ter life from the views of
his teacher, never forgot his indebtedness to the Oxford professor. Even
in 1832, in publishing the second edition of the first volume of his
_Principles_, he dedicated it to Buckland, as one 'who first instructed
me in the elements of geology, and by whose energy and talents the
cultivation of science in the country has been so eminently
promoted[33].'

On leaving Oxford in 1819, at the age of twenty-two, Lyell joined the
Geological Society. What were the dominant opinions at that time on
geological theory among the distinguished men, who were there laying
the foundations of stratigraphical geology, we have already seen. Lyell,
in his frequent visits to the continent, became a friend of the
illustrious Cuvier, whose strong bias for Catastrophism was so forcibly
shown in his writings and conversation.

What then, we may ask, were the causes which led Lyell to abandon the
views in which he had been instructed, and to become the great champion
of Evolutionism?

It has often been assumed that Lyell was led by the study of Hutton's
works to adopt the Uniformitarian' doctrines. But there is ample
evidence that such was not the case. As late as the year 1839, Lyell
wrote of Hutton, 'Though I tried, I doubt whether I fairly read half his
writings, and skimmed the rest[34]'; and he emphatically assured Scrope
'Von Hoff has assisted me most[35].'

The fact is certain that Lyell, quite independently, arrived at the same
conclusions as Hutton, _but by totally different lines of reasoning_.

As early as 1817, when Lyell was only twenty years of age, he visited
the Norfolk coast and was greatly impressed by the evidence of the waste
of the cliffs about Cromer, Aldborough, and Dunwich; and three years
later we find him studying the opposite kind of action of the sea in the
formation of new land at Dungeness and Romney Marsh. All through his
life there may be seen the results of these early studies in a tendency
which he showed to _overrate marine action_; the chief defect in his
early views consisting in not fully realising the importance of that
subaerial denudation--of which Hutton was so great an exponent. But it
was in his native county of Forfarshire that Lyell found the most
complete antidote to the Catastrophic teachings. Buckland had taught him
that the 'till' of the country had been thrown down, just 4170 years
before, by the Noachian deluge: while Cuvier had asserted that the study
of freshw