also learned more about the geological effects of drifting ice in the last ten days than in all the Canadian tour.” Lyell returned to England, and, after a short rest, started for the north of Ireland. He wrote to his sister: “We have just returned from a walk over the grand pavement (Giant’s Causeway), the effect of which was as picturesque as the evening sun and some white breakers rolling and foaming over the black rocks could make it. Much as I have been pleased with the sight, it strikes me that there are parts of Staffa away from Fingal’s Cave, and which travellers have seldom leisure to visit, which are even finer in precisely the same style. The geology of Antrim is very interesting—so many formations, such as chalk, green sand, lias, new red—and the coal being represented by such distinctly characterized and yet such thin sets of strata, compared to the same groups elsewhere; and then the grand trap or basaltic mass covering and cutting through them all.” Often slightly political in his ideas, Lyell wrote much about the Irish peasantry, and spoke of them as the quick, obliging, and fine-looking natives of the Green Island. He remarked, in 1843, “One cannot help fearing that the anti-English spirit has sunk deep into the hearts of the millions here, for they read nothing but O’Connell’s newspapers, from which he artfully excludes, without appearing to them to do so, every other foreign or domestic topic of interest except repeal and Irish grievances—a great proportion of them now bygone.” He kept steadily at work preparing his American travels for publication, and in a note to a friend regarding the nature of coal, he instanced the swamps of Virginia. “The Virginian morasses allow, under a hot sun, great accumulations of black vegetable matter, nearly like peat, and which might make coal. The shade of _Cupressus distichi_, Thuya, and water oaks shut out the sun, and ferns and mosses draw in the damp air beneath, while the heat causes evaporation, and evaporation cold. One swamp which I saw is forty miles long by twenty broad. Thousands of prostrate trees are in the peat.” Some investigators held that the atmosphere must have contained a large amount of carbonic acid gas during the ages in which coal was being formed out of decaying vegetation, but Lyell, adhering to his strictly uniformitarian views, denied this, and considered the Virginian swamps to be explanatory of the formation of coal.