At seventeen young Lyell entered Exeter College, Oxford. He still devoted many hours to entomology, and took some honors in classics. A book, as is often the case, had already helped to shape his life. He had found and read, in his father's library, Bakewell's "Geology," and was greatly excited over the views there expressed about the antiquity of the earth. Dr. Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford, was then at the height of his fame, and Lyell at once attended a course of his lectures and took notes. College life was having its influence over the youth, for he wrote to his father: "It is the seeing the superiority of others that convinces one how much is to be and must be done to get any fame; and it is this which spurs the emulation, and feeds that 'Atmosphere of Learning,' which Sir Joshua Reynolds admirably describes as 'floating round all public institutions, and which even the idle often breathe in, and then wonder how they came by it.'" And yet Lyell, like most students, found it a difficult matter to decide what was best for a life-pursuit. His father wished him to study law. In reply, the son says: "As for the confidence and quickness which you were speaking of, as one of the chief requisites of the Bar, I don't know whether intercourse with the world will supply it, but God knows, I have little enough of it now in company." During his college course, Lyell made a journey with some friends to Staffa, and wrote a poem upon the place, and then, with his parents and his eldest sisters, travelled in France, Switzerland, and Italy. Here, in the midst of art and beautiful scenery, his mind still turned toward science. He thought the collections in comparative anatomy in the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, would tempt any one to "take up ardently the study of anatomy." In Cuvier's lecture-room, filled with fossil remains, he found "three glorious relics of a former world, which have added several new genera to the Mammalia." In the Jura chain he concluded the limestone to be "of a different age from what we passed through before Dijon, for the latter abounded in organic remains, whereas I could not discover one fossil in the Jura. By the roadside I picked up many beautiful petrifactions, which must be forming daily here, where the water is charged plentifully with lime." "The rock of the Col de Balme," he said, "is a brown, ligneous slate, with some veins of white quartz intersecting it: the appearance is very curious. On the top was the richest carpet of turf I ever saw, spangled with thousands of the deep blue gentian, red trefoil, and other mountain flowers." Nothing said about law, but much about rocks! At twenty-two Lyell graduated from Oxford. The same year he became a Fellow of the Geological Society of London, and also of the Linnæan Society, and, in accordance with his father's preference, began the study of law in London.