It has been sometimes said that Lyell was not an original thinker. Possibly not; _vixere fortes ante Agamemnona_ is true in science no less than in national history; there were mathematicians before Newton, philosophic naturalists before Darwin, geologists before Lyell. He did not claim to have discovered the principle of uniformity. He tells us himself what had been done by his predecessors in Italy and in Scotland: but he scattered the mists of error and illusion, he placed the idea upon a firm and logical basis; in a word, he found uniformitarianism an hypothesis, and he left it a theory. That surely is a more solid gift to science, a better claim to greatness, than any number of brilliant guesses and fancies, which, after coruscating for a brief season to the amazement of a gaping crowd, explode into darkness, and are no more seen. But to a certain extent Lyell has thrown his own work into the shade. The fame of his books causes his numerous scientific papers[175] to be overlooked; particularly his contributions to the history of coalfields and to the classification of the Tertiary deposits. Moreover, into these books he was constantly incorporating new and original matter. We may be fairly familiar with the "Principles" and the "Elements," but we fail to realise until we have read his "Life" and the accounts of his two tours in America how much those books are made up from the results of actual experience and personal study in the field. It has been also said that Lyell carried the principle of "uniformity" a little too far. But, suppose we concede this, does it amount to more than the admission that he was human? It is almost inevitable that the discoverer or prophet of a great truth, who has to encounter the storm and stress of controversy, should state his case a little too strongly, or should overlook some minor limitation. Suppose we grant that Lyell was a little too lavish in his estimate of the time at the disposal of geologists. The physicist had not then intervened, with arguments drawn from his own science, to insist that neither earth nor sun can reckon their years by myriads of myriads, and even now this controversy cannot be regarded as closed. Suppose we grant that in accepting Hutton's dictum, "I find in the earth no signs of a beginning," Lyell was misled by appearances,[176] which have since proved to be delusive, and that facts, so far as they go, point rather in the contrary direction. Well, this point also is not yet to be regarded as settled; and of one thing, at any rate, we may be sure, that if Lyell were now living he would frankly recognise new facts, as soon as they were established, and would not shrink from any modification of his theory which these might demand. Great as were his services to geology, this, perhaps, is even greater--for the lesson applies to all sciences and to all seekers after knowledge--that his career, from first to last, was the manifestation of