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Lyell, Charles, portrait at about age 65
Portrait of Charles Lyell at about age 65 (photo: ca. 1862)
Charles Lyell (1797-1865) was a British geologist whose work was highly influential in influencing Darwin's theory of natural selcction. In a number of works including textbooks on historical geology written from 1831 onwards, Lyell demonstrated the vast time scale of the earth's geological past, evidenced by the correlation of geological periods with index fossils. Such evidence accumulated through the mid 19th century as other geologists such as Murchison successfully defined early periods including the Cambrian, Silurian, Permian, and Devonian.
Lyell's
synthesis of these findings provided the necessary deep time scale to
accomodate a gradualist theory of evolution through natural selection,
According to this view, embraced by Darwin and his colleagues such as
T.H. Huxley, gradual changes in adaptive selection accumulated
generation by generation, to result in the vast diversity of physical
forms and subsistence modes of animals.
References
Lyell, Charles 1831 Elements in Geology
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