Charles Lyell
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Image:CharlesLyell.jpg Image:Lyell Principles frontispiece.jpg Sir Charles Lyell (November 14, 1797 – February 22, 1875), British lawyer, geologist, and popularizer of uniformitarianism.
Charles Lyell was born in Kinnordy, Forfarshire, Scotland, the eldest of ten children. Lyell's father, also named Charles, was a botanist of minor repute and first exposed the younger Charles to the study of nature. Charles spent much of his childhood at the family’s other home, Bartley lodge in the New Forest, where his interest in the natural world was sparked. Having attended Exeter College, Oxford ending in 1816, Lyell encountered geology as a serious profession under the wing of William Buckland. Upon graduation he took a professional detour into the law, but dabbled in geology. His first paper, "On a Recent Formation of Freshwater Limestone in Forfarshire", was presented in 1822. By 1827 he had abandoned the law and embarked on a long geological career that would result in the widespread acceptance of the ideas proposed by James Hutton a few decades before.
During the 1840s, he travelled to the United States and Canada, which resulted in his writing two popular travel-and-geology books: 1845's Travels in North America and A Second Visit to the United States (from 1849).
He won the Copley Medal in 1858 and the Wollaston Medal in 1866.
Upon his death in 1875, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Lyell crater on the Moon and a crater on Mars were named in his honour.
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Career and Major Writings
Image:Charles Lyell - Project Gutenberg eText 16935.jpg Virtually alone among leading British geologists of his era, Lyell supported himself by writing books about his scientific work. He came from a prosperous family, worked briefly as a lawyer in the 1820s, and held the post of Professor of Geology at University College London in the 1830s, but from 1830 onward his books provided both a comfortable living and growing fame. Each of his three major books was a work continually in progress. All three went through multiple editions during his lifetime, and Lyell used almost every edition as an opportunity to incorporate additional material, rearrange existing material, and revisit old conclusions in light of new evidence. These frequent, substantial revisions added significant value to new editions of Lyell's books, and helped to ensure robust sales to both the scientific community and the general public.
Principles of Geology, Lyell's first book, was also his most famous, most influential, and most important. First published in three volumes in 1830-33, it established Lyell's credentials as an important geological theorist. This book was a major inspiration for Charles Darwin during his voyage on the Beagle where much of what Lyell proposed was able to be seen.
Elements of Geology began as the fourth volume of the third edition of Principles: A systematic, factual description of geological formations of different ages. The material grew so unwieldy, however, that Lyell split it off into a single volume under the Elements title in 1838. The book went through six editions, eventually growing to two volumes and ceasing to be the inexpensive, portable handbook that Lyell had originally envisioned. Late in his career, therefore, Lyell produced a condensed version titled Student's Elements of Geology that fulfilled the original purpose.
Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man brought together Lyell's views on three key themes from the geology of the Quaternary Period of Earth history: glaciers, evolution, and the age of the human race. First published in 1863, it went through three editions that year, with a fourth and final edition appearing in 1873.
Scientific Contributions
Lyell's geological interests ranged from volcanoes and geological dynamics through stratigraphy, paleontology and glaciology to topics that would now be classified as prehistoric archaeology and paleoanthropology. He is best known, however, for his role in popularising the doctrine of uniformitarianism.
Uniformitarianism
From 1830 to 1833 his multi-volume Principles of Geology was published. The work's subtitle was "An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation", and this explains Lyell's impact on science. He was, along with the earlier John Playfair, the major advocate of the then-controversial idea of uniformitarianism, that the earth was shaped entirely by slow-moving forces acting over a very long period of time. This was in contrast to catastrophism, a geologic idea that went hand-in-hand with age of the earth as implied by biblical chronology. In various revised editions (twelve in all, through 1872), Principles of Geology was the most influential geological work in the middle of the 19th century, and did much to put geology on a modern footing. For his efforts he was knighted in 1848, then made a baronet in 1864.
Volcanoes and Geological Dynamics
Stratigraphy
Lyell's most important specific work was in the field of stratigraphy. In 1828, he travelled to the south of France and to Italy, where he realised that the recent strata could be categorised according to the number and proportion of marine shells encased within. Based on this he proposed dividing the Tertiary period into three parts, which he named the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene.
Glaciers
Evolution
Charles Darwin was a close personal friend, and Lyell was one of the first prominent scientists to support The Origin of Species—though he never fully accepted natural selection as the driving engine behind evolution. In fact, Lyell was instrumental in arranging the peaceful co-publication of the theory of natural selection by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, after each discovered it independently. Lyell's own The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man followed a few years later in 1863.
External links
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