Part 31

In 1835, having received the gold medal of the Royal Society, for his "Principles of Geology,"--now in its fourth edition, which Sir John Herschel said he had read three times,--he was elected president of the Geological Society of London, and made extensive researches in Switzerland, Germany, and Scotland.

In 1841, already famous as well as beloved, Lyell was invited to give twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute, in Boston. He and his wife spent thirteen months in the United States, studying the country geologically; its social life, its politics, and our benevolent and educational institutions. Between two and three thousand persons came, both morning and evening, to listen to the distinguished scholar, who had travelled almost the world over to study his beloved science.

Close friendships were formed with some of our most prominent men, like Prescott and Ticknor. Lyell visited the great lakes, and compared the supposed ancient boundaries of Lake Ontario, when it was one hundred and fifty feet higher, with its present shore. He made a careful study of Niagara Falls, which cuts its deep gorge toward Lake Ontario, for seven miles, and estimated that it wore away a foot a year. If so, he argued that at least thirty-five thousand years have passed since the river began to cut its passage between the high rocky walls. "What would I give," said Lyell, "for a daguerrotype of the scene as it was four thousand, and again forty thousand years ago! Even four centuries would have been very important." Authorities differ as to the rate of the recession of the falls. Some estimate an inch instead of a foot yearly, requiring a period of more than four hundred thousand years.

In 1845, Lyell published his "Travels in North America, with Geological Observations," and in September of the same year, returned again to our country, spending nine months in travel and study, and bringing out later, in 1849, his "Second Visit to the United States of North America."

Already his "Elements of Geology" had appeared, which went through several editions. A seventh edition of the "Principles" had been published. He had also been knighted by the Queen, for his rare scholarship. Honored at home and abroad, working ardently and earnestly, often with failing sight, he had already won for himself the eminence of which he had dared to dream years before.

Of course he was welcomed at all great gatherings. Macaulay and Hallam, Milmore and Mrs. Somerville, Rogers, and scores of others were often at his home.

In 1851, he was appointed one of the Royal Commissioners for the first Great Exhibition held in Hyde Park, London, and a year later gave a second course of lectures at the Lowell Institute, Boston. So kindly and cordially had he written concerning us and our country, that he received the heartiest welcome. He had carried out in his life what he wrote to beautiful Mary Horner, twenty years before: "I hope we shall both of us contrive to cultivate a disposition--which David Hume said was better than a fortune of one thousand pounds a year--to look on the bright side of things. I think I shall, and I believe you will." The sweet-natured and great-minded man had looked on the bright side of America, and seen the good rather than the evil. He believed in our future. When Prescott died, to whom he was devotedly attached, he said: "From such a soil and in such an atmosphere, great literary men must continue to spring up."

All through our Civil War, he had known and loved us so well, that he was, like John Bright, our constant advocate. He deprecated the course of some of the English newspapers. "The integrity of the empire," he said, "and the non-extension and for the last two years the extinction of slavery constitute to my mind better grounds for a protracted struggle than those for which any war in our time, perhaps in all history, has been waged.... I am in hopes that the struggle in America will rid the country in the course of twenty years of that great curse to the whites, slave labor, and, if so, it may be worth all it will cost in blood and treasure...."

"Had the States been dismembered, there would have been endless wars, more activity than ever in breeding slaves in America, and a renewal of the African slave-trade, and the future course of civilization retarded in that continent in a degree which would not, in my judgment, be counterbalanced by any adequate advantage which Europe would gain by the United States becoming relatively less strong.... I believe that if a small number of our statesmen had seen what I had seen of America, they would not have allowed their wishes for dismemberment to have biassed their judgment of the issue so much."

In 1853, at the request of his government, he came to New York, as one of the commissioners to the International Exhibition. Of course, now, wherever he travelled, either in Europe or America, he met the distinguished, and was honored by them. He was the friend of Berzelius, the noted chemist of Sweden, and of the great Liebig of Germany. Professor Bunsen of Heidelberg said, that all his taste for geology had been derived from Lyell's books.

