From Tuscaloosa to Mobile Lyell had splendid chances of studying the geological character of the country, and he frequently expresses appreciation of the courtesy and assistance always given him throughout Alabama, contrasting it with the “ignorant wonder” the fossil hunter inspires in unfrequented districts of England, France, and Italy. He was anxious to examine the calcareous bluff at St. Stephen’s. Night fell before they reached it, but Captain Lavargy stopped, said he could take on wood, gave him a boat and two negroes bearing pine torches, thus making it possible for him to thoroughly explore the whole cliff and find many fossils. [Illustration: Zooma, the Last Tarkbar.] Mobile again claims him on February 21, 1846, and flaunts her spring forwardness by touches of green on the cypress and cotton trees, and scarlet seed-vessels on the rubra. “In the gardens there were jonquils and snow-drops in flower, and for the first time, we saw that beautiful evergreen, the yellow-jessamine, in full bloom, trailed along the wall of Dr. Hamilton’s house.” Anxious for his first sight of the Gulf of Mexico, he drove with Dr. Hamilton, the Presbyterian minister, to the light-house (situated on Choctaw Point and washed away by the storm of 1852), and, from the tower had a “splendid view of the city to the North, and to the South the noble bay of Mobile, fourteen miles across.” He then went to the bay which lay “smooth and unruffled, the woods coming down everywhere to its edge.” He noted the immense amount of driftwood, dug up bivalve-shelled gnathodons that live in our mud-banks, and that will in future ages indicate the position of our rivers. He found Mobile to be built upon a deposit of these shells, the stratification of which proved that it had been thrown up by the waves. Our delta, in the soft mud of which cattle are frequently mired and which receives carcasses washed down by the rivers and thrown up by the sea, exemplifies the formation of such regions as the Fayûm of Egypt--the elephant’s ancestral home--now covered by desert sands, but which is each day yielding priceless treasure to the paleontologist. On February 23d, the _James L. Day_, bound for New Orleans, “sailed out of the beautiful bay of Mobile in the evening,” carrying aboard Charles Lyell and his wife.