Reading the Rocks

by Brenda Maddox

  In his lectures Lyell would make good use of his observations on the recession of Niagara Falls and the creation of the Niagara Gorge – a magnificent example, he declared, of geological forces at work. He had already described in Principles the history of the falls, going back nearly 10,000 years, and had calculated that, receding at about a foot a year, they were about 35,000 years old. Now with his own eyes he saw what he knew already: the mile-broad Niagara River flowed from Lake Erie into Lake Ontario. Before reaching the falls, the river was divided by an island which split it into two sheets of water that cascaded down with an enormous roar and pounded on the shale beds below so that their disintegration was constant. Lyell endorsed the general opinion that the Falls would retreat to Lake Erie twenty-five miles away in 30,000 years.

  Observing that the ridges above the table land between Lakes Ontario and Erie matched the ridges on the uplands bounding the valley of the Ottawa River, he wrote in his Travels: ‘I shall content myself with stating that, with the exception of the parallel roads or shelves in Glen Roy, and some neighbouring glens of the Western Highlands in Scotland, I never saw so remarkable an example of banks, terraces, and accumulation of stratified gravel, sand, and clay, maintaining, over wide areas, so perfect a horizontality, as in this district north of Toronto.’9

  When he and Mary went on to look at French Canada they encountered the French-English divide. English settlers with whom Lyell spoke described as ‘enlightened’ the measures introduced by the late Lord Sydenham (first Governor of Canada) to quash the French. One of Sydenham’s supporters told Lyell: ‘We shall never make any thing of Canada until we anglicise and protestantise it.’ To this charge, Lyell heard ‘a French seigneur’ rejoin with bitterness: ‘Had you not better finish Ireland first?’

  Lyell concluded that Canada must continue to owe her protection from external aggression, not to local armaments and provincial demonstrations, but to the resources of the whole British Empire.

  Heading south in the United States, he cast an envious eye on the great continuous coalfield of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio. He saw the virtues of hard anthracite coal: nearly smokeless, it was much preferable to the soft bituminous coal used in London where it left people ‘living constantly in a dark atmosphere of smoke, which destroys our furniture, dress, and gardens, blackens our public buildings, and renders cleanliness impossible’. Dickens, writing nine years later on the opening page of Bleak House, evoked the filth of the English capital: ‘Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes . . . Dogs indistinguishable in the mire . . . Fog everywhere.’10 Why, Lyell wondered, were the British and American types of coal so different when both originated in the same decaying plant matter and came from the same species of plants formed at the same period? (In fact, the coals emerged from completely different types of plant and bituminous and anthracite represented these origins.)

  While examining the coal seams in Pennsylvania, Lyell was fascinated by the use of gravity to get passengers down a hill from the Lehigh Summit Mine: ‘we descended for nine miles on a railway impelled by our own weight, in a small car, at the rate of twenty miles an hour. A man sat in front checking our speed by a drag on the steeper declivities, and oiling the wheels without stopping.’11 The coal came down the same way, with sixty mules ready to draw up the empty carts every day.

  He found monotonous the long unbroken summits of the ridges of the Allegheny Mountains, but the scenery below beautiful. And he admired the religious tolerance and universal education – so unlike Great Britain ‘where we allow one generation after another of the lower classes to grow up without being taught good morals, good behaviour, and the knowledge of things useful and ornamental because we cannot all agree as to the precise theological doctrines in which they are to be brought up’.12 However, he had to get back to Boston. He described how he and Mary accomplished it:

  from Philadelphia by New York to Boston, 300 miles, without fatigue in twenty-four hours, by railway and steam-boat, having spent three hours in an hotel at New York, and sleeping soundly for six hours in the cabin of a commodious steam-ship as we passed through Long Island Sound. On getting out of the cars in the morning, we were ushered into a spacious saloon, where with 200 others we sat down to breakfast, and learnt with surprise, that, while thus agreeably employed, we had been carried rapidly in a large ferry-boat without perceiving any motion across a broad estuary to Providence in the State of Rhode Island.13

