592 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



intellect and vigor. Charles was the eldest of ten, having two broth- 

 ers and seven sisters. All were able, but he was the ablest. The first- 

 born of a wealthy and cultivated family, with ample means and ample 

 leisure, endowed by nature with literary and scientific potentialities, 

 brought up in the stimulating atmosphere of his own home, of Oxford, 

 and of the London literary world, surrounded from his childhood up- 

 ward by men of science and men of letters, it would have been strange 

 if Charles Lyell had not turned out exactly such a man as we all know 

 him to have been. He was predestined for his work by the inevitable 

 forces of his own constitution and the environing society, and he was 

 admirably fitted beforehand for the work he had to do. 



" Unencumbered research," as Mr. Sorby calls it, is, in fact, the 

 key-note of Lyell's history. Like most other of our greatest scientific 

 generalizers, he was brought up in an easy position, which enabled 

 him to devote his life to science alone, without troubling his brain 

 about the often absorbing question of the bread-supply, that wastes 

 the best years of so many lives fit for better things. He came to us 

 from the eighteenth century. Charles Lyell was born at Kinnordy, 

 in Forfarshire, his father's estate, on November 14, 1797. But the 

 real home of his childhood was Bartley Lodge, in the New Forest, 

 which his father leased for twenty-eight years shortly after Charles's 

 birth, though the family often returned for a time to Kinnordy as 

 their summer quarters. The fragment of early autobiography which 

 Lyell wrote years after for his future wife gives us some pleasant 

 glimpses of the boy's life among the big trees and shady avenues of 

 the Hampshire woodland. He felt the charm of nature and the open 

 air from his childhood upward. He knew every clump and every sin- 

 gle tree in the park, and to each one he gave a separate name. At 

 Old Sarum, whither he used to go on half-holidays from his school at 

 Salisbury, he loved already to break the flints from the chalk to see 

 which had crystals of chalcedony in the middle, and which had white 

 cores of sparkling quartz. Even then, before he was eleven years old, 

 he had taken to collecting beetles and butterflies, finding out their 

 names from the entomological books in his father's library. This free 

 life in the New Forest must have formed such a preparation for his 

 future work as could have fallen to the lot of very few boys in Eng- 

 land ; nowhere else, perhaps, in this over-tilled kingdom could he 

 have formed so just an idea of Avhat Nature left to herself is like 

 though even the New Forest looks but an artificial thing, after all, 

 beside genuine native primeval woodlands. Moreover, he luckily 

 escaped the conventionalizing and stereotyping drill of our public 

 schools ; he was never put through one of those dismal mills for 

 crushing out individuality, into which we turn most of our best mate- 

 rial, so as to grind it down to the Procrustean measure of Ovidian 

 elegiacs and yEschylean trimeters. He went to three small private 

 schools, first at Ringwood (close to home), then at Salisbury (where 



