A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

Not quite as remarkable in character but more influential than all the others combined was Charles Lyell. Lyell was born in the year that Hutton died and only 70 miles away, in the village of Kinnordy. Though Scottish by birth, he grew up in the far south of England, in the New Forest of Hampshire, because his mother was convinced that Scots were feckless drunks. As was generally the pattern with nineteenth-century gentlemen scientists, Lyell came from a background of comfortable wealth and intellectual vigour. His father, also named Charles, had the unusual distinction of being a leading authority on the poet Dante and on mosses. (Orthotricium lyelli, which most visitors to the English countryside will at some time have sat on, is named for him.) From his father Lyell gained an interest in natural history, but it was at Oxford, where he fell under the spell of the Reverend William Buckland—he of the flowing gowns—that the young Lyell began his lifelong devotion to geology.