The geologist who taught Darwin to think in deep time
Charles Lyell argued that the forces shaping Earth today, erosion, earthquakes and volcanoes working at ordinary rates, could explain its entire history if given enough time. His Principles of Geology persuaded a broad public of vast ages, and Darwin said anyone who read it yet doubted the immensity of past time might as well close his book.
Born on 14 November 1797 at Kinnordy House near Kirriemuir, the eldest of ten children, Lyell grew up partly beside the Highland Boundary Fault, where farmland meets the Grampian Mountains, and partly in Hampshire's New Forest. His father, a botanist and translator of Dante, introduced him to nature. At Oxford he attended William Buckland's geology lectures, yet he trained in law. Failing eyesight pushed him toward geology full time; he presented his first paper in 1826 and had left law by 1827.
His Principles of Geology, published between 1830 and 1833, built on the ideas of James Hutton and John Playfair. The philosopher William Whewell labelled Lyell's view uniformitarianism, contrasting it with the catastrophism favoured by Georges Cuvier and more popular in Europe. Lyell also offered an early explanation of long-term climate change based on shifting coastlines, influential accounts of earthquakes and volcano growth, and a division of the Tertiary into the Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene that stuck. He got some things wrong, supposing icebergs moved glacial boulders and that loess settled out of floodwater, and he held out for an indefinitely old Earth. His separate 'Recent' period for human history is often cited as a forerunner of the Anthropocene debate.
Lyell was a close friend of Charles Darwin and shaped his thinking. Despite religious reservations about natural selection, he helped arrange the joint presentation of papers by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, and later published geological evidence for the antiquity of humankind.
In 1832 he married Mary Horner in Bonn and spent the honeymoon on a geological tour of Switzerland and Italy. Trips to North America in the 1840s produced two popular travel books. Sweden's Royal Academy of Sciences elected him a foreign member in 1866 and, after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, was among the first to donate books toward the city's public library. He died on 22 February 1875.
Source: Charles Lyell
