Charles Lyell and Modern Geology

thirteen months, less than one of them being spent on the ocean, nearly ten in active geological field work, and a little

ns of post-tertiary geology, as well as on the tertiary, cretaceous, coal, and older rocks. These afterwards produced a crop of about twenty papers, which appeared in various sci

in the more accessible parts of Europe. One may read of plains where the sun rises and sets as from a sea; of lakes, like Superior, as big as Ireland; of falls, like Niagara, where the neighbouring ground never ceases to quiver with the thud of the precipitated water; of rivers well nigh half a league wide while their waters still are far from the

ed a splendid field for work. Much of the country had been settled and brought under cultivation at no distant date; new tracts were being made accessible almost daily. Geologists of mark were few and far between, so that large areas awaited exploration, and in many places the traveller found a virgin field. The Geological Survey of Canada was just then being organised, the labours of the National Survey in the United States had not yet begun, though S

had a geological significance, he was not prepared. The drifts around Boston, good sections of which had been exposed in making cuttings for railways, resembled very closely the deposits which he had seen in Scandinavia. Were it not, he says, for the distinctness of the plants and of the birds, he could have believed himself in Scotland, or in some part of Northern Europe. These masses of sand and pebbles, derived generally from the more immediate neighbourhood, though containing sometimes huge blocks which had travelled from great distances, occas

eir general appearance and association recalling Salisbury Crags and other familiar sections near Edinburgh. In this district Lyell found the grasshoppers as numerous and as

to its employers, for they had dispelled all hopes of finding coal within the limits of the State. This, as Lyell says, was a great disappointment to many; but it did good in checking the rashness of private speculation, and in preventing the waste of the large sums of money which had been annually squandered in trials to find coal in strata which really lay

d series of formations from the base of the Pal?ozoic, where it rested on the ancient gneiss, to the coalfield of Pennsylva

in no other country are these ancient strata developed on a grander scale, or more plentifully charged with fossils; and as they are nearly horizontal, the order of their relative position is always clear and unequivocal. They exhibit, moreove

tatement which at that time was often made-namely, that in the rocks older than the Carboniferous system the fossil fauna in different parts of the globe was almost everywhere

ould be impossible, we think, to find such a spot now; "nothing but the greenwood, the falling water, and the white foam"-he thought the falls "more beautiful but less grand" than he had expected; but, after spending some days in the neighbourhood, now watching the river sweeping onwards to its final plunge, here in the turmoil of the rapids, there in its gliding, so smooth but so irresist

ch covers the surface of the country-such an one as may still be seen between Lake Erie and the falls-but the river, slowly and steadily, has cut its way back through the rocky plateau from the first site of the falls near Queenstown to their present position. The upper part of this plateau consists of a thick bed of hard limestone, but beneath this the deposits become softer; and the lowest bed is the most perishable. The water, as it plunges down, undermines the overlying rock. The gorge began at once to be developed, and it has ever since continued to retreat towards Lake Erie. Every year makes some slight change. This becomes more marked when old histories are consulted and old drawings compared with the present aspect of the scene. Father Hennepin's sketch, of which Lyell gives a copy,[96] rude and incorrect as it is, proves beyon

e coal measures of North America, and was no less interested than surprised to find how closely the whole series corresponded with that of Britain. He saw sandstones "such as are used for building in Newcastle or Edinburgh, dark shales often full of ferns 'spread out as in a herbarium,' beds and nodules of clay-ironstone, seams of bituminous coal, varying in thickness from a few inches to some yards, and, beside these, an underlying coarse grit, passing down i

astern side of the Atlantic, contained fossils which corresponded more closely with those of the white chalk, some species being actually identical. This fact was another

that classic region. The Alleghanies or Appalachians consist of a series of Silurian, Devonian, and Carboniferous strata in orderly sequence, "folded" (to use Lyell's words) "as if they had been subjected to a great lateral pressure when in a soft and yielding state, large portions having afterwards been removed by denudation. The long uniform, parallel ridges, with intervening valleys like so m

nd day, yet quite free from smoke." Special contrivances, of course, are requisite to secure the combustion of anthracite, especially in household fireplaces, but he had no hesitation in declaring that h

rata have been bent into a vertical position the beds above and below, when the anthracite has been

stones, shales, etc.-were less persistent than those of coal, and that the way in which the former became thicker towards the south-east indicated that this was the direction of the ancient land region from which they had been derived. The result of his examination satisfied him tha

tickets were given under certain restrictions. For Lyell's lectures about 4,500 were issued, and the class, he states, usually consisted of more than 3,000 persons. It had therefore to be sub-divided and each lecture to be repeated

mond in Virginia, and from that place visited the Tertiary deposits in the vicinity of the James River. The more interesting of these are of Miocene age, and he observed that the fossils of Maryland

