Lyell, Charles (1797–1875)

Charles Lyell was born in Kinnordy, Forfarshire, Scotland, on November14, 1797, the eldest of 10 children. His father guided his early studies of nature, but Lyell's formal education was received at Exeter College of Oxford University. While there, Lyell was influenced by the works of William Buckland, a geologist and paleontologist. After graduating in 1816, Lyell studied law, but by 1827 he had abandoned the profession to start a long, full-time career in geology. His writings would enhance the ideas proposed by James Hutton, a Scottish geologist considered by many to be the father of modern geology and noted for formulating the concepts of uniformitarianism, in his Theory of the Earth (1795) as well as the Plutonists' school of thought. Hutton's new theory was based on his observations that layers of sedimentary rocks, thrust up against other layers at various angles, pointed to the fact that layers had been deposited, transformed into rock, and then tilted only to have further deposition on top. He also proposed that the interior of the earth was hot and that the movement in this “heat engine” resulted in the formation of new rock. The presumption was that these tremendous displacements of rock happened gradually, requiring a vast amount of time to slowly produce the various topographies. A corollary to his argument was that the same geological processes at work today were in operation in the past, whereas the prevalent notion at the time was catastrophism, which stated that all rocks had precipitated out of an enormous flood in a very short time span. Hutton's view of the geology of the earth had “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

Lyell was also committed to this steady-state, nondirectional, and nonprogressive view of uniformitarianism. Changes were gradual and continuous, but with no direction. He rejected Hutton's thesis that the earth had been molten when it was first formed and that it was in the process of cooling. This denial posed a serious impediment by ignoring the relevance of astronomy and physics to historical geology.

From 1830 to 1833, Lyell published his three-volume Principles of Geology. The work's subtitle was An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation.However, it restricted all geological explanations to causes that can be observed in the present, ruling out any catastrophies because they are non-observable in the present, and therefore rejecting them as past events to explain the present formations. [Page 1504]Lyell believed in the uniformity of the laws of nature, as did the catastrophists. His position may be summarized by pointing out not only that geology was to restrict its hypotheses to the same kind of causes as those currently acting but also that the intensity of those causes is to be in the same range that currently exerts itself. This view of uniformitarianism rules out the possibility of a developmental theory of the earth.

Source: Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Lyell's Principles of Geology, and its many revisions, was the most influential geological work of its day and did much to lay the groundwork for the fledgling science of historical geology.

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