When Darwin read Lyell’s Travels in the summer of 1845 he was dismayed at his friend’s treatment of slavery. ‘Your slave discussion disturbed me much,’ he wrote to Lyell, ‘but as you would care no more for my opinion on this head than for the ashes of this letter, I will say nothing except that it gave me some sleepless, most uncomfortable hours.’33 Darwin thought Lyell showed too little feeling and suspected that his view had been tempered by the hospitality he received from his anti-abolitionist hosts.
When his second trip to the United States began in 1845, Lyell had established that his English readers’ appetite for American detail was virtually insatiable. In New York he found the most striking change to be the electric telegraph poles, standing thirty feet high, a hundred yards apart, ‘and certainly not ornamental. Occasionally, where the trees interfere, the wires are made to cross the street diagonally.’34 One result was the swift spread of international news: one item lay behind ‘the sensation just created here . . . and is now going the round of the newspapers, namely, the conversion to the Romish Church of the Rev. Mr. Newman, of Oxford’.35 He heard heated discussions of politics as people argued over the possible candidates for the next presidential election, to be held in 1848. He did not keep silent. ‘I enlarged on the superior advantages of a hereditary monarchy, as preventing the recurrence of such dangerous agitation.’36
In New Jersey he made notes on the abundant dogwood in the forests ‘with such a display of white flowers as to take the place of our hawthorn’. With greater experience, surveying the blue Appalachian mountain chain, with its many folds, arches and troughs, Lyell wrote a little homily for those still unaware of the age of the earth or, as he put it, ‘not accustomed to reflect on the long succession of natural events . . . which have concurred to produce a single geological phenomenon, such as a mountain chain’. Although it appeared paradoxical, he attributed the structure of such mountains to ‘the sinking, rather than to the forcing upwards, of a portion of the earth’s crust’. The Appalachian chain, in short, was due to subsidence at a time when the mountains were still submerged beneath that ocean in which they were originally formed, as ‘is testified by their imbedded corals and shells’.37
On seeing the confluence of three great navigable rivers, the Monongahela, the Allegheny and the Ohio, he marvelled at the sight of level seams of coal lying open on the river banks. He rhapsodised about the great future that lay waiting ‘when the full value of this inexhaustible supply of cheap fuel can be appreciated; but the resources which it will one day afford to a region capable, by its agricultural produce alone, of supporting a large population, are truly magnificent’.38 Moving on in his Travels in North America, Lyell called his readers’ special attention to the vast Illinois coalfield, taking in parts of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky – an area almost as big as the whole of England.
Immigrants always caught Lyell’s eye, although he was never tempted to become one himself. He observed ‘many wagons of emigrants from Pennsylvania, of German origin’ who were heading for the West. He spoke with an Irish grandmother who had lived in America for forty years but would ‘die happy could she but once more see the Cove of Cork’.39 He also asked his readers to abstain from drawing general conclusions from the conversation of persons whom chance had thrown in the traveller’s way. Even so: ‘As soon as we were recognised to be foreigners, we were usually asked whether we had made up our minds where we should settle. On our declaring that, much as we saw to like and admire in America, we had no intention of exchanging our own country for it, they expressed surprise that we had seen so many States, and had not yet decided where to settle. Nothing makes an English traveller feel so much at home as this common question.’40
Determined that on this trip he would devote an entire month to the geology of Nova Scotia, Lyell was delighted to find in the ancient rocks on the shores of the Bay of Fundy marks of ripples and raindrops. Even more interesting were six perfect footmarks left by a sandpiper. Lyell split the slabs, found more footprints on the underside and packed them to bring home for the British Museum.
With two American trips behind him, on 4 February 1848, Lyell filled London’s Royal Institution for one of its noted Friday evening lectures. An audience of 400, including most of the geologists in the capital and many literary figures as well, turned out to hear him speak on ‘The fossil reptile footprints in Pennsylvania’.
Lyell told how he had been shown the reptile prints at Greensburg, Pennsylvania, a town about twenty miles east of Pittsburgh, where they lay in the coal formation of the Allegheny Mountains. He had been taken out to a stone quarry by a young doctor, Dr Alfred King, along with a local Presbyterian clergyman. (Mrs Lyell had remained at the inn in Greensburg where, he noted, the landlady was especially kind to her.) When Dr King had first made the fossil discovery, he was fiercely denounced by a Catholic clergyman for denying the account of creation in the Bible. However, the Protestant clergyman who accompanied him, and saw the prints with his own eyes, kept silent.41
Lyell was astounded. He could see at once that the footprints were genuine. Apart from being those of a quadruped, they recalled the bird tracks he had just seen in Nova Scotia. He concluded that the tracks had been produced as the reptile walked over the clay-like mud before the mud had begun to dry and crack.
Before his London audience, Lyell displayed one of the slabs he had brought back with him. He pointed out the differences between the toe-grouping in the prints and those of the European Cheirotherium (the ‘hand beast’ whose tracks resembling human hands had first been found in Germany in 1833). Each pair of the Pennsylvanian footprints suggested a creature that had walked with a protuberance like another toe.
