Charles Lyell
![Portrait of Lyell by George J. Stodart](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Charles_Lyell00.jpg)
Lyell's scientific contributions included a pioneering explanation of climate change, in which shifting boundaries between oceans and continents could be used to explain long-term variations in temperature and rainfall. Lyell also gave influential explanations of earthquakes and developed the theory of gradual "backed up-building" of volcanoes. In stratigraphy his division of the Tertiary period into the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene was highly influential. He incorrectly conjectured that icebergs were the impetus behind the transport of glacial erratics, and that silty loess deposits might have settled out of flood waters. His creation of a separate period for human history, entitled the 'Recent', is widely cited as providing the foundations for the modern discussion of the Anthropocene.
Building on the innovative work of James Hutton and his follower John Playfair, Lyell favoured an indefinitely long age for the earth, despite evidence suggesting an old but finite age. He was a close friend of Charles Darwin, and contributed significantly to Darwin's thinking on the processes involved in evolution. As Darwin wrote in ''On the Origin of Species'', "He who can read Sir Charles Lyell's grand work on the Principles of Geology, which the future historian will recognise as having produced a revolution in natural science, yet does not admit how incomprehensibly vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume." Lyell helped to arrange the simultaneous publication in 1858 of papers by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace on natural selection, despite his personal religious qualms about the theory. He later published evidence from geology of the time man had existed on the earth. Provided by Wikipedia
1
Published: 1849
Superior document: A second visit to the United States of North America vol. 2
2
Published: 1845
Superior document: Travels in North America with geological observations on the Unites States, Canada, and Nova Scotia vol. 1
3
Published: 1845
Superior document: Travels in North America with geological observations on the Unites States, Canada, and Nova Scotia vol. 2
4
Published: 1849
Superior document: A second visit to the United States of North America vol. 1
5
6
7
Published: 1882