He crossed the river to visit the Blounts at Woodlawn. Leaving his wife with Mrs. Blount, he went with Mr. Blount by carriage to Clarksville, where the enormous fossil zeuglodons had been found. “The district we passed through was situated in the fork of the Alabama and Tombeckbee rivers, where the aboriginal forest was only broken here and there by a few clearings. At Macon my attention was forcibly called to the newness of things by my friend’s pointing out to me the ground where there had been a bloody fight with the Choctaws and Chickasaws, and how the clerk of the Circuit Court was the last survivor of those who had won the battle.” The Indian paths, still tractable through the forests near Tuscaloosa, awakened the same feeling. On his return he and his wife crossed to Claiborne to await the Mobile steamer, and he expresses his pleasure at finding it, the _Amaranth_, commanded by his “old friend Captain Bragdon.” Reaching Mobile, the Tuscaloosa steamer was ready to start, so they were soon northward bound on the Tombeckbee, then so high “that the trees of both banks seemed to be growing in a lake.” Arriving at Tuscaloosa where there was a “flourishing college” he was met by Mr. Brumley, the professor of chemistry who at once conducted him to the outlying coal-fields. He found the coal, even of the strata exposed to the surface to be “excellent quality and highly bituminous.” Here there is a bit of justification in Huxley’s criticism of Lyell’s aversion “to look beyond the veil of stratified rocks,” for while he notes with seeming satisfaction the imprints of the fossil plants in the black shale to be exactly the same as those existing in the “ancient coal-measures of Europe and America,” there is no foreshadowing of the explanation given by recent geology and astronomy, that even as late as the early carboniferous era, there were no seasons, the earth being wrapped in a uniform, vaporous warmth greater than the heat now existing in the tropics; a heat which came not from the sun, but the earth itself. One proof lies in the fact that irrespective of latitude, the same organic remains are found--their nearest of kin of to-day living only in the tropics; also that there are no rings of annual growth in carboniferous tree-life. Lyell and Professor Brumley extending their wanderings, “entered about thirty-three miles northeast of Tuscaloosa a region called Rooke’s Valley, where rich beds of iron-stone and lime-stone bid fair, by their proximity to the coal, to become one day a source of great mineral wealth.” He was not only indebted to Professor Brumley for much scientific information, but also to Mr. Bernard, the teacher of astronomy, who showed him some “double stars and constellations not visible in England,”--the telescope a recent acquisition from London. Mrs. Lyell also made many friends in Tuscaloosa, among them two ladies who were reading as a “pastime Goethe and Schiller in the original.”