January 10, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



69 



Tried in debate and developed tliereby, 

 Lyell's ideas begot a purpose which absorbed 

 his means, his time and his thought. That 

 purpose is stated in the title of his book: 

 ' Principles of Geology ; being an Attempt to 

 Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's 

 Surface by Reference to Causes now in Opera- 

 tion.' To this end he devoted the energies of 

 a life singularly free from limitations and cares, 

 such as ordinarily divert men from a single ob- 

 ject. 



The first volume of the Principles was writ- 

 ten in the autumn of 1829, and published 

 in the winter ; the second appeared early in 

 1832, and the third in May, 1833. Five 

 editions of the work had been issued by the 

 spring of 1837. In 1838 the third volume was 

 published separatelj"^ as the ' Elements of Geol- 

 ogy,' and the Principles, thus curtailed, passed 

 through editions from the sixth to the eleventh 

 during the author's lifetime, the twelfth being 

 under way at the time of his death, in 1875. 



Thus for forty-five years he pursued his pur- 

 pose. There is danger in lifelong devotion to 

 one hypothesis, but Lyell was armed against 

 narromng bias by his methods of observation 

 and by the breadth of his mind. The hypoth- 

 esis, which a small man would have spun to a 

 vanishing thread, in Lyell's hands was forged 

 into a chain of causality, binding past and 

 present. 



In accordance with one favorite .saying of his : 

 'Go and see,' he travelled throughout western 

 Europe and eastern America, searching always 

 with painstaking care for facts. And obeying 

 another principle, ' Prefer reason to authority,' 

 (even when that avithority was his own pub- 

 lished conclusion), he kept his work abreast of 

 the advance of geology, for which he had indi- 

 cated the way. 



Uniformitarianism did not originate with 

 Lyell, but he became the gTeat exponent of 

 that principle. Not priority, but thoroughness, 

 makes for reputation. Weighing the broader 

 results of Lyell's studies, Prof. Bonney con- 

 cludes : "We may be sure, that if Lyell were 

 now living he would frankly recognize new facts, 

 as soon as they were established, and would not 

 shrink from any modification of his theory which 

 these might demand. Great as were his services 



to geology, this, perhaps, is even greater — for 

 the lesson applies to all sciences and to all 

 seekers after knowledge — that his career, from 

 first to last, was the manifestation of a judicial 

 mind, of a noble spirit, raised far above all 

 party passions and petty considerations, of an 

 intellect great in itself, but greater still in its 

 grand humility ; that he was a man to whom 

 truth was as the ' pearl of price,' worthy of the 

 devotion and, if need be, the sacrifice of a life." 

 Bailey Willis. 



Die Gastropoden der Plankton-Expedition, von 

 Dk. H. Simeoth. Kiel & Leipzig, Lipsius & 

 Fischer. 1895. 4to., 206 pp., 22 pi. 

 The Plankton-Expedition, as many of our 

 readers are aware, had for its object the study 

 of pelagic life in the North Atlantic, and es- 

 pecially its distribution in depth ; the drawing, 

 as it were, of the bathymetric contours of 

 oceanic life. The material thus gathered has 

 been distributed among many naturalists for 

 study, and a large number of essays have already 

 been printed under the supervision of the gen- 

 eral editor, Prof. Victor Hansen, of Kiel. 



The latest contribution is by Prof. Heinrich 

 Simroth, of Leipzig, already well known by 

 numerous valuable studies of the mollusks, and 

 especially by his editorship of the new edition 

 of that part of Bronn's ' Thier-reichs ' relating 

 to the Mollusca. It comprises observations on 

 larval and pelagic Gastropods, fully illustrated 

 and of great interest. 



After the reaction against the methods of 

 descriptive biology based on superficial charac- 

 ters, which began about twenty-five or thirty 

 years ago, so rich were the results derived from 

 embryological and anatomical researches that 

 the more hasty of the younger workers con- 

 cluded in their enthusiasm that surface charac- 

 ters were of no value whatever ; and this view 

 was carried so far that we find one naturalist 

 gravely arguing that the only proper basis for a 

 classification of the Gastropods would be found 

 in the number and arrangement of the gang- 

 lionic cells, which he had studied in half a 

 dozen species of land snails. Even the better 

 informed and more cautious biologists were led 

 to doubt if the characters of the shell in mol- 

 lusks would lend any aid to the study of the 