During the next few years, he was much in Holland, France, and Germany, preparing for the publication of another great work in 1863, the "Antiquity of Man." He had made a careful study of the ancient Swiss Lake-dwellings, erected on piles in the midst of the water, connected with the land by bridges. On Lake Neuchatel it is estimated that there were more than forty such circular houses. At Wangen, near Stein, on Lake Constance, it is believed forty thousand piles were used. Some five thousand objects have been found, comprising flax, not woven, but plaited; carbonized wheat, and the bones of the dog, ox, sheep, and goat. The arrow-heads, hatchets, and the like, belong to the stone age, which geologists place, at the least, seven thousand years ago. At Zurich one human skull was found belonging to this early stone age. No traveller should pass through Zurich without seeing these memorials of a people who lived in the dawn of civilization, when the world was being made ready for the more perfect man.

Lyell had studied also the Danish "kitchen-middens," familiar to those who have been carefully over the museums at Copenhagen. These shell-mounds, the refuse heaps of this ancient race, are sometimes one thousand feet long and two hundred wide. As far back as the time of the Romans the Danish isles were covered with magnificent beech forests. In the bronze age there were no beech trees, but oaks. In the stone age the Scotch fir prevailed, and thousands of years must have elapsed while these giant forests succeeded each other.

The delta and alluvial plain of the Mississippi Lyell found to consist of sediment covering an area of thirty thousand square miles, several hundred feet deep. Taking the amount deposited annually, it would require from fifty to one hundred thousand years to produce the present deposits.

The coral reefs of Florida, built up at the rate of one foot in a century, each reef adding ten miles to the coast, have required, according to Agassiz, at least one hundred and thirty-five thousand years for building. Human remains in a bluff on the shores of Lake Monroe, in Florida, he shows to be at least ten thousand years old.

Under the streets of Glasgow, Scotland, seventeen canoes have been dug up, one in a vertical position, as if it had sunk in a storm, with the prow uppermost. Twelve canoes one hundred yards back from the river were found nineteen feet beneath the surface. Almost all were single oak trees, hollowed out by blunt tools, probably stone axes, aided by fire, relics of the stone age.

In caverns near Liege, France, human bones have been found, with the cave-bear, elephant, rhinoceros, and other species now extinct. Skulls found in these primeval caves, especially one near Duesseldorf, called the "Neanderthal," "is the most brutal of all known human skulls, resembling those of the apes." These rude men probably were living at the same time, or even later, than the makers of the "refuse heaps" of Denmark.

Wales has been under the sea to the depth of fourteen hundred feet, as proved by glacial shells; its submergence and reelevation would require, by careful computation, about two hundred and twenty-four thousand years.

Lyell showed that the Alps, Andes, and Himalaya Mountains were all elaborated under water. "The Alps have acquired four thousand, and even, in some places, more than ten thousand feet of their present altitude since the commencement of the Eocene (dawn of recent) period.... It is not too much to say that every spot which is now dry land has been sea at some former period, and every part of the space now covered by the deepest ocean has been land. The present distribution of land and water encourages us to believe that almost every conceivable transformation in the external form of the earth's crust may have been gone through. In one epoch the land may have been chiefly equatorial; in another, for the most part polar and circumpolar."

Lyell showed also the great age of the world by the changes which have taken place in climate. In Greenland are a multitude of fossil plants, which show that it formerly enjoyed a mild and genial climate. Fossil tulip and walnut trees have been found within the Arctic circle.

"On the North American continent, between the Arctic circle and the forty-second parallel of latitude," said Lyell, "we meet with signs of ice-action on a scale as grand, if not grander than in Europe." The drift covered from the Atlantic border of New England and Labrador westward to Dakota and Lake Winnipeg, and farther north, across the continent. Some stones in this bed of ice were thirty feet square, weighing over four million pounds. Some boulders from the Alps, weighing three thousand tons each, are now found on the Juras. "It must, I think," said Lyell, "be conceded that the period required for the coming-on of the greatest cold, and for its duration when most intense, and the oscillations to which it was subject, as well as the retreat of the glaciers and the 'great thaw,' or disappearance of snow, from many mountain-chains where the snow was once perpetual, required not tens, but hundreds, of thousands of years."

