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In regard to mammiferous remains, a single glance at the historical table published in the Supplement to Lyell's Manual, will bring home the truth, how accidental and rare is their preservation, far better than pages of detail.
The view of an ancient lake-dweller's village, given as the frontispiece of Sir Charles Lyell's "Antiquity of Man," is chiefly founded on a sketch of this very village of Dorey; but the extreme regularity of the structures there depicted has no place in the original, any more than it probably had in the actual lake-villages.
Grenville, the Archbishop, and himself, he is now all that remains. November 28th . . . On Monday evening I went without Mr. Bancroft to a little party at Mrs. Lyell's, where I was introduced to Mrs. Somerville.
The theory hitches on wonderfully well to Lyell's uniformitarian theory in geology, that the thing that has been is the thing that is and shall be, that the natural operations now going on will account for all geological changes in a quiet and easy way, only give them time enough, so connecting the present and the proximate with the farthest past by almost imperceptible gradations, a view which finds large and increasing, if not general, acceptance in physical geology, and of which Darwin's theory is the natural complement.
Young growing and irregular combs, and those which have not had pupæ, are most valuable for measurements and examination; their edges should be well protected against abrasion. Everyone whom I have seen has thought your paper very well written and interesting. You ask about Lyell's frame of mind.
I am well aware that this doctrine of natural selection, exemplified in the above imaginary instances, is open to the same objections which were at first urged against Sir Charles Lyell's noble views on "the modern changes of the earth, as illustrative of geology;" but we now very seldom hear the action, for instance, of the coast-waves, called a trifling and insignificant cause, when applied to the excavation of gigantic valleys or to the formation of the longest lines of inland cliffs.
Down, Bromley, Kent, S.E. January 22, 1869. My dear Wallace, Your intended dedication pleases me much and I look at it as a great honour, and this is nothing more than the truth. I am glad to hear, for Lyell's sake and on general grounds, that you are going to write in the Quarterly.
For most of us this is the happy event. Now and then comes the rare spirit to whom all of this fails to appeal because he is ready for something better. Such was the spirit of Charles Darwin. He started on his journey with a mind singularly free from prepossessions. In the long hours of this sailing voyage across the Atlantic Ocean Darwin had time to read and ponder Lyell's weighty words.
In the Cordillera I estimated one pile of conglomerate at ten thousand feet in thickness. Let the observer remember Lyell's profound remark that the thickness and extent of sedimentary formations are the result and measure of the degradation which the earth's crust has elsewhere suffered. And what an amount of degradation is implied by the sedimentary deposits of many countries!
Lyell's last work in the field was carried on about his home in Forfarshire, and only a few months before his death he wrote to Darwin: "All the work which I have done has confirmed me in the belief that the only difference between Palaeozoic and recent volcanic rocks is no more than we must allow for, by the enormous time to which the products of the oldest volcanoes have been subjected to chemical changes."
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