Reaching Montgomery, he remained there a few days examining the geologic formations and remains of that region. It was his intention to go directly to Tuscaloosa, only one hundred miles distant by land, but every one advised him that he would at that season save both time and money by taking an eight hundred mile trip down the Alabama River by boat to Mobile, and up again on the Tombigbee. The _Amaranth_ was scheduled to leave at ten o’clock, January 28, 1846. Accustomed to Northern punctuality, they went down on time, and learned with some annoyance that she might not sail until the next day. It was his first sight of our “magnificent Southern river boats.” He and Mrs. Lyell made up their minds to look on it as “their inn and read and write there” and were soon enjoying “its luxuries which Southern manners and a hot climate require.” He describes very fully the peculiar construction which adapts the boats to rivers which rise and fall rapidly. When recording that some of them could float in two feet of water, he adds, “but they cannot quite realize the boast of a western captain, that he could sail wherever it was damp.” It would be too much to write in detail of all the things which interested Lyell, for nothing seems to have escaped him. At each landing, however, he collected many cretaceous fossils, so concluded to stop a few days at Claiborne, whose bluff had long been known to geologists as “classic ground,” having already yielded four hundred species of tertiary shells, belonging to the Eocene formation. He notes, too, the finding of a fossil zeuglodon in the same cliff by Mr. Hale of Mobile. “The morning after our arrival, January 29th, the thermometer stood at eighty degrees F. in the shade, and the air was as balmy as an English summer day. Before the house stood a row of Pride-of-India trees ladened with bunches of yellow berries. I had often been told by the negroes that the American robin ‘got drunk’ on this fruit, and we now had an opportunity of witnessing its narcotic properties; for we saw some children playing with one of these birds before the house, having caught it after it had eaten freely of these berries. My wife, seeing that the robin was in no small danger of perishing, bought it of the children for some sugar-plums, and it soon revived in our room, and flew out of the window. In the evening we enjoyed a sight of one of those glorious sunsets, the beauty of which in these latitudes is so striking, when the clouds and sky are lighted up with streaks of brilliant yellow, red, and green, which, if a painter should represent faithfully, might seem as exaggerated and gaudy as the colors of an American forest in autumn when compared with European woods.”