Principles of Geology (Penguin Classics) [Paperback]

Charles Lyell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 014043528X | ISBN-13: 978-0140435283 | Edition: Abridged

One of the key works in the nineteenth-century battle between science and Scripture, Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33) sought to explain the geological state of the modern Earth by considering the long-term effects of observable natural phenomena. Written with clarity and a dazzling intellectual passion, it is both a seminal work of modern geology and a compelling precursor to Darwinism, exploring the evidence for radical changes in climate and geography across the ages and speculating on the progressive development of life. A profound influence on Darwin, Principles of Geology also captured the imagination of contemporaries such as Melville, Emerson, Tennyson and George Eliot, transforming science with its depiction of the powerful forces that shape the natural world.

Editorial Reviews

Book Description

In 1833, the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell published the final volume of his groundbreaking trilogy, which profoundly influenced Charles Darwin. With infectious enthusiasm, Lyell describes the composition of the Earth's crust, examines volcanic formations and marine fossils, and explains rock stratification, separating geological formations into three periods. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

SIR CHARLES LYELL (1797-1875), British geologist. Lyell is most famous for his great geological opus: The Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes now in Operation (3 vols 1830-33). Jim Secord is a lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge and is the author of Controversy in Victorian Geology (1986).

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics; Abridged edition (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014043528X
• ISBN-13: 978-0140435283
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #422,617 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A model of clarity and rational thinking, December 1, 2008

By 

Geoff Bond "www.naturaleater.com" (Cyprus) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Principles of Geology (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

It was on reading Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle that I became aware of Charles Lyell. Darwin went to the trouble (in the 1830's) of having the volumes of Principles of Geology sent out to him in South America as they were published. Lyell's seminal importance was hammered home when Darwin in The Origin Of Species, could only advance his ideas thanks to Charles Lyell's insights.

In this volume we are treated to Lyell's razor-sharp intellect cutting through prevailing humbug to construct an amazingly accurate picture of the history of the earth's crust. Above all he challenged (with all due respect) religious orthodoxy of a Creation in recent times.

Lyell also takes up and successively demolishes many of the erroneous, flabby-thinking, and sometimes cranky theories put forward by various researchers in the field.

Lyell's argument for the immense antiquity of the earth is persuasive and provided the foundation for Darwin's argument for evolution, which required immense periods of time to work.

He points out how, as rocks get more ancient, so the proportion of extinct marine creatures increases. This was the second insight to inspire Darwin: that in the history of the earth, most species that have ever lived have become extinct. Lyell struggled with the notion that species could die off and others "be called into existence", yet he had the courage to follow his logic to the correct conclusion. He even said that: "In the universal struggle for existence, the right of the strongest eventually prevails...", a phrase that Darwin picks up and paraphrases 20 years later in his Origin of Species.

Lyell successfully argues the amazing idea that some rocks now found at the tops of mountains were originally laid down in the oceans. He works out how, through analysis of earthquakes and volcanoes, how this could have happened. The Lisbon earthquake showed how land could sink too - 600 feet below the waves. Of course he had no idea of the help given by plate tectonics - a notion that took another 130 years to be evidenced let alone accepted.

This edition is in fact an abridged version of the original. However, by cutting out heavily detailed supporting evidence which, in today's world we do not need to convince us, is a boon for the general reader. The editor puts in an explanation of what he has cut out in the appropriate point in the text.

Lyell writes with erudite elegance and illustrates his points with quotations from the classics. He expected the reader of the time to know them but our editor here has helpfully supplied the citations. All the way Lyell anticipates objections to his theories and carefully and accountably meets them and disposes of them. In this, Lyell shows the way for Darwin to do the same thing in the Origin 25 years later. Today we are taken aback by some of the prejudices he has to dispel. For example the prevailing belief in Noah's flood and the believers' obsessive searching for proof of it in the geological record. Lyell firmly (and courageously) says that there is no evidence for the Biblical Flood.

