Lyell, Charles

Cultural  

1. Nineteenth-century Scottish natural philosopher who laid the foundations for the modern sciences of geology and evolutionary biology. His book Principles of Geology had an enormous influence on other scientists in the nineteenth century, especially Charles Darwin. He was the founder of the doctrine of uniformitarianism, which holds that all processes on the Earth are the same today as they have been in the past. Geologists often use the slogan “the present is the key to the past” to summarize Lyell's ideas.

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Example Sentences

His work produced comparatively little effect upon the world at large in his own time, but it had immense influence upon the next great prophet of evolution, Lamarck, and through Lamarck on Lyell, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and the modern school of evolutionists generally.

From Project Gutenberg

Lyell, Charles, investigations on the numerical relations of extinct and organic life, 274, 275; nether-formed or hypogene rocks, 249; uniformity of the production of erupted rocks, 257.

From Project Gutenberg

Darwin's probably last attendance, this time as a guest, was in 1851, when Horner again wrote to Lyell, "Charles Darwin was at the Geological Society's Club yesterday, where he had not been for ten years—remarkably well, and grown quite stout."

From Project Gutenberg