At the time of Lyell’s visit, Alabama lay struggling in the grasp of that spirit of unrest which from the most remote antiquity as often obsessed people of the Aryan race, calling them ever westwards towards the setting sun. Everywhere he met “movers”--Texas masking as the Promised Land, beckoning to the cultured as to the ignorant. Adventure prompted many, others knew not why they were going, some were “eaten out by their negroes,” and one informant said: “If we remain here, we are reduced to the alternative of high taxes to pay the interest of money so improvidently borrowed from England, or to suffer the disgrace of repudiation, which would be doubly shameful, because the money was received in hard cash, and lent out, often rashly by the State to farmers for agricultural improvements. Besides, all the expenses of the Government were in reality defrayed during several years by borrowed money and the burthen of the debt thrown on posterity. The facility with which your English capitalists, in 1821, lent their cash to a State from which the Indians were not yet expelled without reflecting on the migratory nature of the white population is astonishing. The planters, who got the grants of your money and spent it, have nearly all of them moved off and settled beyond the Mississippi.” But Lyell had faith in Alabama’s natural resources, which he felt were so great that only a moderate amount of economy would be necessary to surmount all embarrassments. Texas and the probability of war with England over the Oregon Question were topics discussed on every hand. Lyell would hear the English adversely criticized and such boasts as “we have whipped them twice, and should whip them a third time,” but where his nationality was known, he says, “never once were any speeches, uncourteous in their tone towards my country, uttered in my hearing.” On his geologizing trips, which would have oftentimes been hard on any one not riding his own hobby, he was forced to stop where night overtook him, so that even the habits of the “crackers” became familiar to him. “In many houses I hesitated to ask for water or towels, for fear of giving offense ... nor could I venture to ask any one to rub a thick coat of mud off my trousers, lest I should be thought to reflect on members of the family, who had no idea of indulging in such luxuries themselves. I felt the want of a private bed-room, but very soon came to regard it as a privilege to be allowed even a bed to myself.” In his wanderings, he also met “clay-eaters”[27]--a people curious in their cravings for certain kinds of clay. Their peculiar green complexion indicating anemia, which usually terminates in dropsy, was formerly considered a sequence to the gratification of this abnormal appetite, but is now supposed to be a result of a pathogenic parasite found in the small intestine.[28] The type is still a most familiar one in the hill-country just west of Mobile.