The next year, 1818, marked an important step in his education as a geologist, for he accompanied his father, mother, and two eldest sisters on a Continental tour. Starting early in June, they drove in a ramshackle carriage, which frequently broke down, from Calais to Paris, along much the same route as the railway now takes; they visited the sights of the capital, not forgetting either the artistic treasures of the Louvre or the collections of the Jardin des Plantes, particularly the fossils of the "Paris basin." Thence they journeyed by Fontainebleau and Auxerre to Dôle, and he makes careful and shrewd notes on the geology, for the carriage travelling of those days, though slow, was not without its advantages--and in crossing the Jura he observes the nodular flints in a limestone, and the contrast between these mountains and the Grampians of his native land. As they descended the well-known road which leads down to Gex in Switzerland, they had the good fortune to obtain a splendid view of Mont Blanc and the Alps. From Geneva, where he notes the "most peculiar deep blue colour of the Rhone," they visited Chamouni by the usual route. At this time the principal glaciers were advancing rather rapidly. The Glacier des Bossons, he remarks, "has trodden down the tallest pines with as much ease as an elephant could the herbage of a meadow. Some trunks are still seen projecting from the rock of ice, all the heads being embodied in this mass, which shoots out at the top into tall pyramids and pinnacles of ice, of beautiful shapes and a very pure white.... It has been pressed on not only through the forest, but over some cultivated fields, which are utterly lost."[6] At Chamouni, Lyell made the most of his time, for in three days he walked up to the Col de Balme, climbed the Brévent, and made his first glacier expedition, to the well-known oasis among the great fields of snow and ice which is called the Jardin. Everywhere he notes the flowers, which at that season were in full beauty; and the insects, capturing "no less than seven specimens of that rare insect, _Papilio Apollo_."[7] He feels all the surprise and all the delight which thrills the entomologist from the British Isles when he first sets foot on the slopes of the higher Alps, and sees in abundance the rarities of his own country, besides not a few new species. But Lyell does not neglect the rocks and minerals, or the red snow, or the wonders of the ice world. Chamouni, we are told, was then "perfectly inundated with English," for fifty arrived in one day. The previous year they had numbered one thousand out of a total of fourteen hundred visitors. Since then, times and the village have changed.