great divis

ck, fir-wood, and peasants"-till he arrived at Norrk?ping, and made his way in a steamer down one fjord and up another until he came into the Malar Lake. These last stages introduced him to a kind of scenery of which Scandinavia affords such striking and innumerable examples-the margin of a submerged mountain land. "We entered," he says, "a passage between an endless string of islets and the mainland, the water here smooth as a millpond. We passed swiftly on in deep water close to the rocks, on the barest of which are a few firs in the clefts. These are evidently the summits of submarine mountains." At Stockholm he found plenty to be done. Some of the evidence, which had been brought forward to prove a rising of the land, was obviously weak. For instance, on one of his first visits to a place where the upward movement was said to be comparatively rapid, he found a fine oak-tree, perhaps a couple of centuries old, growing eight feet above high-water mar

one fossil have I found newer than the chalk in Sweden, that was not in the number of those found living in that half-hour." More localities for shells were visited, erratics were examined, and pilots were questioned closely "about the agency of ice, in which they believe." With their opinion Lyell inclined to agree; at any rate, he was convinced that his observations would "quite overset the débacle theory," and, as he expected, "bring in ice carriage as the cause." On the coast further north at Oregrund and Gefle, bench-marks had been cut some years previously in order to apply a more exact test to the question of the change in levels. These he visited, and the former seemed to prove "as Galileo said in a different sen

t. Here are deposits in which sea-shells are abundant at a height of about two hundred feet above the sea. Nothing but a submergence can account for their pres

Uddevalla, as he points out, are not of that brackish-water character peculiar to the Baltic, but such as now live in the Northern Ocean.[77] On reaching the coast he made an expedition by boat, and saw the benc

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in which he set forth the reasons which had convinced him that in Sweden, "both on the Baltic and ocean side, part of that country is really undergoing a gradual and insensibly slow rise." It affects an area measuring about one thousand miles north and south, and is believed to reach a maximum at the North Cape. There it is said, but the statement

chemistry, and "had made some progress," as he writes to Mantell, "in a single volume which two years ago I promised Murray, a purely elementary work for beginners in geology, and which I find more agreeable work than I had

is now universally admitted. In discussing this question Lyell lays down a principle of classification the soundness of which has been proved by experience, namely, that the age of a Tertiary deposit is to be determined by the proportion of recent species and the relation of these to the forms still living in the neighbouring seas. If, for instance, the recent shells in a formation, amounting to one-half, or even as few as one-third, of the total number can be thus found, the formation will be Pliocene in age, "while the recent shells of the Miocene have a more exotic and tropical form." To this conclusion he had been led, by an examination, with the help of Deshayes, of a typical collection of Crag fossils which he had carried with him to Paris. As to other matters, the leading French geologists were still warring vigorously in defence of deluges, and none of his numerous heresies, he remarks, appears "to have excited so much honest indignation as his recent attempt to convey some of the huge Scandinavian blocks to their present destination by means of ice." He had proved, he reminds Sedgwick, that "some of the great bloc

ns were to be found on the precipitous northern slopes of the Jungfrau and in the upper part of the Urbach-thal, a lonely glen which descends into the main valley of the Aar at Imhof, above Meyringen. In both these localities gneiss appears to overlie "fossiliferous limestone," and Lyell, after visiting them, returned satisfied that he had seen "alternations of the gneiss with limestone of the lias or something newer in the highest regions of the Alps." That undoubtedly he saw, but he did not suspect that the appearance was illusory. This was not in the least surprising; the Alps were still almost a terra incognita; the processes of "mountain making" as yet were unknown; many statements in common currency as to the passage of sedimentary into crystalline rocks were erroneous and distinctly misleading. Only by degrees was it discovered that this superposition of gneiss or crystalline schist to Secondary rock was due to folding on a scale so gigantic that the older had been doubled over upon the younger rock and the apparent order of succession was the converse of the true one. The intercalation also of the gneiss and the Jurassic limestone was a result of a similar action, but carried, if possible, to an even greater extreme, for here the hard gneiss had been thrust in wedge-like slabs between the softer masses of sedimentary rock, like a paper-knife between the leaves of a book; that is to say, the gneiss and crystalline schists in both ca

c paper[79] on this subject, in which he established the independence of cleavage and bedding. This paper laid the foundation for the discovery of the true cause of the former structure, though its author was unable, with the information then at his command, to do more than suggest an hypothesis, which afterwards proved to be incorrect. He had shown that both the strike and the dip of cleavage-planes were persistent over large areas, an

the dip of the strata ascertained by alternate beds of greywacke.... As it is the best description of drawing slate, and as divisible almost as mica into thin plates

use of slaty cleavage was recognised-viz. that it is a result of pressure. Thus, in a region like the Alps, where the strata often have been so completely folded as to be bent, so to say, back to back, the planes of cleavage, which are produced when the rocks can no lo

of February and the preparation of another one for the same season in the following year, occupied a good deal of his time. The summer was spent in a long visit to his parents at Kinnordy, after which he and Mrs. Lyell made some stay in the Isle of Arran before they returned to London. The latter seemingly had been

