Charles Lyell

Charles Lyell established that the earth is shaped by processes still going on today and gave Darwin the timescale evolution needed. He trained as a lawyer, practised briefly, and gave it up for geology as his eyesight worsened. The Principles of Geology, published in three volumes from 1830, argued for what came to be called uniformitarianism: that the causes now operating - erosion, deposition, volcanism, the slow rise and fall of land - are sufficient to explain the whole record, without appeal to catastrophes of a kind no longer seen. He was arguing against the catastrophism of Cuvier and against the compressed chronology that went with it, and the case was made largely through fieldwork in Sicily, Auvergne and the Paris basin. Darwin took the first volume aboard the Beagle and had the second sent out to him, and later wrote that he saw partly through Lyell's eyes; the depth of time the Principles established is what made natural selection thinkable, since the mechanism requires far longer than any biblical chronology allowed. Lyell himself resisted evolution for a long time, and his Antiquity of Man in 1863 accepted it only guardedly, which disappointed Darwin considerably. He was nevertheless the person who, with Joseph Hooker, arranged the joint reading of the Darwin and Wallace papers at the Linnean Society in 1858 when Wallace's letter arrived and threatened to leave Darwin with nothing. He revised the Principles through twelve editions across forty years, each incorporating what he had been argued out of. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. The uniformitarian principle has since been qualified - the asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous is a genuine catastrophe - but the method of reading the past from the present is his.

• Lived: 1797 CE – 1875 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: scientist