Erik Visits a (Non) American Grave, Part 2,106
By This is the grave of Charles Lyell.
Born in 1797 in Angus, Scotland, Lyell was rich. In fact, his family owned Kinnordy House, a big ol’estate house, and he was born inside that. His father, also Charles, was a well-known botanist and so Charles Jr was trained for science from the time he was a young’un. He went to Exeter College, Oxford in 1816, stuck there for a classics degree instead of a science one, and finished in 1821. Then he decided on the law as a profession. But he did remain interested in science and was elected joint secretary of the Geological Society of London. Now, he might have stuck with the law. But he started having eyesight problems and glasses weren’t too sophisticated yet and he couldn’t handle all the tiny print and legal work. So geology it became.
By 1827, Lyell was all in on geology as his future. He was tremendously successful as a geologist, becoming not only someone moving the science forward but also popularizing it. Between 1830 and 1833, he published a three-volume book called Principles of Geology that laid out much about the new science to the educated public who wanted to understand it. He showed how the Earth changed slowly over time, not through some great catastrophe like the Flood that had predated these understandings in a very Christian world. It was so hard for 19th century people to get over the fact that the Bible is a myth and not an actual explainer of the Earth’s history. I don’t blame them for it per se, it was the roots of their raising. But boy did a lot of people not want to believe it. Lyell had so much evidence on his side that he presented in this book. That was particularly true of Mount Etna in Sicily, where you had so much fossil evidence and changes is the soil strata that simply could not be explained by a 6,000 year history and a big flood that changed it all.
Now, 19th century British liberalism may have had its limitations–lord knows how true that was if you were in Ireland or India and under their belief that British trade rules were a rule like gravity. But these were people who were interested in scientific discovery and there was so much of that happening so rapidly in the 19th century, not only with Lyell but with Darwin and so many others. Unsurprisingly, this did not mean to these wealthier educated people or even poorer people who paid attention to the world that God did not exist, though some did. It meant that God was now revealing his truer ways to a people more prepared to understand these changes because they are so advanced. The early to mid 19th century really was an optimistic time in the western world.
Who was an avid reader of Principles of Geology? Charles Darwin and Lyell became perhaps his single most important influence as the former developed his theory of evolution. He was actually out on the ship as the second volume came in and he had one shipped to South America to meet him. That said, it took Lyell a good long time to accept Darwin’s ideas and he didn’t really come out in favor of them until Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, by which time he more or less admitted that Darwin was probably right. Lyell had believed in the permanence of species after all, so that was a big step to take.
Lyell was also a big popularizer. The three volume edition was a bit much for popular consumption and especially for fieldwork. So he Elements of Geology, with a first edition in 1838 and ten editions through his lifetime, as a guidebook. Since he kept changing it and expanding the knowledge, after six editions it also had to be two volumes, so then he wrote an even smaller guidebook for fieldwork.
Finally in 1863, Lyell wrote Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, which was his response to Darwin, as well as the discovery of the Ice Ages and geological evidence on the age of humanity. He had originally been wrong on all of these issues, dismissing the entire idea of the Ice Age after considering it. But give Lyell credit, when he felt himself proven he wrong, he’d adjust. He struggled as well with the idea of humans evolving. Here, he did say that Darwin was probably right about it, but it really bothered him. It was a big step! Lyell really wanted to believe in the all-powerful God and so the idea that humans might evolve did challenge his religious beliefs, even as others found ways around that.
Lyell also combined travel writing with geology in ways that a lot of people wanted to read. As Europeans were fascinated and obsessed with the United States in the decades after its independence, Lyell came to the U.S. and wrote a couple of travel/natural history books about it that sold very well across the pond. He was really into the U.S., was a member of the U.S. Philosophical Society, and after the Chicago fire in 1871, sent a bunch of books to the city to rebuild its library.
All of this of course led Lyell to be seen as one of the brilliant men of his day. He was knighted in 1848. He won all the awards one could win. The Royal Society gave him the Copley Medal in 1858, which has been awarded since 1731 and remains the top science medal in the country. Scientists aren’t so famous today and the last winner I know by name is Stephen Hawking, back in 2006. The Geological Society gave him the Wollaston Medal in 1866. Founded in 1831, I’m surprised it took them 35 years to get around to Lyell, though his ideas were awfully controversial in the early years.
Lyell died in 1875. He was 77 years old.
Charles Lyell is buried in Westminster Abbey, London, England.
If you would like this series to visit American geologists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Alexis Julien is in Brooklyn and William Barton Rogers is in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.