Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/118

Rh 102 L Y E L L Lyell received the honour of knighthood in 1848, and was created a baronet in 1864, in which year he was president of the British Association, meeting at Bath. His services to the science of geology were now universally recognized both at home and abroad, and he was a member of almost every Continental and American Society. He was elected corresponding member of the French Institute and of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, and was created a knight of the Prussian Order of Merit. During the latter years of his life his sight, always weak,&quot; failed him altogether, and he became very feeble. He died on February 22, 1875, in his seventy-eighth year, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His funeral was attended by an immense concourse of public men, all his personal friends ; for by young and old the veteran master of geology was deeply loved and revered. His gentle nature, his intense love of truth, his anxiety to help and encourage those who cultivated his favourite science, en deared him to all who approached him ; while the extreme freshness of his mind kept him free from that dogmatism which is so often the accompaniment of old age, and enabled him to accept and appreciate heartily the work of younger men. In order to appreciate justly the influence of Lyell s works upon the geology of the 19th century, it is necessary to bear in mind what was the state of knowledge upon this subject at the time when he entered the field in 1822. The rival schools of &quot;Werner and Hutton were then at the height of their famous contest, and, while the vehe ment discussions between the Neptunists and Vulcanists gave an impetus to the study of rock-masses, the one true principle upon which Hutton himself had so strongly insisted had dropped into oblivion, namely, that in examining things present we have data from which to reason with regard to what has been,&quot; and that there fore we have no need to imagine other causes than those now in action to account for the past. Meanwhile a reaction against the speculative discussions which had so long occupied the world inclined many of the leaders of geological study to confine them selves to the collection of facts, and the science became for a time a mere branch of mineralogy, which, though most valuable in laying a true foundation, was quite inadequate to deal with the earth s history, since it took little or no account of organic re mains, and their real significance was not in the least understood. Both in England and France, however, materials were being ac cumulated which prepared the way for a wider basis. In 1799 &quot;William Smith, travelling over England, first grouped the for mations according to the fossils contained in them, and in 1815 he published his geological map of England, thus making the first step in stratigraphical geology ; and almost simultaneously, in 1812, Cuvier s restorations of the extinct mammalia of the Paris basin, and Lamarck s classification of recent and fossil shells, gave the first impulse to paleontology. But the older schools of geologists, hampered by preconceived theories, were not prepared to make full use of the new facts. Cuvier himself, while insisting on the value of fossils in the chronology of the earth, yet retained all the old notions of sudden and violent convulsions, attributing the destruc tion of the fauna of the Paris basin to the deluge, or to the bursting of lakes caused by a sudden revolution of the globe ; and in like manner Buckland, Sedgwick, and their compeers still explained everything by the diluvial theory, attributing the erratic blocks strewn over the Continent to the universal deluge, and accepting as demonstrated Elie do Beaumont s theory of the sudden elevation of mountain chains. Sedgwick in his address to the Geological Society in 1834 even spoke confidently of the extinct forms in geological strata as &quot;indications of change and of an adjusting power alto gether different from what we commonly understand by the laws of nature.&quot; To shake off the influence of preconceived opinions such as these there was needed a fresh impartial mind capable of appreciating the evidence which had been accumulating during the past thirty years, and especially alive to the discoveries of paleontology. These requisites were found in Lyell. His early study of natural history gave him advantages possessed by few of his contemporaries, while the clear insight and calm judgment for which he was thus early remarkable led him alone of the younger school of geologists to grasp the truth enunciated by Hutton of the power of gradual changes to produce great results if only time enough be allowed. This truth he illustrated with such a wealth of facts, derived from his own observation and that of others, that in the first edition of the Principles we find sketched in broad outline, and demonstrated by actual examples, nearly all those fundamental truths which, though often vehemently opposed at the time, have now become so much the accepted basis of geology that it is difficult to realize how novel they were in 1830. Even the opening historical chapters cut boldly at the root of catastrophic geology by showing how the prejudices concerning the short duration of past time on the globe had