Charles Lyell

Charles Lyell, a Scottish geologist, made his mark by showing how everyday natural forces could explain Earth’s history. He’s most famous for his friendship with Charles Darwin and for writing *Principles of Geology* (1830–33), a book that convinced many people that the planet had been shaped by the same slow processes we see today, working at the same strength. The philosopher William Whewell called this gradual view “uniformitarianism,” setting it against “catastrophism,” the idea championed by Georges Cuvier and more popular in Europe at the time.

Lyell’s work covered a lot of ground. He offered an early explanation for climate change, arguing that shifting ocean and continent boundaries caused long-term shifts in temperature and rainfall. He also gave influential accounts of earthquakes and developed a theory of how volcanoes build up gradually. In stratigraphy, his division of the Tertiary period into the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene became highly influential. He was wrong about some things—he thought icebergs moved glacial erratics and that silty loess came from floodwaters. But his idea of a separate “Recent” period for human history laid the groundwork for today’s discussions about the Anthropocene.

Building on James Hutton and John Playfair, Lyell favored an Earth that was indefinitely old, even when evidence pointed to a long but finite age. He was a close friend of Charles Darwin and helped shape Darwin’s thinking on evolution. Darwin himself wrote in *On the Origin of Species* that anyone who read Lyell’s *Principles* and still didn’t grasp the vastness of geological time might as well close the book. Lyell also helped arrange the 1858 joint publication of papers by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on natural selection, despite his own religious doubts about the theory. Later, he used geology to estimate how long humans had been on Earth.

Lyell was born on 14 November 1797 at Kinnordy House, the family estate near Kirriemuir in Forfarshire, Scotland. He was the eldest of ten children. His father, also Charles Lyell, was a Dante scholar and translator, as well as a botanist who first introduced his son to nature. His grandfather, another Charles Lyell, made the family fortune supplying the Royal Navy at Montrose, which let him buy Kinnordy House. The estate sits in Strathmore, near the Highland Boundary Fault, with good farmland around it. Just a short distance northwest, across the fault, lie the Grampian Mountains. Lyell also spent much of his childhood at Bartley Lodge in the New Forest, Hampshire, a completely different geological and ecological setting.

He entered Exeter College, Oxford, in 1816, attending William Buckland’s geology lectures. He graduated with a second-class BA Honours in classics in December 1819 and earned his MA in 1821. After that, he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn in 1820, traveling through rural England where he could observe geology. In 1821, he attended Robert Jameson’s lectures in Edinburgh and visited Gideon Mantell in Lewes, Sussex. By 1823, he was joint secretary of the Geological Society. As his eyesight worsened, he switched to geology full-time. His first paper, “On a recent formation of freshwater limestone in Forfarshire,” came out in 1826. By 1827, he had left law behind and started a geological career that would bring him fame and widespread acceptance of uniformitarianism—a working out of ideas James Hutton had proposed decades earlier.

In 1832, Lyell married Mary Horner in Bonn, daughter of Leonard Horner, who was also connected to the Geological Society of London. They spent their honeymoon on a geological tour of Switzerland and Italy. During the 1840s, he traveled to the United States and Canada, writing two popular travel-and-geology books: *Travels in North America* (1845) and *A Second Visit to the United States* (1849). In 1866, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. After the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, he was among the first to donate books to help start the Chicago Public Library. He was also elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1841.

Lyell’s wife died in 1873. Two years later, in 1875, Lyell himself died while revising the twelfth edition of *Principles*. He is buried in Westminster Abbey, where a bust by William Theed stands in the north aisle. He was knighted in 1848 and made a baronet in 1864. He received the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 1858 and the Geological Society’s Wollaston Medal in 1866. Mount Lyell, the highest peak in Yosemite National Park, is named after him, as are craters on the Moon and Mars. There is also a Mount Lyell in western Tasmania, Australia, located in a profitable mining area.