142 Obituary — Sir Charles Lyett. 



OBITTJABY. 



SIR CHARLES LYELL, BART., 



M.A., D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S., F.L.S., V.P. GEOL. SOC. LOND. 



On Monday, 22nd February, at his residence in Harley 

 Street, and in his seventy-eighth year, Sir Charles Lyell passed 

 peacefully from amongst us, after a long life of scientific labour, 

 to his honoured rest. 



To the outside world it may seem strange that the death of 

 a man who was neither statesman, soldier, nor public orator, 

 should arouse our sympathies so strongly, or that he should be 

 so highly esteemed all over the world ; . but geologists know 

 well what Lyell has done for them since he published the first 

 volume of " The Principles of Geology " in 1830. 



It is in the character of historian and philosophical expo- 

 nent of geological thought that Lyell has achieved so much 

 for our science ; nor can we fail to remember that those clear 

 and advanced views, for which he became so justly celebrated, 

 were advocated by him forty-five years ago, at a time when 

 scientific thought was still greatly trammelled by a strong 

 religious bias, and men did not dare to openly avow their belief 

 in geological discoveries nor accept the only deductions which 

 could be drawn from them. 



It was no small service which Lyell rendered to us when he 

 publicly maintained that, in reasoning on geological data, it 

 was impossible to restrict geologists to the limits of the Mosaic 

 cosmogony, or to adopt for the past ages of geological time 

 the chronology of Archdeacon Ussher. 



Born at Kinnordy, his father's seat near Kerriemuir, in 

 Forfarshire, on the 14th of November, 1797, Lyell received 

 his early education at a private school at Midhurst, and com- 

 pleted it at Exeter College, Oxford, where he took his 

 Bachelor's degree in 1819, obtaining a second-class in Classical 

 honours in the Easter Term. On leaving the University, he 

 studied for the Bar. but never practised that profession, his tastes 

 having been led by Dr. Buckland's lectures to the study of 

 Geology as a science. In 1824 he was elected an Honorary 

 Secretary of the Geological Society of London, of which he 

 was one of the earliest Fellows. On the opening of King's 

 College, London, a few years later, he was appointed its first 

 Professor of Geology. He had already contributed some im- 

 portant papers to the " Transactions" of the Geological Society, 

 including one " On a Becent Formation of Freshwater Limestone 

 in Forfarshire, and on some Becent Deposits of Freshwater 

 Marl, with a comparison of recent with ancient Freshwater 

 Formations, and an Appendix on Gyrogonites, or Seed Vessel 

 of Chara ;" also one " On the Strata of the Plastic Clay For- 

 mation exhibited in the Cliffs between Christchurch Head, 



