Finding a number of expensive books in his father’s library on entomology, with beautiful plates in them, the boy’s common sense told him that somebody prized all this knowledge, and that it must be valuable. Oddly enough, he took to reading Linnæus for descriptions of insects, and hunted up pictures of his captured butterflies in the plates of the more modern authors. Recovered in health, and fairly strong, Lyell was sent at thirteen years of age to school at Dr. Bayley’s, preparatory to being sent to the great school at Winchester. The new school was at Midhurst, in Sussex, and it had all the demerits of the schools of the day, fighting, fagging, and bullying being rampant. Lyell came off well, although a weak and short-sighted boy. Nevertheless, he stated that the method of teaching got rid of “most of my natural antipathy to work and extreme absence of mind, and I acquired habits of attention, which were, however, painful to me, and only sustained when I had an object in view.” It is evident that at this time, 1811-1813, Lyell’s heart was not altogether in his classics and mathematics, and that he was reading other subjects which were more pleasing to him. At the early age of seventeen, Lyell entered Exeter College, Oxford, and whilst working fairly well at his studies, cultivated music, and entered thoroughly into all the politics and literary fellowships of the undergraduates. His love of nature persisted, and he began to direct his thoughts to the past, and to learn something about fossils. Thus he found out the house of Sowerby, the conchologist, by finding at the door an ammonite, well known to Oxford geologists. Subsequently, when on a visit to Mr. Dawson Turner, of Norwich, he met a Javanese traveller, Dr. Arnold. Mr. Dawson Turner had a fine collection of Norwich and Suffolk fossils. Lyell writes to his father to say, “I have copied for Buckland, part of his paper, being a list of those which are described, and shall copy the rest.” It appears that the seed was sown by attending a course of lectures on geology, at Oxford, given by the celebrated Dr. Buckland, and it is no little thing for that great university to be able to assert that its teaching developed the greatest system of geology ever brought forward. Lyell geologized over Norfolk, and in his conversations with his host and Dr. Arnold, it appeared that he had got hold of the idea, the elaboration of which is at the very bottom of his future great work. Lyell studied what is now in progress in nature so as to comprehend what occurred in the past times of the earth. Modern changes are the examples by which ancient changes can alone be studied. He quotes in a letter to his father, the following saying of Buckland and of White: “Local information, from actual observation, tends more to promote natural history science, than all that is done by the speculations and compilations of voluminous authors.” Dr. Arnold made collections of Norfolk fossils, and catalogued