310 HEROES OF SCIENCE. 



studies, cultivated music, and entered thoroughly 

 into all the politics and literary fellowships of the 

 undergraduates. His love of nature persisted, and 

 he began to direct his thoughts to the past, and to 

 learn something about fossils. Thus he found out 

 the house of Sowerby, the conchologist, by finding 

 at the door an ammonite, well known to Oxford 

 geologists. Subsequently, when on a visit to Mr. 

 Dawson Turner, of Norwich, he met a Javanese 

 traveller. Dr. Arnold. Mr. Dawson Turner had 

 a fine collection of Norwich and Suffolk fossils. 

 Lyell writes to his father to say, " I have copied 

 for Buckland, part of his paper, being a list of 

 those which are described, and shall copy the rest." 

 It appears that the seed was sown by attending a 

 course of lectures on geology, at Oxford, given by 

 the celebrated Dr. Buckland, and it is no little 

 thing for that great university to be able to assert 

 that its teaching developed the greatest system of 

 geology ever brought forward. Lyell geologized 

 over Norfolk, and in his conversations with his host 

 and Dr. Arnold, it appeared that he had got hold 

 of the idea, the elaboration of which is at the very 

 bottom of his future great work. Lyell studied 

 what is now in progress in nature so as to com- 

 prehend what occurred in the past times of the 

 earth. Modern changes are the examples by which 

 ancient changes can alone be studied. He quotes 

 in a letter to his father, the following saying of 

 Buckland and of White : " Local information, from 

 actual observation, tends more to promote natural 



