At Charleston they had practically passed beyond the southern limit of the winter snowfall, the greatest enemy of the field-geologist, and could carry on work without fear of interruption. Here they found flowers "at the end of December still lingering in the gardens," and were in the region of the palmetto palm. Few things during this rather lengthy journey impressed Lyell more than the facility of locomotion in a district which, comparatively speaking, was a new settlement, and was still in places thinly peopled, together with the general good quality of the accommodation for travellers. In this respect they had fared much worse during the previous year, when they were travelling through some of the more populous parts of France, such as Touraine and Brittany. After a journey through the pinewoods, they reached Augusta in Georgia, where another group of Tertiary deposits invited a halt. Those belonging to the Eocene period lie further down the Savannah River, so that a journey was made for the purpose of examining them, in the course of which, near the town of the same name as the river, Lyell also saw the clay in which remains of the mastodon and of other extinct mammals had been found. The muddy beach, with the tracks of racoons and opossums, gave him some hints as to the history of fossil footprints, so that on the whole very much interesting geology was the reward of a three weeks' stay in South Carolina. Then they once more turned their faces northward, and made their way, working at geology as they went, to Philadelphia, where they found themselves again in the region of colder winters at the present, and of erratic boulders as memorials of the past. Six weeks were spent in Philadelphia, but Lyell's time was largely taken up by the delivery of a short course of lectures on geology. Pennsylvania, however, added to his experiences in another way, for the state had passed through a commercial crisis, and was unable to pay the interest on its funded debt. The soreness produced by this repudiation will not be readily forgotten, for nearly two-thirds of the stock--the whole amount of which was eight millions sterling--was held by British owners, so that the loss was felt heavily on this side of the Atlantic. In his "Travels" Lyell gives a brief history of this transaction, and discusses the political causes of a crisis which had been hardly less disastrous in America than in England.