Charles Lyell Quotes

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion.

The present is the key to the past

Hitherto, no rival hypothesis has been proposed as a substitute for the doctrine of transmutation; for 'independent creation,' as it is often termed, or the direct intervention of the Supreme Cause, must simply be considered as an avowal that we deem the question to lie beyond the domain of science.

His books stood neatly along the glassed-in shelves of four vaultlike oak bookcases: the collected Shakespeare, Jefferson’s essays, Thoreau, Paine, Rousseau, Crevecoeur, Locke, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Dickens, Tolstoy. Henri Bergson, William James, Darwin, Buffon, Lyell, Charles Lamb, Sir Francis Bacon, Lord Chesterton. Swift, Pope, Defoe, Stevenson, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Virgil, Plutarch. Plato, Sophocles, Homer, Dryden, Coleridge, Shelley, Shaw. A History of Washington State, A History of the Olympic Peninsula, A History of Island County, Gardens and Gardening, Scientific Agriculture, The Care and Cultivation of Fruit Trees and Ornamental

I may conclude this chapter by quoting a saying of Professor Agassiz, that whenever a new and startling fact is brought to light in science, people first say, 'it is not true,' then that 'it is contrary to religion,' and lastly, 'that everybody knew it before.

Thus, although we are mere sojourners on the surface of the planet, chained to a mere point in space, enduring but for a moment of time, the human mind is not only enabled to number worlds beyond the unassisted ken of mortal eye, but to trace the events of indefinite ages before the creation of our race, and is not even withheld from penetrating into the dark secrets of the ocean, or the solid globe.

It must have appeared almost as improbable to the earlier geologists, that the laws of earthquakes should one day throw light on the origin of mountains, as it must to the first astronomers, that the fall of an apple should assist in explaining the motions of the moon.

Scientists who grapple with biological origins are still affected by Platonic idealism today; Charles Lyell’s nineteenth-century geological theories still influence our understanding of human evolution; quantum theory is still wrestling with Francis Bacon’s methods. To interpret science, we have to know something about its past. We have to continually ask not just “What have we discovered?” but also “Why did we look for it?” In no other way can we begin to grasp why we prize, or disregard, scientific knowledge in the way we do; or be able to distinguish between the promises that science can fulfill and those we should receive with some careful skepticism. Only then will we begin to understand science.

The frontispiece of Mr. Lyell's book is enough to throw a Wernerian into fits.

Lyell and Poulett Scrope, in this country, resumed the work of the Italians and of Hutton; and the former, aided by a marvellous power of clear exposition, placed upon an irrefragable basis the truth that natural causes are competent to account for all events, which can be proved to have occurred, in the course of the secular changes which have taken place during the deposition of the stratified rocks. The publication of 'The Principles of Geology,' in 1830, constituted an epoch in geological science. But it also constituted an epoch in the modern history of the doctrines of evolution, by raising in the mind of every intelligent reader this question: If natural causation is competent to account for the not-living part of our globe, why should it not account for the living part?

An interesting contrast between the geology of the present day and that of half a century ago, is presented by the complete emancipation of the modern geologist from the controlling and perverting influence of theology, all-powerful at the earlier date. As the geologist of my young days wrote, he had one eye upon fact, and the other on Genesis; at present, he wisely keeps both eyes on fact, and ignores the pentateuchal mythology altogether. The publication of the 'Principles of Geology' brought upon its illustrious author a period of social ostracism; the instruction given to our children is based upon those principles. Whewell had the courage to attack Lyell's fundamental assumption (which surely is a dictate of common sense) that we ought to exhaust known causes before seeking for the explanation of geological phenomena in causes of which we have no experience.

He knew he was overfastidious. But how could one write history with Macaulay so close behind? Fiction or poetry, in the midst of the greatest galaxy of talent in the history of English literature? How could one be a creative scientist, with Lyell and Darwin still alive? Be a statesman, with Disraeli and Gladstone polarizing all the available space? You will see that Charles set his sights high. Intelligent idlers always have, in order to justify their idleness to their intelligence.

Quant à moi, je considère les archives géologiques, selon la métaphore de Lyell, comme une histoire du globe incomplètement conservée, écrite dans un dialecte toujours changeant, et dont nous ne possédons que le dernier volume traitant de deux ou trois pays seulement. Quelques fragments de chapitres de ce volume, et quelques lignes éparses de chaque page sont seuls parvenus jusqu'à nous. Chaque mot de ce langage changeant lentement, plus ou moins différent dans les chapitre successifs, peut représenter les formes qui ont vécu, qui sont ensevelies dans les formations successives, et qui nous paraissent à tort avoir été brusquement introduite.

I remember a funny dinner at my brother's, where, amongst a few others, were Babbage and Lyell, both of whom liked to talk. Carlyle, however, silenced every one by haranguing during the whole dinner on the advantages of silence. After dinner Babbage, in his grimmest manner, thanked Carlyle for his very interesting lecture on silence.

We cannot see how the evidence afforded by the unquestioned progressive development of organised existence—crowned as it has been by the recent creation of the earth's greatest wonder, MAN, can be set aside, or its seemingly necessary result withheld for a moment. When Mr. Lyell finds, as a witty friend lately reported that there had been found, a silver-spoon in grauwacke, or a locomotive engine in mica-schist, then, but not sooner, shall we enrol ourselves disciples of the Cyclical Theory of Geological formations.

