Charles Lyell

Charles Lyell was born on 14 November 1797 at Kinnordy House, Angus, Scotland, and died on 22 February 1875 in London, where he is buried in Westminster Abbey. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, from 1816 to 1821, attending William Buckland's geological lectures there, and practiced law through the 1820s before turning to geology full time. He served as Professor of Geology at King's College London in the 1830s. His most influential work, Principles of Geology, was published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, developing and popularizing James Hutton's idea that the Earth was shaped by the same natural processes still operating today, a view often summarized as the present is the key to the past, and arguing against catastrophism, the idea that Earth's history was mainly the product of sudden, violent upheavals. The ship's captain Robert FitzRoy gave the young Charles Darwin the first volume of Principles of Geology before the HMS Beagle sailed, and Darwin later wrote of the book's power to convince a reader of the vastness of past geological time. Lyell was knighted in 1848 and made a baronet in 1864, and received the Copley Medal in 1858 and the Wollaston Medal in 1866.