Charles Lyell

English geologist

• Born: November 14, 1797
• Birthplace: Kinnordy, Kirriemuir, Forfarshire, Scotland
• Died: February 22, 1875
• Place of death: London, England

One of the most important physical scientists of the nineteenth century, Lyell gave shape to the emerging science of geology with his theory of uniformitarianism, explaining past change from currently observable causes.

Early Life

Sir Charles Lyell (LI-ehl) was born into a substantial London mercantile and naval family while his parents were staying on a Scottish estate, Kinnordy. The family spent the years of young Charles’s boyhood in the south of England, where his father, also Charles, engaged in the gentlemanly pursuit of botanical collecting, especially of mosses. His father was a member of the Linnean Society and corresponded with many of the leading scientific men of the time.

Sickly as a boy, Lyell received a private grammar school education and matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1816. He acquired a standard classical education, receiving his B.A., with second-class honors, in 1819. In the same year, he moved to London to read law at Lincoln’s Inn. He was called to the bar in 1822 and practiced law intermittently during the remainder of the 1820’s. In London, he made a name for himself in broader intellectual circles as a regular contributor to the Quarterly Review. In 1826 alone, he provided examinations of the English university question, scientific institutions, and reviews of geology. Of medium height, with a large forehead and a slim build, he presented the gentlemanly exterior of proper dress and the demeanor of a young man of society, although his lifelong problem with weak eyes forced him to wear a squinting quizzical expression.

Lyell’s geological reviews in the Quarterly Review reveal the increasingly central role that geology was playing in his life. His interest, aroused by William Buckland’s mineralogy and geology lectures at Oxford in 1817 and 1818, had been supplemented by bits of geologizing with family friends, in Scotland, the south of England, and the Swiss Alps in 1818. Graduation from Oxford and his move to London brought him membership in the Geological Society of London and the Linnean Society in 1819.

Gradually, as Lyell’s interest in geology changed from an avocation to a committed vocation, he became secretary of the Geological Society from 1823 to 1826 and in 1826 was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Visits to France and geologizing in the Paris Basin with Constant Prévost in 1823, and Prévost’s return visit in 1824, brought Lyell closer to the heart of specialized geology. It also led to his first Geological Society paper in 1824, in which he noted the equivalency of freshwater limestones in the Paris Basin to new limestones deposited in Scottish lakes. In his 1826 articles in the Transactions of the Geological Society in the Quarterly Review, he tentatively began theorizing about the nature of geological change.

During the 1820’s, an amateur making original contributions to geology was not unusual. Geology was still in its Baconian, gentlemanly tradition of collecting and observing, with plenty of room for the gifted amateur. Although little theoretical framework for geology was accepted or recognized, a consensus existed that the Earth’s geological past could be unraveled and ordered. This stratigraphic ordering was based on the agreement that superposition, the sequence or succession of rock strata appearing in the order in which they were deposited, the youngest at the top and the oldest at the bottom, indicated the relative age of each stratum.

This stratigraphic concept was combined with the ideas of William Smith and his map of 1816, showing that each stratum’s different characteristic fossils also indicated relative age. The Geological Society of London had been founded in 1807 on the basis of this empirical, rather than theoretical, consensus, consciously shunning theorizing and stressing observation. Most geologists agreed that the science had been hindered by the extravagant assertions of systems-builders, such as Abraham Gottlob Werner in Germany and James Hutton of Scotland, who seemed to place theory above field experience.

By the late 1820’s, Lyell was planning a popular “Conversations on Geology” to satisfy his geological and monetary needs. When he reviewed George Scrope’s Memoir on the Geology of Central France (1827), however, the book focused his attention on the Auvergne in Central France, where a complex series of lava flows seemed to offer a unique key to geological forces and successions. In 1828, Lyell visited the Auvergne with Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, a retired army officer and amateur geologist who had taken up geology in part to satisfy his craving for outdoor activity and to supplement his passion for hunting.

Viewing the continually reexcavated river beds and successive lava flows suggested to Lyell analogies between past and present geological actions. From France, on what he called the best and longest geological tour he ever made—one that “made me what I am in theoretical geology”—he traveled to Italy with Murchison and then alone to southern Italy and Sicily. Struck by the number of fossil shells of living Mediterranean species, Lyell realized that one could order the Tertiary, or most recent, rocks according to the proportional relationship of living to extinct species. He also saw that past changes in land levels in the area of volcanic Mount Etna could be explained by analogy to present forces. The Italian trip forced him to change the scope of “Conversations on Geology” from a brief popular exposition to a major work.