Each species may have had its origin in a single pair, or individual, where an individual was sufficient, and species may have been created in succession at such times and in such places as to enable them to multiply and endure for an appointed period, and occupy an appointed space on the globe.

Before the time of Allan and Delair, Comyns Beaumont reviewed the work of Establishment geologists, Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz and James Geikie. He exposed their scientific palaver for the nonsense it is, and wrote of the Ice Age theory in these words: What! No Ice Age which came and went, spreading over hundreds of thousands of years as all good geologists proclaim? No smothering ice sheets which enveloped the British Isles and much of the northern parts of the continent, changed the climate to Arctic conditions – although, strangely enough, much of our fauna and flora survived despite it – and compelled all the survivors to flee? No lengthy periods of ice alternated with warm and even sub-tropical climatic interludes? No. Nothing of the sort. There was admittedly a tremendous convulsion of nature, which had the most direful effect upon the inhabitants of Scandinavia, the British Isles, and those in Northern Asia. It resulted in giving us, it is true, bitter cold, tremendous floods, and cruel dampness. That it affected the climate in the north adversely and permanently cannot be denied. It did other things as well. But no Ice Age – (Riddle of Prehistoric Britain) It was an event…sudden, rapid, devastating, and appalling in its magnitude, and destructiveness. It was a celestial impact of an immense cometary body…It rained or distributed rocks, stones, boulder clay, till, gravel, sand, and other material over great areas, utterly obliterating certain parts, elevating others, and entirely missing some regions. It created islands, drowned others, caused immense tidal waves which swallowed up coastal lands, consumed huge spaces with electric waves, set up volcanoes, and swept away cities and largely populated districts almost in a flash

Lyell Glacier Resting on the northern slope of Mt. Lyell (the highest peak in the park), Lyell Glacier is the largest glacier in Yosemite. It’s also the second largest glacier in the Sierra Nevada and one of the southernmost glaciers in North America. Both the mountain and the glacier are named for Charles Lyell, whose 1830 book Principles of Geology has been called “the most seminal work in geology.” (Ironically, when the theory of Ice Ages was first advanced in the 1830s, Lyell did not believe it, and he argued against it for decades.) Over the past century, Lyell Glacier has been shrinking due to warming temperatures. In 2013 it was determined that Lyell Glacier is no longer moving, and thus should be technically classified as an “ice field.

If only the great arguments between religion and doubt could be settled by scientific evidence. A story this week has it that solid evidence has emerged about the historical Jesus: the “tomb of Jesus” reportedly contains proof that Jesus was married, had a son – and was never resurrected. So that’s settled then. Or at least it would be if the scholarly world unanimously accepted these claims (which seems unlikely) or if religious belief were grounded in evidence. If that were the case, all religious belief would have disappeared when Charles Lyell uncovered the nature of geological processes and intimated the true age of Earth in the 1830s – the first clear evidence of a godless natural world.

Geology is intimately related to almost all the physical sciences, as history is to the moral. An

Until the 1800s, most people from the Middle East to the Western World believed what the Bible records about creation and the global Flood. The secular idea of millions of years did not gain extensive popularity until the 1830s, under the influence of a man named Charles Lyell — who opposed a global Flood!

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.

In the empirical argument, so-called Neptunians and Vulcanists squared off. They debated seemingly quotidian subjects, such as the origin of granite (was it crystallized from water or disgorged from volcanos?). But, as so often happens when people divide into opposing camps, the debate became polarized and tribal animosities surfaced. Partisans took to hiding mineral samples which might support the other side; a play written by a Vulcanist was booed on opening night by an audience deliberately packed with Neptunians. As the British geologist Charles Lyell would write several decades later, in his 1835 Principles of Geology, “Ridicule and irony were weapons more frequently employed than argument by the rival sects, till at last the controversy was carried on with a degree of bitterness almost unprecedented in questions of physical science.

Emerson spoke compassionately about fugitive slaves, he also wrote in his journal that “so inferior a race must perish shortly like the Indians,” while Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, put the Negro just above the baboon in the great chain of being. These attitudes were so widespread that in 1842, while touring the United States, the English naturalist Charles Lyell was amazed at “the extent to which the Americans carry their repugnance to all association with the coloured race on equal terms.

Paris skyscape. Paris was ‘less disposed than ever’ to be a centre for the sciences, Humboldt wrote to a friend in Geneva, as the funds for laboratories, research and teaching were slashed. The spirit of enquiry was stifled as scientists found themselves having to curry favours from the new king. The savants had become ‘pliant tools’ in the hands of politicians and princes, Humboldt told Charles Lyell in 1823, and even the great George Cuvier had sacrificed his genius as a naturalist for a new quest for ‘ribbons, crosses, titles and Court favours’. There was so much political wrangling in Paris that governmental positions seemed to change as quickly as in a game of musical chairs. Every man he met now, Humboldt said, was either a minister or an ex-minister. ‘They are scattered thick as the leaves in autumn,’ he told Lyell, ‘and before one set have time to rot away, they are covered by another and another.