Charles Lyell

Charles Lyell. Principles of Geology. Pub. 1830. Ed. James Secord. New York: Penguin, 1997. Print.

• tie to Gidal 2015
• 16 'In the economy of the world,' said the Scotch geologist [Hutton], 'I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end;' and the declaration was the more startling when coupled with the doctrine, that all past changes on the globe had been brought about by the slow agency of existing causes. The imagination was first fatigued and overpowered by endeavouring to conceive the immensity of time required for the annihilation of whole continents by so insensible a process. ...Such views of the immensity of past time, like those unfolded by the Newtownian philosophy in regard to space, were too vast to awaken ideas of sublimity unmixed with a painful sense of our incapacity to conceive a plan of such infinite extent.
  • the implicit limits of Romantic metaphysics/aesthetics
• resurgence of critical interest in this with the Anthroposcene
• uniformitarianism vs catastrophism
  • former: earth changed remade by the same processes as always: no radical shift (i.e., catastrophism)
  • thinking about the Anthroposcene requires us to get back to catastrophe, which is us
• in one way In Memoriam is popularizing Lyell
• Vol 2 Ch 1 - Lamarck
  • generational passing down habits dictates form, not the other way around (188) - this is what Charles Darwin writes against (behavior doesn't matter at all)
  • eventually Lyell came around to Darwin's way of thinking
• we tend to think of it as being a religion/science binary but many scientists were clergy or believers
• Victorian evolutionary theory very quickly roped into discourses about teleology and progress
• 37 1.5 - the most quoted part: "It must always have been evident to unbiassed minds, that successive strata, containing, in regular order of superimposition, distinct beds of shells and corals, arranged in families as they grow at the bottom of the sea, could only have been formed by slow and insensible degrees in a great lapse of ages; yet, until organic remains were minutely examined and specifically determined, it was rarely possible to prove that the series of deposits met in one country was not formed simultaneously with that found in another. But we are now able to determine, in numerous instances, the relative dates of sedimentary rocks in distant regions, and to show, by their organic remaions, that they were not of contemporary origin, but formed in succession. We often find, that where an interruption in the consecutive formation in one district is indicated by a sudden transition from one assemblage of fossil species to another, the chasm is filled up, in some other district, but other important groups of strata. The more attentively we study the european continent, the greater we find the extension of the whole series of geological formations. No sooner does the calendar appear to be completed, and the signs of a succession of physical events arranged in chronological order, than we are called upon to intercalate, as it were, some new periods of vast duration."
  • Anderson 1983 for calendar time and deep time
  • 29: importance of time scale -- if the earth is older, there's time for Darwin's natural selection
    • he makes a genre based argument ("romance") - inviting readership to read geological history as a realistic novel (he was reading Waverley (Scott, 1814))
    • responding to Biblically-inflected geology: it's the same laws, not pre- and post-Lapsarian
• 2.9 (275-7) human impact represented as neutral, just what any species would do
  • effects of man's agency only starting to be felt
  • domination of man -- mass extinction but we "exercise no exclusive prerogative" - just doing what we have to do