Lyell was extremely shortsighted and went through most of his life with a pained squint, which gave him a troubled air. (Eventually he would lose his sight altogether.) His other slight peculiarity was the habit, when distracted by thought, of taking up improbable positions on furniture-lying across two chairs at once or resting his head on the seat of a chair, while standing up (to quote his friend Darwin). Often when lost in
thought he would slink so low in a chair that his buttocks would all but touch the floor. Lyells only real job in life was as professor of geology at Kings College in London from 1831 to 1833. It was around this time that he produced The Principles of Geology , published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, which in many ways consolidated and elaborated upon the thoughts first voiced by Hutton a generation earlier. (Although Lyell never read Hutton in the original, he was a keen student of Playfairs reworked version.)
Between Huttons day and Lyells there arose a new geological controversy, which largely superseded, but is often confused with, the old Neptunian-Plutonian dispute. The new battle became an argument between catastrophism and uniformitarianism-unattractive terms for an important and very long-running dispute. Catastrophists, as you might expect from the name, believed that the Earth was shaped by abrupt cataclysmic events-floods principally, which is why catastrophism and neptunism are often wrongly bundled together. Catastrophism was particularly comforting to clerics like Buckland because it allowed them to incorporate the biblical flood of Noah into serious scientific discussions. Uniformitarians by contrast believed that changes on Earth were gradual and that nearly all Earth processes happened slowly, over immense spans of time. Hutton was much more the father of the notion than Lyell, but it was Lyell most people read, and so he became in most peoples minds, then and now, the father of modern geological thought.
Lyell believed that the Earths shifts were uniform and steady-that everything that had ever happened in the past could be explained by events still going on today. Lyell and his adherents didnt just disdain catastrophism, they detested it. Catastrophists believed that extinctions were part of a series in which animals were repeatedly wiped out and replaced with new sets-a belief that the naturalist T. H. Huxley mockingly likened to a succession of rubbers of whist, at the end of which the players upset the table and called for a new pack. It was too convenient a way to explain the unknown. Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity, sniffed Lyell.
Lyells oversights were not inconsiderable. He failed to explain convincingly how mountain ranges were formed and overlooked glaciers as an agent of change. He refused to accept Louis Agassizs idea of ice ages-the refrigeration of the globe, as he dismissively termed it-and was confident that mammals would be found in the oldest fossiliferous beds. He rejected the notion that animals and plants suffered sudden annihilations, and believed that all the principal animal groups-mammals, reptiles, fish, and so on-had coexisted since the dawn of time. On all of these he would ultimately be proved wrong.
Yet it would be nearly impossible to overstate Lyells influence. The Principles of Geology went through twelve editions in Lyells lifetime and contained notions that shaped geological thinking far into the twentieth century. Darwin took a first edition with him on the Beagle voyage and wrote afterward that the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of ones mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes. In short, he thought him nearly a god, as did many of his generation. It is a testament to the strength of Lyells sway that in the 1980s when geologists had to abandon just a part of it to accommodate the impact theory of extinctions, it nearly killed them. But that is another chapter.
Meanwhile, geology had a great deal of sorting out to do, and not all of it went smoothly. From the outset geologists tried to categorize rocks by the periods in which they were laid down, but there were often bitter disagreements about where to put the dividing lines-none more so than a long-running debate that became known as the Great Devonian Controversy. The issue arose when the Reverend Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge claimed for the Cambrian period a layer of rock that Roderick Murchison believed belonged rightly to the Silurian. The dispute raged for years and grew extremely heated. De la Beche is a dirty dog, Murchison wrote to a friend in a typical outburst.
Some sense of the strength of feeling can be gained by glancing through the chapter titles of Martin J. S. Rudwicks excellent and somber account of the issue, The Great Devonian Controversy . These begin innocuously enough with headings such as Arenas of Gentlemanly