The trip of Lafayette through this country in the twenties was more or less spectacular, and the places he visited are to-day pointed out as historic, yet only twenty years later Lyell, whose name will go down the ages linked with Goethe, Lamarck, and Darwin, covered much the same ground, and it is only in scientific works that one is reminded of the fact. In recent reading, after meeting with several references to his stay in Alabama, I became interested, and it was with intense delight that I was carried back and saw our own section through the eyes of that wonderful observer and thinker. All awe of Charles Lyell, scientist and arch-destroyer of the anthropocentric idea which for so many centuries fettered the world of thought, was at once dispelled, for there was that in his charming geniality that makes the “whole world kin”--even a Charles Lyell and the pine-woods squatter, whose hospitality he often accepted when on geologic excursions. Lyell made two trips to the United States--the first in 1841-42, which furnished material for his _Travels in North America_. He came as far south as Savannah. His _Travels in the United States_ is the record of his second visit, when Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana formed a part of his itinerary. Aside from the geologic importance of these two works, there could scarcely be a more faithful portrayal of American manners, customs, and peculiarities. They were largely instrumental in ameliorating British animosity by giving the English a better and kindlier understanding of Americans. At the time of their publication, they naturally found in this country a circulation only among the few, and are now rare books. His observations on the social conditions that made the South unique and that have been obliterated during the lapse of a half century are deeply interesting to the student of to-day. [Illustration: Kazoola.] On January 15, 1846, we find Lyell and his wife entering Macon, Georgia, by train. His eye was immediately attracted by “a wooden edifice of very peculiar structure and picturesque form, crowning one of the hills.” Learning that it was a blockhouse that had been in real service as a fort against Indians only twenty-five years before, when this frontier knew not the white man’s habitat, it was with a mixed feeling of amusement and incongruity that he received the information that a conspicuous building nearby was a “female seminary, lately established by the Methodists, where all young ladies take degrees.”