In Arctic Siberia herds of elephants must have roamed, as their bodies, covered with hair and flesh, have been dug up in recent years. Great Britain and Europe have been much warmer than now. Our own immense coal fields show a former tropical climate, with their great tree-ferns and tree-rushes, while the remains of reindeers have been found in Connecticut.

No wonder Lyell became fascinated with the history of the changes of this planet, and the life of man before historic times. A great book seemed open to him, and he studied it by night and by day: the Archaean Time--no life; Paleozoic Time, including the Silurian Age, with its shells and trilobites; the Devonian, with its fishes; Carboniferous, with its coal plants; Mesozoic Time, including the Reptilian Age with its reptiles; Cenozoic Time, including the Mammalian or Tertiary, with its mammals, and Quaternary, or age of man. Paleozoic means "ancient life;" Mesozoic, "middle life;" Cenozoic, "recent life."

Lyell divided the Tertiary strata into three groups: Eocene, recent dawn; Miocene, less recent; Pliocene, more recent. In the Eocene Age Great Britain was sub-tropical, and, in North America, Vermont was like North Carolina in temperature. Then came the Glacial Period, with ice probably five thousand feet thick over New England. Then the Champlain Period, with its floods, continents depressed, and climate warm, followed in Europe by a second Glacial Period.

The "Antiquity of Man" had an extensive sale. Honors were now showered upon Sir Charles Lyell. He was offered the Presidency of the Royal Society, and a seat in Parliament for the University of London, but declined both. Oxford University had already conferred upon him the degree of D. C. L., and the Institute of France had made him corresponding member. By request of the queen, he visited her at Osborne, she having made him a baronet. Emperor William conferred upon him the Order of Merit, given also to Humboldt, and the London Royal Society, its highest honor, the Copley gold medal.

In the spring of 1873, his "dearest Mary" died, leaving him heart-broken. She was mourned in America as well as Europe. The "Boston Advertiser" said, "Strength and sweetness were hers, both in no common measure.... She became to her husband not merely the truest of friends, and the most affectionate and sympathizing of companions, but a very efficient helper. She was frank, generous, and true; her moral instincts were high and pure; she was faithful and firm in friendship.... This woman so widely informed, so true, so strong, so brave, seemed all compact of softness, sweetness, and gentleness; a very flower that had done no more than drink the sunshine and the dew. In her smile, her greeting, the tones of her voice, there was a charm which cannot be described, but which all who knew her have felt and will recall.... During the war there was not a woman or a man in England that stood by the Union and the government more ardently and fearlessly than she." Lady Lyell was an efficient linguist, and a woman of unusual mental power. The success of her husband was in part the result of her lovely character. Had she sought society while he needed quiet for his work, had she been fond of dress when their income was limited and necessarily used in his extensive travels, his life might have been a failure. They had what Tolstoi well calls "the friendship of the soul; identity of sentiment and similarity of ideal." Too often in this world persons marry "opposites," and walk, alas! in opposite directions all their lives.

Lyell now worked on, for he said he must carry out what he had planned with her. In 1872 the eleventh edition of the "Principles" appeared. Lyell, though formerly an opponent, had become convinced of the truth of evolution, advocated by his devoted friend Darwin, and was proud of our own distinguished botanist Asa Gray, whose articles, he said, "were the ablest, and, on the whole, grappling with the subject, both as a naturalist and metaphysician, better than any one else on either side of the Atlantic."

Lyell believed ever in "an infinite and eternal Being." He said, "In whatever direction we pursue our researches, whether in time or space, we discover everywhere the clear proofs of a Creative intelligence, and of his foresight, wisdom, and power."

He used to quote Professor Agassiz, who said, "Whenever a new and startling fact is brought to light in science, people first say, 'It is not true,' then that 'it is contrary to religion,' and lastly that 'everybody knew it before.'"