Life’s Work

By January, 1830, Lyell had clarified his ideas and published the first volume of Principles of Geology . This work presents a picture of the geological past as essentially uniform and explicable by analogy to currently operating forces. Lyell found no need for extravagantly violent alterations in forces and rejected the explanation adopted by the Catastrophists, who relied on irregular major convulsive change. Part of the basis of Catastrophism was the need to fit the biblical Flood, or deluge, into geological history (thus their alternative designation, Diluvialists). Lyell instead offered a picture of gradual, cumulative change in a uniform process; thus, his doctrine is called Uniformitarianism . He rejected any effort to explain the beginnings of the world, returning to the famous dictum of Hutton that no vestige of a beginning could be found.

To present a convincing argument, Lyell had to solve a number of problems, the first of which was climatic change. Most older fossils seemed to indicate a past tropical climate much warmer than the climate of Lyell’s England. Most geologists explained the anomaly through the central heat theory, referring to an Earth formed out of fire and then cooling, such that the climate as a whole was slowly cooling over time. Lyell argued that climate was a local and variable phenomenon, dependent on relations of land and sea masses, showing that as the proportion of land and sea varied with uplifting and subsidence of land, climate varied around a stable norm, providing quite different climates and physical environments over time.

Volume 1 of Principles of Geology was an immediate popular success, with more than half the original edition sold by November, 1830. It met with less enthusiasm from the Catastrophists. Adam Sedgwick, in his 1831 presidential address to the Geological Society, pointed to the recent theory of Élie de Beaumont of France that mountain chains had been thrown up in parallel lines by great convulsions. Sedgwick then dismissed Lyell’s theories and supported those of de Beaumont, because Lyell’s work seemed to set out from deductive assumptions rather than empirical fieldwork.

In the second volume of Principles of Geology, which appeared in January, 1832, Lyell examined patterns left by living forms over geological time. If the stratigraphic record was to be intimately tied to the fossil record, then changes in life-forms over time had to be explained for fossils to be accurately used as indices. Because each successive formation displayed a gradually changing mix of different fossils, Lyell had to explain how the characteristic life-forms of each geological epoch had changed. He argued that species were discrete entities and rejected Lamarck’s idea of continual transmutation and plasticity in favor of regular and periodic extinction of species. Then, as landforms and environments altered over time, some species would become extinct from the loss of suitable environment. Changing methods of rock deposition in marine or fresh waters and thus differing environments could explain gaps in the fossil record without reference to periodic catastrophes. The problem of the replacement of extinct species by new and different species remained an unsolved puzzle for Lyell.

The third volume of Principles of Geology appeared in 1833. While Lyell addressed some of his critics, the bulk of the volume was devoted to the direct application of the principles of the first two volumes to the rocks of the Tertiary. To divide the Tertiary, he introduced a new terminology, based on the proportional relationship of extinct to existing fossil forms. He also offered the names Eocene (dawn, recent), Miocene (less, recent), and newer and older Pliocene (more, larger, recent) to identify the succeeding epochs.

Principles of Geology propelled Lyell into the public and scientific eye. Revising it became the work of a lifetime. “Indeed,” he once wrote, “I sometimes think I am in danger of becoming perpetual editor to myself.” Over the next forty years, twelve editions appeared, each thoroughly revised and updated to reflect Lyell’s own work and the work of his colleagues. In 1838, he published Elements of Geology , a work based on the theory of Principles of Geology but emphasizing the descriptive and practical. Elements of Geology became the first true geological textbook. With most of the purely descriptive material relegated to Elements of Geology, Principles of Geology remained his theoretical tour de force.

In 1832, in the forefront of his specialty, Lyell became professor of geology at King’s College, London. He delivered only two series of lectures before resigning in 1834. The pressure of constant fieldwork and controversy prevented sufficient attention to the university. He made trips to the Pyrenees in 1830 to examine de Beaumont’s theory of mountain building and to Sweden in 1834 to investigate the uplift of the lands of Scandinavia.

