Sir Charles Lyell. [From The Nation 20.505 (4 March 1875): 146-147.] ⁴¹

The telegraph announces the death of Sir Charles Lyell on Monday, February 22. His name is not less inseparably connected with the progress and, we might almost say, the completion of a great revolution in geological science (though less conspicuously connected with it) than the greater names in astronomy are with similar periods of transition in that science. The establishment of geology as a strictly inductive or positive science was in a great measure due to the early, clear, and steady conception of true method in its pursuit, which Sir Charles Lyell’s works have done more to expound and promulgate than all other geological publications in this century. It would be difficult to estimate how much of the patient, soberly-directed labor of the modern army of geological explorers has been inspired by his researches and the influence of his teachings; but it is clear that the position early won by him through his writings and observations was a most important one for the guidance of a movement in which, from its magnitude and need of many leaders, no master-mind could by wisdom or energy have attained to such relative rank as has been won by genius in lesser movements of scientific progress. Lyell was bom in 1797, at a time when the principles of sound method in geology were just beginning to be adequately appreciated. In that year Playfair published his illustrations of Hutton’s geological theories, which as completed and amended may be said to have determined the chief line of progress in this century. Ten years later, in 1807, the Geological Society of London was founded. Of this body Lyell was made president at an early age in 1836-7, and again in 1850-1. He had published the first edition of his ‘ Principles of Geology ’ in 1832. The eleven editions of this work, of which the last appeared in 1872, and the seven editions of his ‘ Elements of Geology,’ the last in 1871, may be regarded as chronicles of a progress of which he was the principal historian and a chief actor. Narratives of two visits to the United States, one for geological observation and the second for social as well as geological studies, were published in 1841 and 1845.

The publication in 1863 of his work on the ‘ Antiquity of Man ’ marks an interesting déenoûment of the great movement with which his lifetime was almost coincident, and with which his name and work are inseparably joined. At the end of the last century, the transmutation or development theory was independently and almost simultaneously proposed by three great thinkers, Goethe, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Erasmus Darwin. Its final triumph in our day was almost a direct consequence of the principles adopted by Lyell from Hutton and the Huttonians, and urged so clearly and effectively by him in his ‘ Principles.’ Yet Lyell—and this was an interesting exhibition of a worthy trait of his mind—resisted the theory of development for a long time; until after the publication of that most remarkable book of the century, Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species.’ He showed in the early editions of his ‘ Principles ’ a decided, though just and appreciative, opposition to Lamarck’s theories; and it thus happened that Lyell was one of the few veterans in science who were converted from their older view's by Mr. Darwin’s arguments. Though nearly seventy years of age, he showed the genuineness of his conversion by rewriting in the tenth edition of his ‘Principles ’ the chapter on the development theory, and other matters relating to it. This change gives his masterpiece a greater logical completeness and coherency than it had ever had before, and redounded to his credit in this way quite as much as in the exhibition it gave of his openness of mind to scientific arguments, or of the moderation of the conservatism which characterized him as a true English Liberal.

Hutton, the knowledge and practice of whose principles Lyell did so much to extend, was the first to declare that geology was in no wise concerned “with questions as to the origin of things.” By “origin” was then meant the origin of the natures which things have and their first introduction in the theatre of the world. That cosmology should have been so far banished in half a century from zoological conceptions that Mr. Darwin could use, without incurring serious misunderstanding, the title ‘ Origin of Species ’ for his great work, is evidence of the progress made. “Origin” has now come to mean the coming to pass of anything in the course of events, and is concerned only with how things go on from one determinate appearance to another. “In the economy of the world,” said Hutton, “I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end”; “a declaration,” Lyell remarks, “the more startling when coupled with the doctrine that all past changes in the globe had been brought about by the slow agency of existing causes.” But Lyell was not free at the outset, nor for a long time, from another misleading scholastic conception which scientific progress has also nearly banished, namely, the scholastic meaning of the word “species.” From his deference to the authority of leading minds in systematic natural history he attributed to the authority of their observations what was only involved in a received meaning of a word, namely, that a species was only properly so called because it exhibited invariable characters, and yet that the word was applicable to actual existences. These naturalists, with this meaning in their minds, applied the name to existing and past organic races, implicitly asserting thereby more than their authority as observers could warrant. The word now means not an absolute, but only a comparative fixity of character, so that in Darwin’s treatise both words of the title, ‘ Origin of Species,’ appear with modern unscholastic meanings. But this was in great measure due to the influence of the doctrines and methods which Lyell has done so much to promulgate. In perfect sympathy with the scientific aspirations of earlier Italian geologists to explain the phenomena of the earth’s formations “without violence, without fictions, without hypotheses, without miracles,” he early perceived the value of scientific societies devoted to the patient collection of data for science, and principled against the premature speculation of theories. The Geological Society of London was such an institution, in which no “theories of the earth,” as they were called, were tolerated. Such institutions, like the monastic refuges for culture of old, were securities to scientific observation against the vanity and ferocity of scholastic disputation.

Among the many graphic and instructive illustrations of geological changes from slowly-working natural causes, Lyell gives an account of a great flood at Tivoli, in 1836, in which the “headlong stream,” as Horace had called it, the Anio, produced the most destructive effects; the flood coming “within two hundred yards of the precipice on which the beautiful temple of Vesta stands. But fortunately, this precious relic of antiquity was spared, while the wreck of modern structures was hurled down the abyss.” Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, was the mythological representative of the stability of the earth; and when Aristarchus, the Samian astronomer, first taught the Pythagorean doctrine of the earth’s motion on its axis and around the sun, he was publicly accused of impiety, for “moving the everlasting Vesta from her place.” Lyell is reminded by this coincidence of Playfair’s remark, that when “Hutton ascribed instability to the earth’s surface, and represented the continents which we inhabit as the theatre of incessant change and movement, his antagonists, who regarded them as unalterable, assailed him in a similar manner with accusations founded on religious prejudices.” There appears to be a strong natural association of religious feeling with the idea of stability; and three wrongly consecrated stabilities—that of the earth, that of its continents, and that of its forms of life—have one after another given way to the progress of knowledge, and, though with obstinate resistance from religious sentiment, the changes have taken place without permanent injury to religion.

It is in Lyell’s character as a scholar and writer, however, quite as much as in that of thinker and observer, that his influence has been and will bo felt. His style reveals the man in its calm, clear, scholarly spirit of accuracy. His sentences win confidence and disarm prejudice by their entire freedom from overstatement and advocacy. The man revealed by the style is a model of the qualities in mind and character which distinguish the highest modern social and scientific culture. A tender regard, akin to reverence—to reverence without servility—toward established standards of custom and opinion, kept him, while a Liberal in politics, religion, and science, very far from radicalism in any direction. He was a warm friend of America, and, during his two visits to this country, endeared to him many personal friends. He was married to a lady whose father was also distinguished in geology, Mr. Leonard Homer, formerly a president of the Geological Society, and especially distinguished in the annals of science for the researches for a chronological standard in geology in his examination of the age of the deposits of the Nile mud. Lady Lyell, whom death removed

from her illustrious husband two years ago, had been to him a most devoted and efficient helpmate, through powers and interests trained in the same direction, and by an amiability akin to his own. Sir Charles Lyell was born in Scotland, educated at Exeter College, Oxford, and called to the bar. He was knighted in 1848, and was created a baronet in 1864.