Person

Lyell, Charles, Sir, 1797-1875

1797-1875

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.