  At some point during his New England trip Lyell discovered Martha’s Vineyard. He was carried by ‘an excellent railway’ to New Bedford and found:

  a steam-boat in readiness, so that, having started long after sunrise, I was landed on ‘the Vineyard’, eighty miles distant from Boston, in time to traverse half the island, which is about twenty miles long from east to west, before sunset. Late in the evening I reached the lofty cliffs of Gayhead [Lyell’s spelling] more than 200 feet high, at the western end of the island, where the highly-inclined tertiary strata are gaily-coloured, some consisting of bright red clays, others of white, yellow, and green sand, and some of black lignite . . . I collected many fossils here, assisted by some resident Indians, who are very intelligent.14

  In October, he began his Lowell lectures. He admired Boston with the proximity of Harvard (‘the best endowed university in America’) and the stimulating Bostonian mix of professors, writers, lawyers and doctors. Their influence, Lyell felt, placed the state legislature ‘under the immediate check of an enlightened public opinion’. He had been invited by Mr (John Amory) Lowell – a cousin of the founder – whom he described as ‘trustee and director of a richly endowed literary and scientific institution in this city’, with the instruction to deliver a ‘course of twelve lectures on geology during the present autumn’.15

  Geology was enjoying a great burst of popularity in the United States, with the Association of American Geologists being founded in 1840 in Philadelphia. Lyell’s lectures were held in the Odeon Theatre, hired for the purpose. He noted wryly that while the public ‘have gratuitous admission to these lectures by several judicious restrictions’, such as requiring ticket applications several weeks in advance, the trustee ‘has obviated much of the inconvenience arising from this privilege, for it is well known that a class which pays nothing is irregular and careless in its attendance’.16

  Attendance was hardly irregular. Lyell was such an attraction that more than 3,000 people came to each lecture, with the consequence that he gave each twice, repeating the evening talk the next afternoon. ‘Among my hearers were persons of both sexes,’ he described, and ‘of every station in society, from the most affluent and eminent in the various learned professions to the humblest mechanics, all well dressed and observing the utmost decorum.’

  Travelling north of Boston to Lowell, in November 1845, Lyell inspected the mills which had made the Lowell family fortune. Once more what he saw contrasted with England. He admired the young women who worked the spinning-wheels; he found them: ‘good-looking, and neatly dressed, chiefly the daughters of New England farmers, sometimes of the poorer clergy. They belong, therefore, to a very different class from our manufacturing population, and after remaining a few years in the factory, return to their homes, and usually marry.’17 Factory work, he judged, was better for young women than domestic service ‘as they can earn and save more; their moral character stands very high, and a girl is paid off, if the least doubt exists on that point. Boarding-houses, usually kept by widows, are attached to each mill, in which the operatives are required to board; the men and women being separate.’18 He noticed also that few children were employed and that those under fifteen were compelled by law to go to school three months in the year under penalty of a heavy fine.

  Lyell covered much ground. Moving south, he went to Washington, attended a debate in the Senate and met the new president, John Tyler. (Formerly vice-president, Tyler had become president in April 1841 after the new presi
dent William Henry Harrison died suddenly just one month after his inauguration.) He then crossed the Mason–Dixon line in order to examine the geology of the tertiary strata on the shores of the James River.

  In Virginia he had his first sight of slaves, and was told by a white English immigrant from Hertfordshire that there was no room in the slave states for poor whites, as they were ‘despised by the very negroes if they laboured with their own hands’.19 He learned also of an arrival from New England, a man who, moving south to Virginia, had sold off the slaves and introduced Irish labourers, thinking they would be more economical. But after three years, so the New Englander told him, the Irish became very dissatisfied at being looked down upon by the whites as if they were black.

