SIR CHARLES LTELL. 597 



The young English visitor saw all that was worth seeing in this 

 profoundly rotten society. Making every allowance for good intro- 

 ductions and a less crowded stage of European life than ours, the ease 

 with which he got to know everybody seems nowadays almost in- 

 credible. At the door of the observatory he meets Laplace, " a very 

 fine-looking old gentleman " ; and he is shown over the building by 

 Arago in person. Madame Pichon, a famous beauty, who sat for 

 Gerard's " Psyche," admits him to her salon. Ferussac shows him all 

 his snail-shells, and tells him some things about geology that he did 

 not know before, together with many baseless theories, which his good 

 sense cavalierly rejects. He sees something of the intriguing great 

 world, too ; some of the chameleon-colored politicians, the scheming 

 abbes, the fashionable Ultras, and the still more fashionable Ne Plus 

 Ultras, as he once calls them. "Every other man one meets is either 

 minister or ex-minister. They are scattered as thick as the leaves in 

 autumn, stratum above stratum." He is full of interest, too, in social 

 and political questions ; writes with acuteness anent the system of sub- 

 dividing the land, discusses the centralizing tendency introduced by 

 Napoleon, and is keen about the pensions bestowed on Pairs de France 

 by the Bourbons durante bene placito a gift which, he says, neither 

 blesses him who gives nor him who takes it. As yet he has done noth- 

 ing serious in the way of book-making ; but who would exchange such 

 preliminary training as this for the very best and carefullest field 

 drudgery of the mere cut-and-dried technical geologist ? 



However, he was not idle all this time. On the contrary, he was 

 running up and down and to and fro upon the face of the earth, 

 inspecting its crust everywhere, with an eye to future results ; and 

 to run to and fro was of course a far more difficult thing in the 

 twenties than it is in these later days of easy locomotion. His letters 

 are full of his observations taken in on the spot. Now he is down in 

 the Isle of Wight, examining the cliffs from Compton Chine to Brook, 

 and surprised at the careless way Buckland "galloped over the 

 ground " " he would have entirely overlooked the Weald clay if I had 

 not taken him back to see it " (clearly what satisfies the Bridgwater 

 treatises and the dean in the way of research will not satisfy this very 

 heterodox young man) ; now he is investigating the tertiaries of the 

 Paris basin at Bas Meudon ; and now again he is down at Lyme 

 Regis, classic land of geologists, watching Mary Anning, the self- 

 taught fossil-finder, unearthing the .skeleton of a "superb ichthyosau- 

 rus." Every letter almost teems with new facts or discoveries ; and 

 Lyell's ears are open for everything new in the geological line from 

 the ends, of the earth inward. 



In 1825 his eyes had so far recovered that he was called to the bar, 

 and went the Western Circuit for two years. He was but a dabbler 

 at the law, however, and fortunately never gave up to the Queen's 

 Bench what was meant for mankind. In 1826 he was elected to the 



