There was a singular parallel between the early careers of these two men. Both were the sons of parents of ample means, and were thus freed from the distractions of a business or profession, while throughout life they alike remained exempt from family cares. Each of them received the ordinary education of the English upper classes--Scrope at Harrow, and Lyell at Salisbury, in a school conducted by a Winchester master on public-school lines. In due course, the two young men proceeded to the University--Scrope to Cambridge, to come under the influence of the sagacious and eloquent Sedgwick, and Lyell to Oxford, to catch inspiration from the enthusiastic but eccentric Buckland. On the opening up of the continent, by the termination of the French wars, each of the young men accompanied his family in a carriage-tour (as was the fashion of the time) through France, Switzerland and Italy; and both utilised the opportunities thus afforded them, to make long walking excursions for geological study. They both returned again and again to the continent for the purpose of geological research, and in the year 1825, at the age of 28, found themselves associated as joint-secretaries of the Geological Society. By this time they had arrived at similar convictions concerning the causes of geological phenomena--convictions which were in direct opposition to the views of their early teachers, and equally obnoxious to all the leaders of geological thought in the infant society which they had joined. [Illustration: G Poulett Scrope] It is interesting to note that each of these two young geologists arrived independently, _as the result of their own studies and observations_, at their conclusions concerning the futility of the prevailing catastrophic doctrines. This I am able to affirm, not only from their published and unpublished letters, but from frequent conversations I had with them in their later years. Scrope, who was slightly the elder of the two friends, spent a considerable time in that wonderful district of France--the Auvergne--in the year 1821, and though he had not seen the map and later memoirs of Desmarest, he pourtrayed the structure of the country in a series of very striking panoramic views, and was led, independently of the great French observer, to the same conclusions as his concerning the volcanic origin of the basalts and the formation of the valleys by river-action. Scrope was at that time equally ignorant of the views propounded both by Generelli and by Hutton.