Charles Lyell and Modern Geology

Lyell had plunged into a question which was arousing almost as much excitement as the origin of species-namely, the anti

to the question of the origin of species would bring into no less vivid prominence that of the age and origin of the human race. Be this as it may, he undertook a task comparatively novel, and for the next three years was fully occupied in the preparation of his third great book, "The Antiquity of Man." Travel was necessary for this purpose also; but as the journeys were less lengthy than those already described, and led him for the most part over old ground, it is needless to enter into details. He visited the gravels of the Somme Valley and the caves on the Meuse, besides other par

writer in the Saturday Review,[135] who called it "a trilogy on the antiquity of man, ice, and Darwin." That, however, is but a slight blemish, if b

nalogous constructions in the crannoges of Ireland-islets partly artificial, built of timber and stone. Lyell then passes on from Europe to the valleys of the Nile and Mississippi, and so to the "carses" of Scotland. In the last case canoes buried in the alluvial deposits, as in the lowland by the Clyde, indicate that some physical changes, slight though they may be, have occurred since the coming of man. But none of these researches lead us back into a very remote past; they keep us still lingering, as it were, on the threshold of history. The weapons which have been described, even if made of stone, exhibit a considerable amount of mechanical skill, for many of them are fashioned and polished with much care, while they are associated with the remains of creatures which are still living at no great distance, if not in the immediate vicinity.

Scandinavia, the Alps, and North America, with special descriptions of the loess of Northern Europe, the drifts of the Danish island of M?en, so like those ne

Nevertheless, through frankly avowing his change of view, he advances cautiously and tentatively, like a man over treacherous ice-so cautiously, indeed, that Darwin is not wholly satisfied with his convert, and chides him good-humouredly for his slow progress and over-much hesitation. But this very hesitation was as real as the conversion: the one was the outcome of Lyell's thoroughly judicial habit of mind, the other was a proof, perhaps the strongest that could be given, of that mind's freshness, vigour, and candour. The book ends with a chapter on "man's place in Nature." On this burning question the author sp

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nounced the discovery about seven years earlier; but geologists, for various reasons, were not fu

862, but how far this was for

ol. xv.

uity of Man,