Hope, who had favoured him with some valuable comments and criticisms on the Principles of Geology, and in the course of these had corrected a mistake which Lyell had made in regard to a rather difficult physical question. In referring to this, the latter remarks that the clearness of the mathematical reasoning (to quote his words) "made me regret that I had not given some of t

or lengthy postscript. As is incidentally mentioned, it was not in his own han

pecies, and creation of new ones, going on perpetually now, and through an indefinite period of the past, and to continue for ages to come, all in accommodation to the changes which must continue in the inanimate and habitable earth, the idea struck me as the grandest which I had ever conceived, so far as regards the attributes of the Presiding Mind. For one can in imagination summon before us a small part[82] at least of the circumstances which must be contemplated and foreknown, be

ke it too strong, an occasional variety of the species may have this advantage conferred upon it; or if this would be still too much, one sex of a certain variety. Probably there is scarcely a dash of colour on the wing or body, of which the choice would be quite arbitrary, or what might not affect its duration for thousands of years. I have been told that the leaf-like expansions of the abdomen and thighs of a certain Brazilian Mantis turn from green to yellow as autumn advances, together with the leaves of the plants among which it seeks for it

eir final result the "Origin of Species." The geological stirred Lyell to immediate enthusiasm, for they afforded a valuable support to some of the ideas which he had put forward to the "Principles." "The idea of the Pampas going up," he writes to Darwin, "at the rate of an inch a century, while the Western Coast and Andes rise many feet and unequally, has long been a dre

has not cost me more time than I anticipated; but my question is, whether the time annihilated by learned bodies ('par les affaires administratives') is balanced by any good they do. Fancy exchanging Herschel at the Cape for Herschel as President of the Royal Society, which he so narrowly escaped being, and I votin

exceptionally fitted by allowing themselves to be at everyone's beck and call, and getting their days cut to shreds by meetings. So far has this gone in some cases, that the high promise of early days has been very inadequately fulfilled, and some great piece of work has been never completed. If the spirit in which Lyell writes were more freque

ears to have progressed more slowly than can be explained either by the duties of the Presidential chair, which he resigned in the month of February of this year, or by any distraction caused by other scientific work. But a sentence in a letter written to one of his sister

s fossil species to which Lyell had referred in his book, on which Dr. Beck differed from Deshayes, so that Lyell was anxious to investigate some of the points for himself, and to see the original type-specimens in Linn?us' collection, since these, in some cases, had been wrongly identified by Lamarck and other pal?ontologists. During a drive with the Crown Prince, he had the opportunity of examining an in

occupies valleys and other parts of the granite region. This, which sometimes is found more than 600 feet above sea-

ction were much altered, the limestones being changed into marble, the shale into micaceous schists; the fossils being more completely obliterated in the latter than in the former case. Some remarks which he makes as to the relations of the granite and gneiss indicate the closeness and carefulness of his observatio

s "had been carried, with small gravel of the same, by ice of course, over the south of Norway, and thence down the south-west of Sweden, and all over Jutland and Holstein down to the Elbe, from whence they come to the Weser, and so to this or near this (Wesel-on-the-Rhine). But it is curious that about Münster and Osnabruck, the low Second

resent. The meeting, altogether, was a large one; but as the total number of tickets issued only amounted to 2,400, it seems probable that the general public was admitted more freely than is the custom at the present day. Sedgwick also on one occasion attracted a large crowd, for we are told that he delivered a most eloquent lecture "to 3,000 people on the Sea-shore." Geology, no doubt, has made great advances since that day, little more than half a century ago, but at the cost of much loss of attractiveness. It was then simple in its terminology

hing is recorded between September 6th, 1838, when he writes to Charles Darwin from Kinnordy, and August 1st, 1839, when he writes to Dr. Fitton from the same place. Both these letters are interesting. The former discusses the relation of Darwin's theory of the formation of coral islands with E. de Beaumont's idea of the contemporaneity of parallel mountain ch

what may be urged against philosophers turning public orators, etc. But I am convinced-although it is not the way I love to spend my own time-that in this country no importance is attached to any body of men who do not make occasional demonstrations of their strength in public meetings.

which have elapsed since they were written. Lyell lays his finger on the weakest spot in the n

n's work. From this charge Lyell defends himself, pointing out that, valuable as were Hutton's contributions to the philosophy of geology, he was by no means the first in the field-that there were also "mighty men of old" to whom he felt bound t

, the igneous origin of granite; secondly, that the so-called primitive rocks were altered strata.[90] I dwelt emphatically on the complete revolution brought about by his new views respecting granite, and entered fully on Playfair's illustrations and defence of Hutton.... The mottoes of my first two volumes were especially selected from Playfair's 'Huttonian Theory' because-although I was brought round slowly, against some of my early prejudices, to adopt P

ral of the leading men of science there present, to dine and spend the night at Drayton Manor, the residence of Sir R. Peel,

e of my strictures on the Dean of York's pamphlet[92] I exclaimed, 'By-the-bye, I have only just remembered that he is your brother-in-law.' He said, 'Yes, he is a clever man and a good writer, but if men will not read any one book written by scientific men on such a subject, they must take the consequences.' ... If I had not known Sir Robert's extensive acquirements, I should only have thought him an intelligent, well-informed country gentleman; not slow, but without any quickness, f

ugh Normandy to Paris. As it is dated from London on the 11th of August, this looks as if Lyell did not go during the summer farther than Scotland, where he presided over the Geological Section at the meeting of the British Association.[94] The earlie

TNO

and at the Royal Inst

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an's Place in N

ing part could not be discovered. The same is true of the other anima

Place in Nat

eus, Mytilus edul

sed here in the sense of eithe

entury until (probably towards the end of the fifteenth century) the floor was more than tw

the former editions, as to the validity of t

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ddevalla, and only one hundred feet above the sea, but barnacles were obtai

uity of Man

ology," ch. xxxi. "Ant

e Mineral Masses," etc. Trans.

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is eyes was always mor

etters, and Journals, vol. i. p. 468),

harles Darwin,"

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committees of scientific societies in London, but the amount of time thus wasted in

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., vol. i

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rogress of the former, the justice of it may be questioned; and Lyell's approval would not be endorse

e rocks, it is now generally believed that no inconsidera

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k in 1844, he read a paper before the Geological Section, criticising that science, and propounding a cosmogonical theory of his own. He was severely handled by Professor Sedgwick, but published

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An allusion, however, during his American jour