ater limestones proved them to differ from any recent deposit
by their crystalline character, the absence of shells and the presence
of plant-remains, as well as by the occasional occurrence in them of
bands of flint. As the result of this, Cuvier and Brongniart had
declared that _the freshwater of the ancient world possessed properties
which are not observed in that of modern lakes_[36]. Lyell visited
Kinnordy from time to time between 1817 and 1824, and found on his
father's estate and other localities in Strathmore a number of small
lakes, lying in hollows of the boulder clay. These were being drained
and their deposits quarried for the purpose of 'marling' the land; the
excavations thus made showed that, under peat containing a boat hollowed
out of the trunk of a tree, there were calcareous deposits, sometimes 16
to 20 feet in thickness, which passed into a rock, solid and
crystalline in character as the materials of the older geological
formations and containing the stems and fruits of the freshwater plant
_Chara_ (Stone wort).

With the help of Robert Brown the botanist, and of analyses made by
Daubeny, with the advice of his life-long friend, Faraday, Lyell was
able to demonstrate that from the waters of the Forfarshire lakes,
containing the most minute proportions of calcareous salts, a limestone,
identical in all respects with those of the older rocks of the globe,
had been deposited, with excessive slowness, by the action of
plant-life[37]. He was thus enabled to supply a complete refutation of
the views put forward by Buckland and Cuvier.

Thus while Hutton had been led to his conclusion concerning evolution in
the inorganic world, by studying the waste going on in the weathered
crags and the flooded rivers of his native land, Lyell's conversion to
the same views was mainly brought about by the study of changes due to
the action of the sea along the English coasts, and by studying the
evidence of constant, though slow, deposition of limestone-rocks, by the
seemingly most insignificant of agencies.

Lyell however did not by any means neglect the study of the action of
rain and rivers. During his visits to Forfarshire, he had his initials
and the date cut by a mason on many portions of the rocky river-beds
about his home. Fifty years afterwards (in 1874) I visited with him the
several localities, to ascertain what amount of waste had resulted from
the constant flow of water over these hard rocks. It was in mo