Charles Lyell

Charles Lyell was a Scottish lawyer turned geologist whose Principles of Geology, in three volumes from 1830, argued that the earth’s features were formed by the same slow processes still at work, over immense stretches of time, rather than by catastrophes. Darwin took the first volume on the Beagle and said he saw everything through Lyell’s eyes; the theory of evolution needed Lyell’s time. The Scientific Papers the Harvard Classics assign are from the same period. He was knighted, made a baronet, and buried in Westminster Abbey, and he accepted Darwin’s theory late and with reservations.