Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/117

Rh L Y E L L 101 LYELL, SIR CHARLES (1797-1875), one of the greatest of geological thinkers, was the eldest sou of Charles Lyell of Kinnordy, Forfarshire, and was born November 14, 1797, on the family estate in Scotland. His father was- a man of literary and scientific tastes, known both as a botanist and as the translator of the Vita Xuova and the Convito of Dante. From his boyhood Lyell had a strong inclination for natural history, especially entomology, a taste which he was able to cultivate in the New Forest, to which his family had removed soon after his birth. He was educated chiefly at Midhurst, and then at Exeter College, Oxford, where the lectures of Dr Buckland first opened out to him that field of geological study which became the passion of his life. After taking his degree in 1821, he entered Lincoln s Inn, and in 1825, after a delay caused by chronic weakness of the eyes, he was called to the bar, and went on the western circuit for two yenrs. During the whole of this time, though not neglecting his profession, he was slowly gravitating towards the life of a student of science. In &quot;1819 he had been elected a member of the Linnean and Geologi cal Societies, communicating his first paper, &quot; On the Marls of Forfarshire,&quot; to the latter society in 1822, and acting as one of the honorary secretaries in 1823. In that year he went to France, with introductions to Cuvier, Humboldt, and other men of science, and in 1824 made a geological tour in Scotland in company with Dr Buckland. In 1826 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, from which in later years he received both the Copley and Royal medals ; and in 1827 he finally abandoned the legal profession, and devoted himself to geology. Long prior to this, however, he had already begun the sketch of his principal work, The Principles of Geology. The subsidiary title, &quot; An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth s Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation,&quot; gives the keynote of the task to which Lyell devoted his life, and in pursuance of which he made geological tours over large portions of the Continent, and in later years to Madeira and to the United States and Canada. The journey undertaken with Murchison in 1828 was especially fruitful in results, for not only did it give rise to two joint papers on the volcanic district of Auvergne and the Tertiary formations of Aix-en-Provence, but it was apparently while examining Signer Bonelli s collection of Tertiary shells at Turin, and subsequently when (after parting with Murchison) he studied the marine remains of the Tertiary rocks of Ischia and Sicily, that Lyell conceived the idea of dividing the Tertiaries into three or four principal groups, characterized by the proportion of recent to extinct species of shells. To these groups, after consult ing Dr Whewell as to the best nomenclature, he gave the names now universally adopted Eocene (dawn of recent), Miocene (less of recent}, and Pliocene (more of recent] Upper and Lower ; and with the assistance of M. Deshayes, who had arrived by independent researches at very similar views, he drew up a table of shells in illustration of this classification. The first volume of the Principles of Geo logy appeared in 1830, and the second in January 1832. Received at first with considerable opposition, at least so far as its leading theory was concerned, the work had ulti mately a great success, and it had already reached a second edition in 1833 when the third volume, dealing with the successive formations of the earth s crust, was added. 1 In August 1833 Lyell published the Elements of Geology, which, from being originally an expansion of the 1 Between 1830 and 1872 eleven editions of this work were pub lished, each so much enriched with new material and the results of riper thought as to form a complete history of the progress of geology (luring that interval. Only a few days before his death Sir Charles finished revising the 12th edition, which appeared in 1876. fourth book of the Principles, became a standard work of reference in stratigraphical and pakeontological geology. This book went through six editions in LyelPs lifetime (some intermediate ones being styled Manual of Elementary Geology), and in 1871 a smaller work, the Student s Elements of Geology, was based upon it. His third great work, The Antiquity of Man, appeared in 18G3, and ran through three editions in one year. In this he laid before the world a general survey of the arguments for man s early appearance on the earth, derived from the dis coveries of worked Hint implements in Post-Pliocene strata in the Somme valley and elsewhere, and in it also he first gave in his adhesion to Darwin s theory of the origin of species. A fourth edition appeared in 1873. While thus occupied with his writings, Lyell lost no opportunity of carrying out original investigations, and whenever absent from his literary work in London was always to be heard of in the field either in England or on the Continent. In 1831 he held for a short time the post of professor of geology at King s College, London, and delivered while there a highly appreciated course of lectures, which became the foundation of the Elements of Geology. In 1832 he married Mary, eldest daughter of Leonard Horner, who became thenceforward associated with him in all his literary and scientific labours, aiding him sub stantially with her ready intellect, and by her pre-eminent social qualities making his home a centre of attraction to all men of talent. In 1834 he made an excursion to Den mark and Sweden, the result of which was his celebrated paper to the Royal Society, &quot; On the Proofs of the Gradual Rising of Land in Certain Parts of Sweden,&quot; and another to the Geological Society, &quot; On the Cretaceous and Tertiary Strata of Seeland and Moen.&quot; In 1837 he was again in Norway and Denmark, and in 1841 he spent a year in travelling through the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia. This last journey, together with a second one to America in 1845, when he visited Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and the alluvial plain of the Mississippi, gave rise, not only to numerous original papers, but also to the publication of two works not exclusively geological, Travels in North America (1845) and A Second Visit to the United States (1849). In the second work especially he did much to promote good feeling between England and America, by showing a just appreciation of American society and institutions. It was in the course of these journeys that he estimated the rate of recession of the falls of Niagara, and of the annual average accumulation of alluvial matter in the delta of the Mississippi, and studied those vegetable accumulations in the &quot; Great Dismal Swamp &quot; of Virginia, which he afterwards used in illustrat ing the formation of beds of coal. He also studied with great care the coal-formations in Nova Scotia, and dis covered in company with Dr Dawson of Montreal the earliest known land shell, Pupa vetusta, in the hollow stem of a Sigillaria. But it was chiefly in bringing a thorough knowledge of European geology to bear upon the more widely extended and massive formations of the North American continent that Lyell rendered immense service to geologists on both sides of the Atlantic. Besides these Transatlantic journeys Lyell undertook geological excursions at different times to all parts of the British Isles, to Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Madeira, and Teneriffe, in which latter islands, which he visited in company with G. Hartung, he accumulated much valuable evidence on the age and deposition of lava-beds and the formation of volcanic cones. He also revisited Sicily in 1858, when he made such observations upon the structure of Etna as entirely refuted the theory of &quot; craters of elevation&quot; upheld by Yon Buch and Elie de Beau mont (see Roy. Soc. Proc., 1850).