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Charles Lyell
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Charles Lyell was the son of a wealthy gentleman who had inherited a large estate in Scotland. Lyell went to university at Exeter College, Oxford. Later he moved to London where he planned to become a barrister. However his poor eyesight made this profession impossible and so Lyell turned to his real interest- science. Geology soon became his forte and as member of the Geological Society, he took part in the lively debates in the 1820s about how to reconcile the biblical account of the Flood with geological findings. Lyell, as well as Roderick Murchison and George Poulett Scrope became an outspoken opponent of the diluvial position.
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From childhood, Charles Lyell had a fascination for geology. Because this was not seen at the time to be a suitable profession, he first pursued a legal career, but later abandoned it.
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Charles Lyell, author of the theory of uniformity, visited Niagara Falls in October 1841 (K. Lyell 1881, 2:58). Quite possibly as he travelled in the horse-drawn coach over the Canadian roads of the day, he recalled one of his earliest childhood memories that had been vividly fixed in his mind at the age of four. The event took place while his family was travelling in two coaches from Scotland to their new home in England. A short distance from Edinburgh on the narrow road with a steep hill on one side and a sharp drop on the other, the horses pulling the first coach were frightened and took off at a gallop. The coach overturned; there was a broken window though nothing more serious, and the party was on its way again (K.
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Charles Lyell got his first inkling of the scope of geological time when he visited the Auvergne region of France, motivated by Scrope�s recently-published book (see exhibit item 63). But Lyell had his own epiphany when he visited Etna in 1828. He had learned, while touring France, that the percentage of extinct fossil species in a rock was an indicator of the rock�s age. Thus a rock in which 50% of the fossils represented extinct species was of moderate age. When he saw Etna, he saw a mountain that appeared to be of immense age, sitting on hundreds of feet of lava and basalt. But when he found a limestone layer that ran beneath the mountain, he found that 95% of the fossils represented living species.
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Charles Lyell was born in Kinnordy, Forfarshire, Scotland, the eldest of ten children. Lyell's father... named Charles, was a botanist of minor repute and first exposed the younger Charles to the study of nature. Having attended Exeter College of Oxford University ending in 1816, Lyell encountered geology as a serious profession under the wing of William Buckland. Upon graduation he took a professional detour into the law, but dabbled in geology. His first paper, "On a Recent Formation of Freshwater Limestone in Forfarshire", was presented in 1822. By 1827 he had abandoned the law and embarked on a long geological career that would result in the widespread acceptance of the ideas proposed by James Hutton a few decades before.
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Charles Lyell, the eldest son of Charles Lyell, was born at Kinnordy, Forfar, the family estate, on Nov. 14, 1797. During his early childhood, the family moved to Lyndhurst, Hampshire, where he received his early education. He showed a keen interest in collecting moths, a hobby he pursued throughout his life. At age 15 Lyell read Robert Bakewell's Introduction to Geology (1813), which aroused his interest in geology. Entering Exeter College, Oxford, in 1816, he studied classics and attended geology lectures with William Buckland.
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Charles Lyell