Scottish geologist Charles Lyell was one of the foremost scientists of his Victorian era, and a strong influence on other scientists such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Florentino Angelino. The son of a naturalist, his first hobby was butterflies. He entered Oxford at 19, earning a B.A. with honors in 1819 before moving to London to study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1825.
In 1832 he married Mary Horner and their long honeymoon included geological excursions in Switzerland. Geology took over as a career: he began teaching at King’s College in London and was soon traveling and lecturing in Eastern America and Canada. In his work he was influenced by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, William Buckland, and above all James Hutton. Lyell expounded Hutton's doctrine of “uniformitarianism” in his own "Principles of Geology." Uniformitarianism is the idea that the earth has been shaped entirely by slow moving forces still at work, and acting over a very long time frame, as opposed to catastrophism which envisions disastrous upheavals as forming the planet.
Lyell became close friends with Charles Darwin whose ideas on evolution seemed to be the biological equivalent of geological uniformitarianism
A very religious man, Lyell had difficulty reconciling his beliefs with Darwin’s theory of natural selection but the two continued to be friends.
He was knighted in 1848.

Henry Julian Lyall was born on February 6, 1855, in Gayton Le Wold, Lincolnshire, England.

He was an educator. He studied at Lincoln School, Bonn University, and Christ's College, Cambridge (1876-1877). In 1881, he was Principal of McTavish School in Montreal, Quebec. In 1883, he became a founding headmaster of Lincoln College, Sorel, Quebec (1883-1888). In 1890, he moved to the United States and worked as a teacher in New York and Vermont.

In 1881, he married Edith Mary Earnshaw (1858–1887). He died on April 29, 1924, in Brattleboro, Windham, Vermont.

Steve Luxton was born in 1946 in Coventry, England.

He is a Canadian poet. His family moved to Canada in 1957. He studied at the University of Toronto and Syracuse University. He taught English Literature at John Abbott College, St.-Anne-de-Belle-Vue, Quebec, and Creative Writing at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. He was an original editor of Matrix and The Moosehead Review and co-owner and editor of the Montreal publishing company started by Louis Dudek, DC Books, from 1987 to 2012. He left to focus on creating his own work. Luxton was also a founding member of the now-defunct Montreal Storytellers, an oral storytelling group that performed in both Canada and the U.S. He is the author of several collections of poems, e.g., "The Hills that Pass By" (1987), "Luna Moth and Other Poems" (2004), "In the Vision of Birds: New and Selected Poems" (2012), and "The Dying Meteorologist" (2019).

Luxton lives near Ayer's Cliff, the Eastern Townships, Quebec.