sses, and densely covered with ferns and reeds, above which many evergreen shrubs and trees flourish, especially the white cedar (Cupressus thyoides), which stands firmly supported by its long tap-roots in the softest parts of the quagmire. Over the whole, the deciduous cypress (Taxodium distichum) is seen to tower with its spreading top, in full leaf, in the season when the sun's rays are hottest, and when, if not interrupted by a screen of foliage, they might soon caus

the accommodation for travellers. In this respect they had fared much worse during the previous year, when they were travelling through some of the more populous parts of France, such as Touraine and Brittany. After a journey through the pinewoods, they reached Augusta in Georgia, where another group of Tertiary deposits invited a halt. Those belonging to the Eocene period lie further down the Savannah River, so that a journey was made for the purpose of examining them, in the course of which, near the town of the same name as the river, Lyell also saw th

isis, and was unable to pay the interest on its funded debt. The soreness produced by this repudiation will not be readily forgotten, for nearly two-thirds of the stock-the whole amount of which was eight millions sterling-was held by British own

g schists and less altered sedimentary deposits of the Taconic range, rocks which from that time to this have given ample employment to geologists. After this he found an opportunity of making use of the lessons learnt on the flats by the James River, for he went to Springfield and examined the famous footprints in the sandstone of Connecticut. As the deposit was referred to the Trias, and the footprints to birds, they were su

urg and other interesting localities in the neighbourhood were also visited, and then the Lyells descended the Ohio River to Cincinnati. He had thus traversed in descending order the succession of strata from the Carboniferous to the Lower Silurian or Ordovician system, which is exposed in the neighbourhood of that town. This, however, was not the only attraction offered by Cincinnati. Some two-and-twenty miles distant is the famous Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. Here some saline springs break out on a nearly level and boggy river plain, which are still attractive to wild animals, and often in past time lured them to their death in the adjacent quagmires. Here the bones of the

ek at the Falls of Niagara, revising and enlarging the work already done. During the time he investigated the buried channel which appears to lead from the whirlpool to St. Davids, a league or so to the west of Queenstown. This was supposed by Lyell and many subsequent geologists to indicate part of an old course of the St. Lawrence, which had afterwards been blocked up by glacial drifts. It is, however, according to Professor J. W. Spencer, only a branch of a buried valley, outside

ands in Scotland, I never saw so remarkable an example of banks, terraces, and accumulations of stratified sand

ice-worn, and the overlying drifts are in many ways remarkable. Of these drifts, Lyell examined various sections, at heights of from 60 to 200 feet above the St. Lawrence, finding plenty of sea-shells,[104] the common mussel being in one place especially abundant. He also examined some sections of stratified drifts between Montreal and Quebec, but without obtaining any fossils, though they had been found by Captain Bayford and others. The drifts, however, near the latter city were more prolific. With their shells, indeed, he was already, to some extent, familiar, for in the year 1835 he had received a collection from Captain Bayford. This happened to reach London at a time when Dr. Beck of Copenhagen was with him, and "great was our surprise," he writes, "on opening the box to find that nearly all the shells agreed specifically with fossils which, in the summer of the preceding year, I had obtained at Uddevalla in Sweden." The most abundant species were still living in northern seas, some in those of Greenland and other high latitudes; while in Sweden they were found fossil

oothed and furrowed on the surface by glacial action." This effect Lyell at that time attributed to the friction of bergs grounding as they floated, but it is now referred by the majority of geologists to the action of land ice. Be this, however, as it may, the shell

ie, in the heart of the Nova Scotian coalfield. The cliffs by the sea-shore exhibit a fine series of sections, from the gypseous rocks up to the coal measures, uninterrupted by faults, the beds dipping steadily at an angle of nearly 30°. Sandstones, shales, and seams of coal could be seen alternating in the usual manner; and from the last-named, stumps of trees, sometimes two or three yards high, were seen in places, as at South Joggins, projecting at right angles to the surface of the bed. Of such stems

r is as great as, if not greater than, anywhere else on the globe. On the muddy flats thus left bare he had another opportunity of studying the tracks left by various animals, marine and terrestrial; and in watchi

t-of which, however, he had already examined plenty; but he had studied good and characteristic sections of almost every formation which occurred in the more eastern states of America, from the most ancient crystalline masses, the foundation stones of the continent, to the most recent fossiliferous drifts. He had travelled from a region which resembled Scandinavia to one where the climate was more like that of the north coast of Africa, and had enlarged his conceptions of the scale on which Nature worked. But, in addition, he had been afforded an opportunity of studying the social and political condition of a young and vigorous nation as it w

TNO

in North Ame

in North Ameri

e in the Gentlema

Period," by Dr. G. F. Wright (Inter

ed States Geological Survey, 1886). Professor J. W. Spencer, who has recently investigated the question, has arrived, by a

refers to the confirmatory evidence which W. Logan had

les of Geology

y. Soc. lvi. (

uch attention of late years from Canadian and American geologists. They are found to vary somewhat in level, thus indicating unequal movements of the eart

f the fossils, Sir W. Dawson's "The Ice Age in Canada," c