A Second Visit to the United States of North America…in Two Volumes.
London: John Murray, 1849.
Price: $500.00
About the item
First Edition. xii, 368; xii, 385 pp. 2 vols. 12mo. Original cloth, rebacked. Some rubbing to tips. A clean, tight copy. Howes L 574; Sabin 42763; Clark III, 352.
Item #38376
In September of 1845 Lyell returned to America, and after a trip to Maine and the mountains of New Hampshire, travelled extensively through the South. He stayed for two weeks on a Georgia plantation on the Altamaha River, crossed that state partly by handcar in order to collect rocks and fossils in the grade cuts along the way, went to Claiborne on the Alabama River where he collected more fossils, then to Montgomery and Mobile along the Alabama, Mobile, Tombigbee, and Black Warrior Rivers. From Mobile he went up the Tombigbee River to Tuscaloosa to visit the Alabama coal field, continuing by steamboat to New Orleans, where Lyell made an expedition to the mouth of the Mississippi River to study the growth of the delta. From there he went up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers by steamboat, then overland to Philadelphia. After a quick trip to Richmond, Virginia to re-examine the coal deposits there, he sailed from Boston to Liverpool on June 1, 1846. “Lyell’s description of the coastal islands of the southeastern coast, erosion, topography, and fossils in Georgia and Alabama are an important contribution…, while his detaled observations of the Mississippi Valley from the delto to the mouth of the Ohio River equal or excell the accounts of other travelers…” -- Clark.