  In January 1842, Lyell reached Georgia. Learning that the bones of a mastodon and other extinct mammals had been found, he decided that, at a comparatively recent period, the Atlantic had been inhabited by the existing species of marine testacea (shellfish) and that there had been an upheaval and laying dry of the ocean bed. This new land supported forests in which the megatherium, mylodon, mastodon, elephant, and a species of horse and other quadrupeds had lived and left remains that were found buried in the swamps. He later wrote: ‘As no species of equus existed in the New World when it was discovered in the fifteenth century, naturalists were inclined, at first, to be incredulous in regard to the real antiquity of this fossil but as the tooth is more curved than in the recent horse, ass, or zebra, the fossil species may have differed as widely from any living representative of this genus, as the zebra or wild ass from the horse of Arabia.’20

  At Savannah, Georgia, in order to see the bed of clay containing some mastodon bones, Lyell was instructed to be on the ground by daybreak and at low tide. Accordingly, he left in the middle of the night with his host’s servant as a guide, ‘and I found him provided with a passport, without which no slave can go out after dusk’.21

  From his host, who spoke of ‘abolitionists’ in tones of loathing, Lyell heard that insurrection had been ‘stirred up’ by abolitionist missionaries. He himself took to heart his host’s fear of the whites being outnumbered. As he wrote in his Travels: ‘nearly half the population of Georgia are of the coloured race, who are said to be as excitable as they are ignorant. Many proprietors live with their wives and children quite isolated in the midst of the slaves, so that the danger of any popular movement is truly appalling.’22 To Lyell, the black slaves appeared ‘very cheerful and free from care, better fed than a large part of the labouring class’ of Europe: ‘We might even say that they labour with higher motives than the whites – a disinterested love of doing their duty.’ Lyell was aware that there was another view but concluded that he ‘found it impossible to feel a painful degree of commiseration for persons so exceedingly well satisfied with themselves’.23

  Lyell’s racism was not confined to people of colour. In New York, he remarked on ‘the heterogeneous composition of its people . . . an endless procession of Irish parading the streets, with portraits of O’Connell emblazoned on their banners’. He observed that ‘Pennsylvania also labours under the disadvantage of being jointly occupied by two races, those of British, and those of German extraction’. He asked himself whether it was ‘dangerous to entrust every adult male with the right of voting. Yet in America they think the experiment a safe one, or even contend that it has succeeded. But some disagree.’24

  Back in Washington he turned again to geological observation. He was surprised to see large masses of floating ice brought down from the Appalachian Hills. The huge boulders on the low grounds reminded him of how vast a territory in the South he had passed over without encountering a single erratic block. These far transported fragments of rock, he decided, were ‘decidedly a northern phenomenon’.25

  Moving up to Philadelphia he was shown the entire skeleton of a large fossil mastodon, ‘or so-called Missourium’, brought from Missouri and assembled, with some errors. As he noted in his Travels: ‘This splendid fossil has since been purchased by the British Museum, taken to pieces in London, and correctly set up again under the direction of Mr. [Richard] Owen.’26

  Returning to Boston in a hot July, the Lyells were delighted once more ‘to see our friends, some of whom kindly came from their country residences to welcome us. Others we visited in Nahant, where they had retreated from the great heat, to enjoy the sea-breezes. Ice was as usual in abundance; the iceman calling as regularly at every house in the morning as the milkman. Pine-apples from the West Indies were selling in the streets in wheelbarrows. I bought one of good size, and ripe, for a shilling, which would have cost twelve shillings or more in London.’27

  In October 1842 the Lyells returned to London, bringing with them thirty-six boxes of fossils. Soon after Charles would begin to write his Travels in North America, published in two volumes in 1845.

  During this time back in Britain, Lyell was appointed by the Home Office as one of the experts charged with investigating the explosion at Haswell colliery, County Durham, which had killed ninety-five miners. The use of such high-profile scientists as Lyell and Michael Faraday (who was now Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution) to investigate how such mining explosions occurred and to suggest steps towards prevention was unprecedented. Their subsequent recommendation to the Peel government was that firedamp should be drawn away from the mine by specially made conduits. Lyell’s particular contribution, submitted on 21 October 1844, was that miners should be better educated, as the miners seemed unaware of the dangers of lighting their pipes from the flame of the Davy Lamp. These recommendations would lead to a major political row over the expense that implementing such proposals would entail.

