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

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 COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 by Humboldt, Alexander von