Charles Lyell
Charles Lyell
Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, FRSwas a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularized James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism—the idea that the Earth was shaped by the same processes still in operation today. Principles of Geology also challenged theories popularized by Georges Cuvier, which were the most accepted and circulated ideas about geology in England at the time...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth14 November 1797
science rivers numbers
When the aggregate amount of solid matter transported by rivers in a given number of centuries from a large continent, shall be reduced to arithmetical computation, the result will appear most astonishing to those...not in the habit of reflecting how many of the mightiest of operations in nature are effected insensibly, without noise or disorder.
past hands issues
The question now at issue, whether the living species are connected with the extinct by a common bond of descent, will best be cleared up by devoting ourselves to the study of the actual state of the living world, and to those monuments of the past in which the relics of the animate creation of former ages are best preserved and least mutilated by the hand of time.
europe long curiosity
That ere long, now that curiosity has been so much excited on this subject, some human remains will be detected in the older alluvium of European valleys, I confidently expect.
past men connections
The ordinary naturalist is not sufficiently aware that when dogmatizing on what species are, he is grappling with the whole question of the organic world & its connection with the time past & with Man; that it involves the question of Man & his relation to the brutes, of instinct, intelligence & reason, of Creation, transmutation & progressive improvement or development. Each set of geological questions & of ethnological & zool. & botan. are parts of the great problem which is always assuming a new aspect.
real animal progress
'Time's noblest offspring is the last.' This line of Bishop Berkeley's expresses the real cause of the belief in progress in the animal creation.
mean men order
It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'
philosophy men light
The earth's becoming at a particular period the residence of human beings, was an era in the moral, not in the physical world, that our study and contemplation of the earth, and the laws which govern its animate productions, ought no more to be considered in the light of a disturbance or deviation from the system, than the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter should be regarded as a physical event in the history of those heavenly bodies, however influential they may have become from that time in advancing the progress of sound philosophy among men.
science analogies metaphysical
Probably there was a beginning-it is a metaphysical question, worthy a theologian-species have begun and ended-but the analogy is faint and distant.
perfection wish world
In the course of this short tour, I became convinced that we must turn to the New World if we wish to see in perfection the oldest monuments of the earth's history, so far at least as relates to its earliest inhabitants.
fall moon law
It must have appeared almost as improbable to the earlier geologists, that the laws of earthquakes should one day throw light on the origin of mountains, as it must to the first astronomers, that the fall of an apple should assist in explaining the motions of the moon.
book views illustration
[My Book] will endeavour to establish the principle[s] of reasoning in ... [geology]; and all my geology will come in as illustration of my views of those principles, and as evidence strengthening the system necessarily arising out of the admission of such principles, which... are neither more nor less than that no causes whatever have from the earliest time to which we can look back, to the present, ever acted, but those now acting; and that they never acted with different degrees of energy from that which they now exert.
curiosity causes assumption
Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity, than the assumption of the discordance between the former and the existing causes of change.
ocean men skills
It is probable that a greater number of monuments of the skill and industry of man will, in the course of the ages, be collected together in the bed of the ocean than will exist at any other time on the surface of the continents.
science escaping earth
Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion.