Dictionary of Scientific Biography

When Charles Lyell was less than a year old, his father left Scotland for the south of England, where, in the autumn of 1798, he took a long lease on Bartley Lodge at Lyndhurst, on the border of the New Forest in Hampshire. There Lyell spent his boyhood. Strongly interested in botany, his father collected rare plants in the New Forest and corresponded with James Sowerby, Dawson Turner, William Hooker, and other botanists. He also made regular trips to Scotland to supervise his estate.

In 1805 Lyell, aged seven, was sent to school at Ringwood, Hampshire, and in 1808 at Salisbury. In December 1808 he became severely ill with pleurisy, and during his convalescence at Bartley he began to collect insects and study their habits. In 1810 Lyell and his younger brother Thomas were sent to school at Midhurst, in Sussex. He left Midhurst in June 1815 and in February 1816 matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner. At Oxford he received the customary classical education based largely on the reading of Aristotle and other ancient authors, but in 1817 he took the course of lectures in mineralogy given by William Buckland and in 1818 attended Buckland's lectures in geology.

Since boyhood Lyell had been an enthusiastic amateur entomologist, and now Buckland aroused his interest in geology. In July 1817 Lyell visited his father's friend Dawson Turner at Yarmouth, Norfolk, where he studied the effects of the interaction of the Yare River with the sea in forming the delta on which Yarmouth stood. In September 1817, while in Scotland with his father, he went with two college friends on horseback through the Highlands, along Loch Awe to Oban and thence by water to the island of Mull and to Staffa, famous for its columnar basalt formation. On Staffa, Lyell confirmed for Buckland that there were the broken ends of basalt columns in the roof of Fingal's Cave, a fact which showed that the cave had not been formed by the erosion of an intrusive dike of softer lava, as had been suggested by Leopold von Buch. During the summer of 1818 Lyell accompanied his parents and sisters on a carriage tour through France, Switzerland, and the north of Italy, crossing the Jura and the Alps. In the Alps he observed the effects of glaciers and the destruction produced by mountain torrents.

On 19 March 1819 Lyell was elected to the Geological Society of London and in the same year to the Linnean Society. He was entered at Lincoln's Inn, where in the autumn of 1819 he began to study law, reading in the office of John Patteson, the pleader. During the spring of 1819, however, when Lyell was studying for his degree examinations at Oxford, his eyes had begun to give him a great deal of pain and he found that he could not sustain the prolonged and intense reading needed for his legal studies. He got on as best he could with the help of a reading clerk, but in August 1820 set out with his father on a long tour of the Continent. They traveled through Belgium to Cologne and thence up the Rhine valley and south into Italy, where they visited Ravenna and Rome. Along the Adriatic coast of Italy Lyell observed how the rivers descending from the Apennines had created a coastal plain, and cities which were ports during Roman times were now five miles from the sea. After his return to London in November 1820, Lyell continued his legal studies, but in a more relaxed fashion.

During the summer of 1821 Lyell visited his old school at Midhurst, Sussex, and, becoming curious about the geology of Sussex, called on Gideon Mantell, a surgeon in Lewes, who had formed a collection of fossils from the chalk of the South Downs and the underlying strata of the Weald. They became close friends and pursued a common interest in the geology of southeast England. In April 1822 Lyell visited Winchelsea and Romsey, on the southeast coast, to study the series of strata below the chalk, since they were visible in the cliffs along the English Channel. In late June 1822 Lyell also visited the Isle of Wight, where he discovered that the sequence of strata below the chalk was the same on the Isle of Wight as on the coast of Sussex and that the formation on the Isle of Wight called the greensand by Thomas Webster was identical with the Reigate firestone and the marl rock of western Sussex. The formation in England called greensand by G. B. Greenough and W. D. Conybeare was identical, however, with a lower series of beds which Webster had called the ferruginous sand on the Isle of Wight. Lyell outlined the distinction between the formations now known as the upper and lower greensand in a letter to Mantell of 4 July 1822. He did not publish his findings, and the same observations were first published in a general study of the greensand by William Fitton in 1824, after he had seen Lyell's letter to Mantell on the subject.

On 25 June 1823 Lyell arrived in Paris, where he spent the next two months. He studied French and attended free lectures on mining, geology, chemistry, and zoology. He met many French scientists, including Alexandre Brongniart, Georges Cuvier, and Constant Prévost, and the great German scientist and traveler Alexander von Humboldt, who was then living in Paris. With Prévost, Lyell studied the geology of the Paris basin and was influenced by Prévost to believe that the alternation of freshwater and marine formations could be explained naturally, without resort to