Quotes About Lyell

the real importance of the Darwinian revolution was that Darwin, completing what Lyell had already begun in geology, brought history into science.

I recall the words of Charles Darwin in his Autobiography. 'I rejoice that I have avoided controversies, and this I owe to Charles Lyell,* who…strongly advised me never to get entangled in a controversy, as it rarely did any good and caused a miserable loss of time and temper.

Darwin's mind had been profoundly shaped by Lyell's understanding of the deep time of geological transformation, but standing on the beach, watching the breakers crash against the coral, he knows that his mentor is wrong about the origin of the atolls. It is not a story of simple geology, he realizes. It is a story about the innovative persistence of life.

Darwin read Lyell's magnum opus, The Principles of Geology, on the voyage of the Beagle and employed its principles of reasoning in On the Origin of Species. The subtitle of Lyell's Principles