For his Royal Institution listeners, with the Duke of Northumberland in the chair, Lyell stressed the importance of these footprints. While coal strata had often been seen to hold remains of plants, no traces of any air-breathing, non-marine creatures had ever before been detected in rocks so old. He stressed that it was safe to assume that the huge reptile which left those prints on the ancient sands of the coal measures was an air-breather, for ‘its weight would not have been sufficient under water to have made impressions so deep and distinct’.42 The message he was bringing was one that the geological world was ready to learn: life had developed differently on the opposite sides of the ocean; North America had had its own kind of quadrupedal ancestor to the dinosaur.
In conclusion, Lyell made a political as well as a scientific point. He summarised the dilemma that the Pennsylvania footprints presented for scientific discourse. In the United States, with its free press, religious toleration and social equality, he felt that there was still insufficient intellectual freedom to enable a student of nature to discuss with impunity the philosophical questions presented by science. He called for the British to set up ‘a good system of primary schools’ to make impossible ‘that collision of opinion, so much to be deprecated, between the multitude and the learned’. In sum, he gave a rousing call for mass education and a free press.
Lyell was in his best form. His publisher John Murray had just paid him £250 for the seventh edition of Principles (1847). His Travels (1845) and A Second Visit to the United States (1849) make for interesting reading. He continued to expound on his fascination with coalfields and unusual fossils, always interlacing his observations with a compulsive reporting of American society, its immigrants, population rise and mix of races. He testified to the great future resources of the country. He would make two more trips to the United States before his attention was required by Darwin and Prince Albert, for more pressing projects in his own country.
15
AT LAST, THE BIG QUESTION
In June 1846 Lyell returned from his second trip to North America certain of the superiority of secular universities. His own country, he told American friends, was ‘more parson-ridden than any in Europe except Spain’.1
He had ended his first volume of colourful American travel stories with an attack on Oxford and Ca
mbridge. Why, he asked, ‘should we crowd all the British youth into two ancient seats of learning? Why not promote the growth of other institutions in London, Durham, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland?’2 It would be desirable for Oxford and Cambridge to expand freely and cease to be places for educating the clergy of the Established Church. In his eyes, the two venerable universities as they stood encouraged ‘class division and exclusive sectarianism’.
In February 1847 twenty-seven-year-old Prince Albert was elected chancellor of Cambridge University and set himself to broaden the curriculum. The prince consort, an ardent supporter of science, had been reading Lyell’s Travels. When Lyell sent him the seventh edition of Principles, he was rewarded with an invitation to Buckingham Palace.
Lyell, then in his early fifties, had met the young prince a few years earlier and now found his English much improved.3 Meeting on 28 March 1847, they chatted animatedly about a cause dear to them both: university reform. Indeed, classical languages and mathematics were still held to be the only subjects suitable for Cambridge or Oxford. Neither university had woken up to the new industrial need for trained scientists. For Lyell and the prince, their agreement on this important issue was the beginning of a good relationship. On a visit to the palace the following year, Lyell told Albert how he admired American public (or state) education. He feared that many people in England opposed schooling for the lower classes as it might make them discontented with their lot. He told the prince that in America, slave owners used the same argument for the same reason.4
The two men had more to discuss than university reform. Albert wanted Lyell to sit on the royal commission for the Great Exhibition, which was still in its planning stages. The country weathered the Chartist agitation of April 1848, when a crowd of more than 100,000 (some accounts say 300,000) gathered on Kennington Common in south London demanding universal suffrage. Long-held fears of a duplication of the revolutions sweeping Europe led Queen Victoria to flee London for her safety. A guard was mounted at scientific institutions, among them the Geological Survey where Henry De la Beche brought in an armful of cutlasses and prepared for a siege.5 The Reverend William Buckland waited at Westminster Abbey armed with a crowbar. However, the mass protest meeting was no uprising and the throng dispersed peacefully.
In the late summer of 1848, Queen Victoria summoned Lyell to Balmoral to receive a knighthood. (Lyell would become the third member of the Geological Society to be knighted. Humphry Davy in 1812 had been the first; the second – not until 1846 – was Roderick Murchison.) Prince Albert wanted Lyell to be the first person knighted at Balmoral, the castle in Aberdeenshire on which he had bought a long-term lease from its owner, Lord Aberdeen. For Lyell, it was a straight fifty miles north on horseback across the Grampian Hills from his father’s Kinnordy estate. He was invited to stay overnight, although not at Balmoral itself; accommodation was arranged at an inn about a mile away, with a carriage sent by the queen to take him back and forth. Together Lyell and the prince, as Lyell wrote to his sister, ‘had a most agreeable geological exploring on the banks of the Dee’.6
When what was called ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations’ opened in Hyde Park on 1 May 1851, Prince Albert took justifiable pride in the triumphant realisation of his bold vision. He called it a ‘living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived’.7 The massive and unprecedented glass structure of ‘the Crystal Palace’, designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, was an astounding success. There was a glittering opening by Queen Victoria. The exhibits celebrated, as works of art, the machinery, scientific instruments and technical inventions of the industrial revolution. Before the exhibition’s closure five months later, on 15 October, some six million people had attended, including Darwin, Lyell and George Eliot. The cheapest tickets were a shilling. Public toilets could be visited for one penny (a charge that gave rise to the prim and enduring euphemism, ‘to spend a penny’).
