submergence by floating ice and grounding bergs. After a few days' halt at Boston, they moved on to Newhaven, where Professor Silliman showed him dykes and intrusive sheets of columnar greenstone altering red sandstone, their general appearance and association recalling Salisbury Crags and other familiar sections near Edinburgh. In this district Lyell found the grasshoppers as numerous and as noisy as in Italy, watched the fireflies sparkling in the darkness, and had his first sight of a humming-bird, and of a wildflower hardly less gorgeous, the scarlet lobelia. From Newhaven they went to New York, and up the Hudson River in one of the great steamers, past the noble colonnade of basalt called the Palisades, and along the winding channel through the gneissic hills to Albany. Here a geological survey had been established by the State, and its members had already done good work, which, however, was not altogether welcome to its employers, for they had dispelled all hopes of finding coal within the limits of the State. This, as Lyell says, was a great disappointment to many; but it did good in checking the rashness of private speculation, and in preventing the waste of the large sums of money which had been annually squandered in trials to find coal in strata which really lay below the Carboniferous system. The advantage to the revenues of the state by the stoppage of this outlay and the more profitable direction given to private enterprise were sufficient, Lyell remarks, "to indemnify the country, on mere utilitarian grounds, for the sum of more than two hundred thousand dollars so munificently expended on geological investigation." From Albany Lyell travelled to Niagara. The journey was planned in order to give him an opportunity of examining a connected series of formations from the base of the Palæozoic, where it rested on the ancient gneiss, to the coalfield of Pennsylvania; and he had the great advantage of being accompanied by one of the most eminent of American geologists, Mr. James Hall. "In the course of this third tour," Lyell writes,[95] "I became convinced that we must turn to the New World if we want to see in perfection the oldest monuments of the earth's history, so far as relates to its earliest inhabitants. Certainly in no other country are these ancient strata developed on a grander scale, or more plentifully charged with fossils; and as they are nearly horizontal, the order of their relative position is always clear and unequivocal. They exhibit, moreover, in their range from the Hudson River to the Niagara some fine examples of the gradual manner in which certain sets of strata thin out when followed for hundreds of miles; while others, previously wanting, become intercalated in the series."