Product Description

One of the key works in the nineteenth-century battle between science and Scripture, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33) sought to explain the geological state of the modern Earth by considering the long-term effects of observable natural phenomena. Written with clarity and a dazzling intellectual passion, it is both a seminal work of modern geology and a compelling precursor to Darwinism, exploring the evidence for radical changes in climate and geography across the ages and speculating on the progressive development of life. A profound influence on Darwin, Principles of Geology also captured the imagination of contemporaries such as Melville, Emerson, Tennyson and George Eliot, transforming science with its depiction of the powerful forces that shape the natural world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #175728 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

About the Author
SIR CHARLES LYELL (1797-1875), British geologist. Lyell is most famous for his great geological opus: The Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes now in Operation (3 vols 1830-33). Jim Secord is a lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge and is the author of Controversy in Victorian Geology (1986).

Customer Reviews

A model of clarity and rational thinking
It was on reading Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle that I became aware of Charles Lyell. Darwin went to the trouble (in the 1830's) of having the volumes of this work sent out to him in South America as they appeared. His importance was hammered home when Darwin in The Origin Of Species, could only advance his ideas thanks to Charles Lyell's insights.

In this volume we are treated to Lyell's razor-sharp intellect cutting through prevailing humbug to construct an amazingly accurate picture of the history of the earth's crust. Above all he challenged (with all due respect) religious orthodoxy of a Creation in recent times.

Lyell also takes up and successively demolishes many of the erroneous, flabby-thinking, and sometimes cranky theories put forward by various researchers in the field.

Lyell's argument for the immense antiquity of the earth is persuasive and provided the foundation for Darwin's argument for evolution, which required immense periods of time to work.

He points out how, as rocks get more ancient, so the proportion of extinct marine creatures increases. This was the second insight to inspire Darwin: that in the history of the earth, most species that have ever lived have become extinct. Lyell struggled with the notion that species could die off and others "be called into existence", yet he had the courage to follow his logic to the correct conclusion. He even said that: "In the universal struggle for existence, the right of the strongest eventually prevails...", a phrase that Darwin picks up and paraphrases 20 years later in his Origin of Species.

Lyell successfully argues the amazing idea that some rocks now found at the tops of mountains were originally laid down in the oceans. He works out how, through analysis of earthquakes and volcanoes, how this could have happened. The Lisbon earthquake showed how land could sink too - 600 feet below the waves. Of course he had no idea of the help given by plate tectonics - a notion that took another 130 years to be evidenced let alone accepted.

This edition is in fact an abridged version of the original. However, by cutting out heavily detailed supporting evidence which, in today's world we do not need to convince us, is a boon for the general reader. The editor puts in an explanation of what he has cut out in the appropriate point in the text.

Lyell writes with erudite elegance and illustrates his points with quotations from the classics. He expected the reader of the time to know them but our editor here has helpfully supplied the citations. All the way Lyell anticipates objections to his theories and carefully and accountably meets them and disposes of them. In this, Lyell shows the way for Darwin to do the same thing in the Origin 25 years later. Today we are taken aback by some of the prejudices he has to dispel. For example the prevailing belief in Noah's flood and the believers' obsessive searching for proof of it in the geological record. Lyell firmly (and courageously) says that there is no evidence for the Biblical Flood.

As a nutritional anthropologist and writer Deadly Harvest I was enthralled by this extraordinary tour de force: I just wish my publisher would allow me to write like that today!