594 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Good evidence how long provincial prejudices lingered in Oxford, as 

 they still linger about the Jesus Welshmen and the Balliol Scots. 

 The letters from college (anno 1817) are amusingly old-fashioned in 

 their eighteenth-century echoes. They are written stiffly in the literary 

 style of the past generation, with Horace deliberately dragged in, thus : 



"Ilunc varum distortis cruribus." Sat. 



But we are gainers hereby in the end ; for Lyell's epistolary style, 

 thus developed, was very different from the hasty manner of the pres- 

 ent day, based upon the post-card and the telegraph-form. 



It was at Oxford, too, that Lyell discovered geology, hitherto to 

 him a terra incognita, or, rather, inopinata. He attended Buckland's 

 lectures, and seems at once to have been converted to the new love, 

 the insects being henceforth almost entirely deserted, or, at least, rele- 

 gated to the second place. One of his long vacations was spent at 

 Yarmouth with the Dawson Turners ; and already we see the theory 

 of " causes now in action " fermenting in his eager brain. He visits 

 the alluvial delta of the Yare, finds evidence of ancient channels 

 blocked up by the shingle which so diverted the course of the river, 

 learns that Norwich was a great port in mediaeval history, and, put- 

 ting two and two together, comes to the natural conclusion that the 

 changes in that part of the coast were very recent, and were due, not 

 to one of the then fashionable cataclysms, but to river-silt still in 

 course of deposition. " Cromer, Bakefield, Dunwich, and Aldbor- 

 ough," he says, " have necessarily been losing in the same proportion 

 as Yarmouth gains." The bent was there even at this early date ; 

 and it is the bent that makes the man. The old drastic cosmogony 

 was trembling to its fall ; the germs of evolutionism were already in 

 the air. Catastrophes, special creations, deluges, and the rest, though 

 backed by the great name of Cuvier, had had their day. Lyell was 

 to be one of the first to discover the cumulative value of the infinitesi- 

 mal. From the first, his thoughts pointed in that direction ; and 

 though he did not know to what grand results the system was to lead 

 us in the hands of Darwin though, indeed, he was slow to accept the 

 results when flashed upon him too dazzlingly at last yet it is inter- 

 esting to observe how throughout he keeps a keen eye upon all the 

 crude theories that make in the same way, such as that of Lamarck, 

 who from the beginning exercised an obvious fascination upon his kin- 

 dred mind. 



Toward these final results Lyell's own work led slowly up. Per- 

 haps it is not too much to say that in future ages, when the origin of 

 the great uniformitarian system of interpreting nature is looked back 

 upon with impartial eyes, four prominent names will stand out as rep- 

 resentative of the evolutionary movement in the judgment of posterity. 

 The first is that of Laplace, who applied it to the origin and develop- 

 ment of sidereal systems ; the second is that of Lyell, who applied it 



