252 SIB CHARLES LYELL. 



"My ambition," he says, "during the second 

 half-year was excited by finding myself rising 

 near the top of a class of fifteen boys in which I 

 was ; and when miserable, as I often was, with the 

 kicks and cuffs I received, I got into a useful habit 

 of thinking myself happy when I got a high num- 

 ber in the class-paper." Each year he received a 

 prize for speaking, and often prizes for Latin and 

 English original composition. 



At seventeen young Lyell entered Exeter Col- 

 lege, Oxford. He still devoted many hours to 

 entomology, and took some honors in classics. A 

 book, as is often the case, had already helped to 

 shape his life. He had found and read, in his 

 father's library, Bakewell's "Geology," and was 

 greatly excited over the views there expressed 

 about the antiquity of the earth. Dr. Buckland, 

 Professor of Geology at Oxford, was then at the 

 height of his fame, and Lyell at once attended a 

 course of his lectures and took notes. 



College life was having its influence over the 

 youth, for he wrote to his father : " It is the seeing 

 the superiority of others that convinces one how 

 much is to be and must be done to get any fame ; 

 and it is this which spurs the emulation, and feeds 

 that < Atmosphere of Learning,' which Sir Joshua 

 Eeynolds admirably describes as 'floating round 

 all public institutions, and which even the idle 

 often breathe in, and then wonder how they came 

 by it.' " 



And yet Lyell, like most students, found it a 



