Principles of Geology

Abstract

Charles Lyell was a Scottish geologist and a major figure in the full emergence of that discipline in the nineteenth century. Lyell was born in a stately home in Scotland, but his family moved to the New Forest when he was a young child. He studied law at Oxford and then initiated a legal career whilst always maintaining a private passion for geology and natural history. Poor eyesight allied with acknowledging his true love saw Lyell abandon the legal profession and fully embrace geology, lecturing in the subject at Cambridge and travelling extensively in the course of researching many publications in this area. Lyell is often styled as the ‘father of geology’ such were his contributions to the discipline. Notably, he developed the theory of ‘uniformitarianism’, first articulated by James Hutton in the eighteenth century, which argued that all the Earth’s physical features were formed gradually over time through natural forces acting on them, such as with erosion.

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