46 THE COMING [CH. 



studies in a tendency which he showed to overrate 

 marine action ; the chief defect in his early views 

 consisting in not fully realising the importance 

 of that subaerial denudation of which Button was 

 so great an exponent. But it was in his native 

 county of Forfarshire that Lyell found the most 

 complete antidote to the Catastrophic teachings. 

 Buckland had taught him that the 'till' of the 

 country had been thrown down, just 4170 years 

 before, by the Noachian deluge : while Cuvier had 

 asserted that the study of freshwater limestones 

 proved them to differ from any recent deposit by 

 their crystalline character, the absence of shells and 

 the presence of plant-remains, as well as by the 

 occasional occurrence in them of bands of flint. As 

 the result of this, Cuvier and Brongniart had declared 

 that the freshwater of the ancient world possessed 

 properties which are not observed in that of modern 

 lakes 36 . Lyell visited Kinnordy from time to time 

 between 1817 and 1824, and found on his father's 

 estate and other localities in Strathmore a number 

 of small lakes, lying in hollows of the boulder clay. 

 These were being drained and their deposits quarried 

 for the purpose of ' marling ' the land ; the excava- 

 tions thus made showed that, under peat containing 

 a boat hollowed out of the trunk of a tree, there were 

 calcareous deposits, sometimes 16 to 20 feet in thick 

 ness, which passed into a rock, solid and crystalline 