led men to the mistaken conclusion that &quot;centuries were implied where the characters imported thousands, and thousands where the language of nature signified millions&quot;; and the arguments for the uniform action of nature followed with overwhelming force, as Lyell pro ceeded to lay under contribution all countries of the world to show how the face of the earth is now being altered by rivers, torrents, springs, currents and tides, volcanoes and earthquakes. In the second volume the changes in the organic world were used to teach the same lesson. The proofs of extinction of specific forms in historical times were accumulated to explain that the presence of extinct forms in geological formations was the effect of gradual causes and not of sudden and violent catastrophes, while the tranquil imbedding of organic remains now in progress was used to strengthen the previous argument derived from in organic causes for the slow and gradual accumulation of fossiliferous strata. It was in this volume that Lyell made in 1830 his cele brated attack upon Lamarck s theory of the transmutation of species, and, though this has often been held as a want of appreciation on his part of the arguments of the great naturalist, yet, as we shall see presently, it was really a curious illustration of the impartiality of Lyell s mind (though acting under what he himself would have called the influence of &quot;inherited belief&quot;) that this theory, so eminently calculated to harmonize with his own views of the power of minute causes to work appreciable change, was rejected by him because it rested upon an assumption of a law of innate progressive development, which could not be shown to be in accordance with natural facts. The third volume of the Principles, which did not appear till two years later, completed the task which Lyell had set himself, by interpreting the fragmentary record which remains to us of the successive geological formations of the earth s crust with their imbedded remains and the associated volcanic rocks, and thus re storing as far as possible the past history of the earth. Through all its successive editions this volume has remained the standard text-book of geological history, as its two predecessors have of the philosophical principles of the science. So immediate was the effect of this remarkable work that from the time of its publication the earlier cosmogonies disappeared from the field, and even Cuvier s Theory of tlie Earth never reached another edition. Yet, although geologists began insensibly to follow the lines which Lyell had marked out, they were long in receiving the principles upon which these were founded. Sedgwick, in the address already quoted, while pronouncing a eulogy on the book as a whole, regretted that &quot;from the very title-page of his work Mr Lyell seems to stand forward as the champion of a great leading doctrine of the Huttonian hypothesis, &quot; i. e., the explanation of former changes by reference to causes now in operation; and Lyell s oldest friend and fellow-labourer Murchison remained to the last the exponent of the converse truth, that we have no evidence forbidding the possibility of a greater intensity of the forces in action during past periods. This form of catastrophic geology has indeed always prevailed upon the Continent, and still does so in a great degree. There is, how ever, nothing necessarily antagonistic in the two theories ; and, if Lyell in his earlier years accentuated perhaps somewhat too strongly the necessity for making unlimited drafts upon the &quot;bank of time,&quot; as he often called it, to the exclusion of intensified vol canic or aqueous action, it was because he had to combat the opposite and deeply rooted error. Between the year 1853, when the 9th edition of the Principles was published, and 1863, when he &quot; read his recantation,&quot; as he himself would sometimes express it, in the Antiquity of Man, the discovery of the flint implements associated with bones of extinct mammalia at Abbeville, and subsequently in the valley of the Thames and else where, threw an entirely new light upon the data of human existence upon the earth, allowing far more time for the develop ment of the numerous varieties of mankind than had hitherto been supposed possible. In conjunction with these discoveries came also the evidence adduced by Darwin and Wallace of the action of natural causes in producing modifications in living forms, thus applying the very same principle to organic life which Hutton and Lyell had used to explain the gradual modification of the earth s surface. Then it was that Lyell, who had rejected Lamarck s theory because it rested on a purely imaginary law of innate progressive development, at once accepted &quot; natural selection &quot; as a vera causa helping to explain those evidences of the gradual change in organic forms pre sented in successive geological formations. By recognizing the value of the new principle, and incorporating its results in his Principles, Lyell completed in 1872 in a fuller sense than he had contemplated in 1850 the task of &quot; explaining former changes of the earth s surface (including the history of its living inhabitants) by reference to causes now in action &quot; ; while at the same time he gave to his original conception that element of expansion and pliability which