  Within two years Lyell was back again in Boston, delivering a series of Lowell lectures once more. In all, he would make four visits to America.

  For Lyell and many since, the landscape of America was an open textbook on geological history. More’s the pity that he never saw what were the greatest pages in the book – the Grand Canyon. As he had pronounced after his first visit: ‘Certainly 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.’28

  In Kentucky he inspected a place of ‘great geological celebrity’ called Big Bone Lick, where the bones of mastodons and many other extinct quadrupeds had been dug up in extraordinary abundance. ‘The term Lick is applied throughout North America to those marshy swamps,’ he explained to his readers, ‘where saline springs break out, and which are frequented by deer, buffalo, and other wild animals for the sake of the salt, whether dissolved in the water, or thrown down by evaporation in the summer season, so as to encrust the surface of the marsh. Cattle and wild beasts devour this incrustation greedily, and burrow into the clay impregnated with salt, in order to lick the mud.’29

  Lyell’s method of finding local specialists when abroad was to go to a pharmacy upon entering a new town and ask if anyone was interested in geology. He had discovered in Sicily in 1828 that the ‘apothecary in the Pharmacia always set himself up as a savant’. In Jackson, Mississippi, this tactic brought down a physician who lived above the drugstore, who had read Principles and who had a collection of fossils.

  Lyell saw the Mississippi River and its delta for the first time. He was unprepared for the French atmosphere of New Orleans, even less for the fossil teeth and jawbone of a mastodon shown him. Going up the Mississippi by steamboat, he was surprised when the booking clerk asked him if he wrote about geology and then questioned him about a recent article in the Edinburgh Review. Lyell was gratified with this evidence that the countries shared a common culture despite the wide ocean separating them. In Missouri in March 1846, Lyell saw the place where, thirty-five years before, an earthquake had altered the course of the Mississippi – an event he had already described in Principles.

  Lyell gave more thought to the phenomenon of slavery durin
g his travels. At first he had thought that the liberation of slaves was desirable, but changed his mind when he considered the obstacles. Who would feed the slaves if their masters stopped doing so? Where would they live? He decided, on balance, that he would not embrace the abolitionist cause. ‘I have seen nothing to alter my views of the condition of the slaves,’ he wrote to his father in February 1846 (having just sent off a long letter on the geology of Alabama to the Geological Society of London). ‘If emancipated, they will suffer very much more than they will gain. They have separate houses, give parties, at which turkeys and all sorts of cakes are served up. They marry far more than our servants – eat pork – the women exempted from work a full month after childbirth, corporal punishment excessively rare; they do so much less bodily work than the whites in the North, that the Southern planters will not believe in the stories of the former.’30

  He had already written to his father-in-law about the slaves in Georgia: ‘My dear Horner . . . Besides being clothed and very well fed, they are by nature most peaceful, so that they hardly ever fight, and the contrast of some Irish labourers who came here to dig a canal (to which, by the way, we owe the discovery of the Megatherium), would really be laughable if it were not such a serious evil.’31 In South Carolina he became conscious of the numerical preponderance of slaves. He sympathised with the reasoning behind the strict laws against importing books relating to emancipation and also with the prohibition on bringing back slaves who had been taken by their masters into free states.

  Like Agassiz, Lyell wondered whether the black and white races had separate origins. Obviously influenced by his reading of Lamarck (although in Principles he had firmly denounced the Frenchman’s ideas on the genetic transmission of acquired characteristics), he asked himself whether if ‘the Negro’ learned skills, he might be able to pass improved intelligence to his children. He wrote to his father-in-law about the differences in races between whites and ‘people of colour’ and raised the possibility that, with the passage of geological time, there might come about a being ‘as much transcending the white man in intellect as the Caucasian race excels the chimpanzee’.32