Brothers William (1794-1857), Henry (1813-1897), and Benjamin Lyman (1810-1878) operated the chemist business Wm. Lyman & Co. from 1836 until William’s retirement in 1855. The drug shop was originally founded by their uncle, Lewis Lyman, with George Wadsworth sometime around 1800. When Lewis Lyman moved to New York in 1819, the store passed to an uncle, Samuel Hedge, and to his eldest son, William Lyman, who ran the firm as Hedge and Lyman. Younger brothers Benjamin and Henry entered the firm in 1827 and 1829 respectively.

British geologist Mary Horner, oldest child of London geologist Leonard and Ann Horner, was one of six girls in the scientific family. In 1832 she met and married the famous geologist Charles Lyell in Bonn, and the couple had a geological honeymoon in Switzerland and Italy; on their return, they settled in Bloomsbury where Charles worked to finish the third volume of his monumental “Principles of Geology.” She helped her husband with his research in many ways: her reading knowledge of French and German meant that she could translate pertinent scholarly articles for him; because of Charles’ poor eyesight, she often read aloud to him and also managed his correspondence. In addition to her research in geology, she also became interested in Conchology (study of shells). Charles was president of the Geological Society from 1835 to 1837; Mary’s father served in that same post from1845 to 1846 and from 1860 to 1861. Charles and Mary traveled together to the United States when Charles was invited to give the Lowell lectures in Boston in 1841-1842 and again in 1845-1846. The fruits of these visits were several volumes, published in 1845 and 1849, about their travels and their opinions on American social and political problems.

British botanist Katharine Horner was the fourth in a family of six daughters born in London to geologist Leonard Horner and his wife Ann. She grew up in a science-oriented family – her father sometimes brought his daughters with him to meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. At a visit to her sister, Mary, who was married to the eminent geologist Charles Lyell, she met his brother, Henry, and married him in 1848. She traveled to India with her husband and collected plants in the Ganges Delta as well as in Assam and the Khasia Hills ; she gave the specimens to the British Museum. Her special interest was ferns, and in 1870 she wrote the “Geographical Handbook of All the Known Ferns”; she donated her own collection of ferns to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. In 1881, after her sister Mary died, she edited the two-volume “Life and Letters of Sir Charles Lyell.” In 1906, she undertook another two-volume editing job: editing the life and letters of another brother-in-law, Sir Charles J.F. Bunbury, husband of her sister Frances.

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.