The exhibition earned £186,000 above its costs (over £16 million today). Its success led Albert to establish the subsequent ‘Surplus Committee’, on which Lyell served, to decide what to do with the profits. One objective of the committee was to set up a trust to provide grants and scholarships for industrial research; another was to develop a nearby tract of land. The museums of South Kensington, in an area now sometimes referred to as ‘Albertopolis’, stand as a monument to the princely vision.
In the early summer of 1850, John Murray’s publishing house was preparing to bring out a new edition of Lyell’s Elements of Geology (this 1838 book being distinct from Lyell’s earlier and most popular work, Principles of Geology). Lyell went to Down House in Downe, Kent, to discuss with Charles Darwin what changes might be required in Elements. Lyell was now serving his second two-year term as president of the Geological Society. A mark of Lyell’s acknowledgement of his debt to the eighteenth-century James Hutton was his choice of cover for the new edition: a woodcut of Scotland’s Siccar Point, where Hutton had first glimpsed the spectacularly mismatched rocks that confirmed his belief in the vast age of the earth.
In January 1852 the fourth edition of yet another popular work by Lyell, A Manual of Elementary Geology, appeared – its sales speeded by the success of his American travel books. For this edition Lyell wrote a new introduction in which he raised for the first time the big question: why and how did new species appear?
In March the Lyells took themselves to Hyde Park to take a last look at the now empty glass-and-iron Great Exhibition Hall. Mary Lyell found it beautiful: ‘so very large there is something quite dreamy about the extent of it & the light colouring’.8 They also attended the queen’s ball at Buckingham Palace, where they watched Victoria and Prince Albert dancing in a quadrille, ‘enjoying themselves very much’.
That summer saw a smallpox outbreak in London; Mary made sure that everyone in their household at Harley Street was vaccinated. In July they celebrated their twentieth wedding anniversary and met Charles Dickens for tea. Weeks later Lyell made a speech at the reopening of the Crystal Palace, which had been rebuilt in Sydenham, where it stood until fire destroyed it in 1936. (Later, as a government commissioner reporting on the 1851 exhibition, Lyell would reiterate his message about the need for continuing the tradition of large industrial exhibitions. He claimed that what had been seen in London had ‘created a unity of all the nations of the world, however different their tendencies and systems of government’.) After spending the weekend with the Darwins, they left in August for their third trip to America – their first as Sir Charles and Lady Lyell.
On 6 October 1852, Sir Charles went with James Hall, a New York geologist, to western Massachusetts to examine the erratic boulders in the Berkshire Hills. The stones were extraordinarily large – one was 52 feet long and 40 feet wide – standing in long parallel straight rows. The usual explanation – glacial action – would not do. Lyell decided that the erratics could not have been carried by glaciers because the boulders were distributed at right angles to the ridges above them. In this he was wrong; the boulders had been carried by continental glaciers rather than by the mountain glaciers Lyell knew about. (He was also struck by the New England farmhouses made of wood – something unknown in Britain – and by their porches holding rocking chairs.9)
Delivering his third series of Lowell lectures in Boston in November, Lyell acknowledged the geological sophistication of his audience, who knew very well that the periods of which he was speaking extended back for millions of years. For the first time in his lectures Lyell addressed the species question. Why, he asked them to consider, had certain species disappeared? Fossils showed that the North American mastodon had lived in quite recent geological times. Why had it vanished? Then he raised the tougher question: how to account for the appearance of new forms of life? Mixing the theological with the geological in the dozen Lowell lectures of this series he examined theories for the emergence of new species. Did they replace those gone extinct? He offered three possibilities: first, the Lamarc
kian idea of ‘transmutation’ – emergence through changes in pre-existing species; second, new species simply appearing unrelated to others; third (his own favoured idea), they were brought into being by a creative act of God.
In the very first edition of Principles, Lyell had provided a chapter called ‘The Progressive Development of Life’; but the chapter was long and tortuously argued – single paragraphs extended over two pages – and his otherwise elegant prose was befuddled by the inability to say anything clear and outright. But from this earliest work, Lyell had insisted upon the recent origin of man. He did not accept that there were any human bones among the fossils of extinct mammals found in cave deposits. In his view, claims that some of these were human remains were unauthenticated. To him, man was an entirely different species. As he had summed up in his postscript to the fourth edition of A Manual of Elementary Geology: ‘Physically considered, he [man] may form part of an indefinite series of terrestrial changes past, present, and to come: but morally and intellectually he may belong to another system of things – of things immaterial – a system which is not permitted to interrupt or disturb the course of the material world, or the laws which govern its changes.’10
Lyell titled his twelfth and final Lowell lecture ‘Progressive Development’. He accepted that one class of organisms might replace another, but held that there was no evidence of preparation of the earth to receive man nor – his old theme – of any grand catastrophe. He ended with more praise to the ‘rational lord of Creation’.
Reading the Rocks Page 17