In 1832, Lyell married Mary Elizabeth Horner, daughter of Leonard Horner, a fellow of the Geological Society. A marriage tour of the Rhine, Switzerland, and France showed that he had married a woman with a fascination for and insight into geology. She became a skilled conchologist who helped him in his work, especially because of his weak eyes, often writing for him. Recognition and honors were heaped upon Lyell. In 1834, he received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society. From 1834 to 1836, and again in 1849, he served as president of the Geological Society. In 1848, Lyell was knighted by Queen Victoria, and through his friendship with Prince Albert he was named a commissioner of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

In 1841, Lyell stepped onto a new stage. He sailed for the first of four trips to North America. In the United States, he presented the Lowell Lectures in Boston, visited Benjamin Silliman at Yale, and toured New York State with James Hall of the New York Geological Survey. He was particularly struck by Niagara Falls and the possibility that the recession of the falls presented for explaining the passage of geological time.

Along the border of New York and Pennsylvania, Lyell was able to study the Devonian rocks, subject of a controversy then raging in England. After touring in the southern states, Lyell attended the spring, 1842, meeting of the American Association of Geologists and Naturalists in Boston. Finally, a tour of British North America took him through the St. Lawrence Valley and ended in the coal fields of Nova Scotia, where he met an enthusiastic young geologist, John William Dawson . Lyell’s collaboration with and encouragement of Dawson would help him become one of the two greatest geologists of nineteenth century Canada. The trip was capped by the appearance of his two-volume work Travels in North America with Geological Observations on the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia in 1845.

Lyell returned to North America in 1845, concentrating his attention on the Tertiary rocks of the South. His observations were published in Second Visit to the United States of North America in 1849. Lyell briefly visited a third time in 1852, when he worked in the South Joggins coal formations of Nova Scotia with Dawson. His final visit was in 1853, when he served as one of the British commissioners to the New York Industrial Exhibition, working closely again with Hall.

After an 1853-1854 visit to the island Madeira, Lyell concentrated on the species question. While studying the Madeira fossils, he was struck by the large number and variety of species, a discovery analogous to Charles Darwin’s at the Galápagos Islands. Noting that every species must have come into existence near in time and place to closely allied species, Lyell began a series of seven notebooks solely devoted to the subject.

This new focus brought him back into intimate contact with Darwin. In 1836, after Darwin had returned from his expedition on the Beagle, a working and personal friendship developed with Lyell. Initially, the relationship was one of Lyell as mentor and Darwin as student, for Darwin had used a copy of Principles of Geology on his expedition. Darwin’s first published work after his return explicitly used and expanded Lyell’s ideas. In his 1837 presentation to the Geological Society, Darwin argued for the elevation of South America through successive earthquake and volcanic action rather than a single convulsive upheaval. At the same time, Darwin presented a new theory of coralreefs, applying Lyellian principles, as the remnants of subsiding mountains, rather than Lyell’s specific theory that they represented the tops of submerged volcanoes. This forced Lyell to alter his ideas, for as he wistfully recognized, “I must give up my volcanic crater theory for ever, though it costs me a pang at first, for it accounted for so much.”

By 1856, Lyell consulted regularly with Darwin and urged him to publish his ideas promptly on the transmutation of species though natural selection, particularly after the revelation that Alfred Russel Wallace had come independently to the idea of natural selection and might forestall Darwin. Lyell and Joseph Hooker were instrumental in presenting both Darwin’s and Wallace’s ideas to the Linnean Society in July, 1858, and in impelling Darwin to publish his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859.

Although the Madeira species caused Lyell tentatively to accept Darwinian ideas of transmutation, he was unwilling to commit himself to the theory. Discovery of mammal remains in the supposedly reptile-dominated rocks of the Secondary epoch raised doubts about the change in species. Moreover, discovery of human-crafted implements in the later Pliocene deposits of France, shell mounds in Denmark, Lake Dwellings in Switzerland, and an apparently human skull at Neanderthal in Germany all focused Lyell’s attention on the specific question of human origins.

Lyell’s investigations culminated in 1863 with the publication of The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man . In a tightly argued exposition, Lyell presented the evidence for a common parentage for human beings and the long period of time necessary for their development. He presented the evidence and then left his readers to reach their own conclusions; while the book offered a powerful argument in support of Darwin, Lyell did not make his support for Darwin explicit. Darwin was disappointed in the lukewarm support, but as Lyell explained to him in an 1863 letter,

I have spoken out to the utmost extent of my tether, so far as my reason goes, and farther than my imagination and sentiment can follow, which I suppose has caused occasional incongruities.

