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Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation is a book by the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell that was first published in 3 volumes from 1830 to 1833. Lyell used the theory of uniformitarianism to describe how the Earth's surface was changing over time. [3]
He was the eldest of ten children. Lyell's father, also named Charles Lyell, was noted as a translator and scholar of Dante. An accomplished botanist, it was he who first exposed his son to the study of nature. Lyell's grandfather, also Charles Lyell, had made the family fortune supplying the Royal Navy at Montrose, enabling him to buy Kinnordy ...
Hutton's Unconformity at Jedburgh. Above: John Clerk of Eldin's 1787 illustration. Below: 2003 photograph. Uniformitarianism, also known as the Doctrine of Uniformity or the Uniformitarian Principle, [1] is the assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in our present-day scientific observations have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the ...
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time is a 1987 history of geology by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in which the author offers a historical account of the conceptualization of Deep Time and uniformitarianism using the works of the English theologian Thomas Burnet, and the Scottish geologists James Hutton and Charles Lyell.
This idea, uniformitarianism, was used by Charles Lyell in his work, and Lyell's textbook was an important influence on Charles Darwin. The work was first published in 1788 [4] by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and later in 1795 as two book volumes. [5] [6]
Lyell provided evidence for Uniformitarianism, a geological doctrine holding that processes occur at the same rates in the present as they did in the past and account for all of the Earth's geological features. [29] Lyell's works were popular and widely read, and the concept of Uniformitarianism took a strong hold in geological society. [24]
He is best known for his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), which summarised the work of James Hutton. [1] It was through this book that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism, later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience.
Charles Lyell further developed the theory of uniformitarianism in the 19th century. [8] Modern geologists have generally acknowledged that Earth's geological history is a product of both sudden, cataclysmic events (such as meteorite impacts and volcanic eruptions) and gradual processes (such as weathering, erosion, and deposition).