SIB CHABLES LYELL. 591 



SIR CHARLES LYELL. 



By Professor GKANT ALLEN. 



SIX years after Sir Charles Lyeil's death, his sister-in-law, Mrs. Ly- 

 ell, has given the world his letters and journals in two bulky but 

 vastly interesting as well as really valuable volumes. The book is not 

 exactly a biography in the ordinary sense, for the editor's part has 

 been confined to a few stray connecting paragraphs of the baldest 

 explanation ; nor is it a deliberate autobiography, for Lyell was far 

 too unobtrusive of his own personality to sit down and write at full 

 length about himself ; but it is unconsciously autobiographical for all 

 that, consisting of letters extending over more than half a century, 

 and enabling us to trace in minute detail the gradual unfolding of their 

 writer's ideas. As a study in psychological evolution these volumes 

 are invaluable ; they set before us vividly the prior causes which pro- 

 duced Lyell, the environment which affected him, and the influences 

 which molded or developed his inherent faculties. Their interest is 

 thus rather social and personal than merely geological ; it is Lyell the 

 man, not simply Lyell the writer, that they paint for us with such 

 graphic fidelity. 



Whence did he come ? What conditions went to beget him ? 

 From what stocks were his qualities derived, and why ? These are 

 the questions that must henceforth always be first asked when we 

 have to deal with the life of any great man. For we have now learned 

 that a great man is no unaccountable accident, no chance result of a 

 toss-up on the part of Nature, but simply the highest outcome and 

 final efflorescence of many long ancestral lines, converging at last 

 toward a single happy combination. Whatever he possesses he has 

 derived in the main from his ancestors, though he may possibly add 

 some few elements himself by functional use ; and it is not, perhaps, 

 too much to say that the most richly endowed natures must necessarily 

 derive many of their separate endowments from very different preced- 

 ing strains. In Lyell's case the ancestral facts are clear and simple. 

 His father was a Lowland Scotch laird, a man of cultivation and re- 

 finement, with tastes wide enough to embrace both literature and sci- 

 ence. He was a botanist of some distinction, of whose researches into 

 the cryptogams Humboldt himself spoke with favor ; and later in life 

 he became an enthusiastic Dante scholar, collecting every known edi- 

 tion, and publishing numerous translations from the Florentine poet. 

 Thus the father already foreshadowed the special combination of tastes 

 to be found in the son. His mother came from a good Yorkshire fam- 

 ily the Smiths of Maker Hall, in Swaledale and we can well believe 

 Mrs. Lyell's statement that she was a woman of sound sense, for all 

 her children seem to have inherited more than their father's share of 