By 1864, however, Lyell expressed his full and unalloyed support for Darwin. The tenth edition of Principles of Geology, which appeared in 1868, was revised around a specifically Darwinian explanation for the transmutation of species.

Significance

Sir Charles Lyell died on February 22, 1875, and was interred in Westminster Abbey, the final recognition for an illustrious career. The last years of his life had been marked by continuous honors. In 1864 he was made a baronet and elected president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Other honors included the Royal and Copley medals of the Royal Society and the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society.

Lyell had provided the broad intellectual framework within which geology progressed in the nineteenth century. Principles of Geology is an enduring landmark in geology. In arguing for a geological past that changed through small, cumulative change, Lyell had defeated his Catastrophist opponents who supposed that nature changed primarily through violent and discontinuous means. His uniformitarian geology had provided a flexible model for research, as he demonstrated through his constant revision of Principles of Geology. He never abandoned the principles of uniformitarianism yet demonstrated a remarkable willingness to alter specific conclusions when presented with contradictory evidence.

Lyell always stood somewhat outside the geological establishment of Great Britain, with its central concern for the Baconian tradition. While Murchison and Sedgwick were crafting their Devonian, Silurian, and Cambrian systems in a practical, hands-on way within the stratigraphic consensus, Lyell was building his uniformitarian system.

Lyell also served as a link between British and North American geology, cross-fertilizing both. Lyell had brought the best of British geology directly to North America, which was then only beginning geological surveys and investigations. Through his books and papers for the Geological Society, he brought the new phenomena of North America back to Great Britain.

Fostering, aiding, and abetting Darwin, first as mentor and then as follower, Lyell contributed to a momentous scientific development in the nineteenth century. The personal scientific relationship was fruitful for both men, while Lyell’s uniformitarian geological framework and analysis of fossil life changes were key to Darwin’s hypothesis.

Bibliography

Bolles, Edmund Blair. The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999. Describes how interactions between Lyell, natural historian Louis Agassiz, and poet Elisha Kent Kane created public acceptance for the idea of an ice age.

Gillispie, Charles Coulston. Genesis and Geology. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951. Classic study of the “biblical” geology against which Lyell argued. May overstate the depth of biblical geology, but well worth studying for the interaction of science and religious views.

Gould, Stephen Jay. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. A revisionist account by the popular science writer, showing that Lyell’s conception of geological time was essentially static, in contrast to the modern sense of “deep” time with its unimaginable immensity. Scholarly but accessible, and engagingly written. Illustrated.

Klaver, J. M. I. Geology and Religious Sentiment: The Effect of Geological Discoveries on English Society and Literature Between 1829 and 1859. New York: Brill, 1997. Explores Lyell’s scientific and religious views about world antiquity and how these views were received by theologians, philosophers, poets, and novelists.

Lyell, Charles. The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. London: John Murray, 1863. Four editions down to 1873. Clearly written and argued. Although it does not explicitly support Darwin, the evidence seems to do so.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Life, Letters, and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell. Edited by K. M. Lyell. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1881. A classic Victorian life-and-letters approach, filled with fascinating insights. Lyell’s combative and epigrammatic style is allowed to come through.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1830-1833. Twelve editions down to 1875, in various formats and numbers of volumes. Widely available in many British and American editions, each of which is worth examining for his general theories. Remarkably easy to read, and written with an open and accessible style.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Travels in North America with Geological Observations on the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1845.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. A Second Visit to the United States of North America. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1849. These two two-volume works are filled with fascinating comments on the American social and political scene, particularly on the slavery question, as well as geological observations. Interesting for the observations of an intelligent British tourist.

North, Frederick J. Sir Charles Lyell: Interpreter of the Principles of Geology. London: A. Baker, 1965. Popular, brief biography that deals with the essential facts and ideas clearly. A good introduction to the subject.

Rudwick, Martin, J. S. The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge Among Gentlemanly Specialists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Densely factual history of an important geological controversy that provides a context for the geological atmosphere in which Lyell was working. Worth plowing through.

Wilson, Leonard G. Charles Lyell, the Years to 1841: The Revolution in Geology. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Lyell in America: Transatlantic Geology, 1841-1853. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. The first two volumes of a projected three-volume definitive biography. Detailed and a gold mine of information.