Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/620

600 the new school have ever heard of the 'Alciphron,' or even know Berkeley in any other way than through one eternal quotation from "Don Juan"?

In 1831 the journal written for his future wife begins, so that we may conclude he was then or thereabout first engaged. In 1832 he married. His wife was a daughter of Leonard Horner, and a lady of tastes very similar to his own. Perhaps one may hint that all the ladies of Lyell's family were a trifle more learned than all the world would care for: it must have been rather a strain to live up to such a constant stimulation in the home circle; and most men would hardly wish to fill their letters to their wives with highly interesting details of dip, strike, and horizon. But this is a matter of personal taste. Lyell seems to have been one of the giants who can stand such incessant high pressure; and he was probably all the happier for his well assorted marriage. He himself seems strongly to have believed that bachelorhood was not good for the cause of science.

The summer of 1834 was spent in Scandinavia. Lyell was delighted with all that he saw in this new field. "There is much doing here which is unknown in England and France," he writes from Copenhagen. "I am more than ever struck with the extreme slowness with which science travels, what with multiplicity of languages, douanes, etc." If even Lyell felt this, though he spoke English, French, and Italian fluently, German well, and Spanish a little, how much must it stand in the way of lesser people, with smaller means and narrower accomplishments! After seeing Denmark from top to bottom, he crossed to Malmö and Lund, and did the Peninsula pretty thoroughly. At Stockholm, Berzelius took him in hand and gave him the cream of all he knew; at Upsala, it seems a strange link with the infancy of science to read that the daughters of the great Linnæus himself showed him over their father's garden. Conversation was limited to German, eked out, when needful, with Latin, which Lyell often found of service as a lingua franca in out-of-the-way places; but educated Scandinavians usually speak English so well that even the most helpless foreigner is seldom at a loss. He seems to have been as pleased with the peaceful and simple descendants of the wickings as most other people, and to have returned to Scandinavia with special pleasure on future visits. In 1837 he took his wife with him, and made further investigations on the geology of the Baltic basin, which stood him in good stead in his later works.

Naturally, as he grew older, after the "Principles" and the "Elements" had made their mark, he became an authority, and saw even more of the best intellects of the time than before. His correspondence with Mr. Darwin—not yet the apostle of evolution—seems to date from this period, and the allusions to London society crowd more and more thickly on every page. The tone, however, remains unchanged. Not a trace of narrow specialism anywhere. We get long accounts of such