As a nutritional anthropologist and writer Deadly Harvest I was enthralled by this extraordinary tour de force: I just wish my publisher would allow me to write like that today!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A ridiculous price for a book created by automated OCR scanning, July 22, 2010

By 

Kiwi (Mississauga, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Principles of geology (1835) (Paperback)

A ridiculous price for a book created by automated OCR scanning. The General Books LLC version is created by automated OCR scanning with abosolutely no editing in any form whatsover. There may be numerous typos, there's no Table of Contents. What you're getting is a scanned in copy of the original. There are far far better versions (professionally edited I might add) available at a fraction of the cost. Don;t be fooled into buying the General Books LLC version, it's a ripoff (as are the 500,000 other "books" available from this publisher).

The version of the book yhou see when you "Look Inside" is from another publishers version.

The other reviews associated with this General Books LLC version are from other and better imprints of the book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More essential and interesting than its reputation suggests, May 2, 2010

By 

Yothgoboufnir - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Principles of Geology (Penguin Classics) (Kindle Edition)

Lyell's contribution to science is most often reduced to a bullet point in a list titled "Influences on Darwin". In fact, Lyell stands as a bridge roughly halfway between Newton and Darwin. Call him, if you will, the missing link. But it seems a funny thing happens when you contribute to one of the greatest breakthroughs (evolution) in the history of thought: your work is only seen in relation to its intellectual cousin and, thus, much of the heart of your contribution is overlooked. This might even be expected, but what is a little more surprising is that even those Lyellian insights of major importance for Darwin never make it into the bullet point.

* Lyell 1830: deep time, gradualism, 'present key to past'

A variety of scientists, including Lyell's (and Darwin's) forerunner Hutton, were already discussing gradualist change over deep time spans, by the time Lyell came on the scene. Lyell presented more empirical evidence than his predecessors -- an unabridged copy of 'Principles' is a hefty package. You might never get through it unless you're stuck on a sailing ship for three years. And, at least as importantly as the extensive cataloging of evidence, Lyell did a wonderful job at articulating the reasoning behind a different kind of science. Much of the discourse on Earth history before Hutton and Lyell was basically either Biblical literalism or unrestrained fancy: both kinds of "cosmogony" worked with an understanding that prehistoric Earth operated on "principles" very different from those at work presently. In consequence, anything went in making up stories about the past. Lyell argued that, instead, scientists needed to restrict themselves to testable hypotheses. Testability for Lyell was about observation, not experimentation, but the principle at work, as with experimentation, was that science had to be empirical.

The historical science of Lyell actually required a philosophical point which Newton's didn't: that not only is everything we see now acting according to repeatable patterns, but anything we can suppose about former states falls under the same restrictions. This difference might seem trivial or even imaginary to a 21st-century perspective. But Newtonian physics was an accepted system within the 18th century, whereas gradualism in Earth history was not accepted until later. It could only have been the case that people accepted the universality of Newtonian laws across human experience without having also accepted that all material events, including the primordial past, could be explained by present conditions.

Lyell titled his work after Newton's 'Principia' because his goal was to establish "general principles". But, unlike Newton, Lyell didn't mean universal ... just general. This difference was what made it so important for Lyell to travel so very widely as he did -- the example he set is still indispensable in geological training, and is forcefully argued by Lyell early on in his book. He shows how several of his forerunners acquainted themselves only with their local geology and ended up formulating global models that proved ridiculous when tried out in any other country. Newton, on the other hand, could have studied optics everywhere or anywhere, and would have found the same results -- it is what makes physics so impressive, and also what made geology so difficult to get a handle on.

Taking the particulars of geography seriously was essential for Darwin's insight into evolution, and this outlook is forcefully put forth by Lyell. For example, Darwin noticed/argued that finches on the Galapagos were of a morphology and lifestyle someone might a priori have expected to be filled by different types of birds, but that the finches were modified descendants of the nearest mainland birds. Lyell, though he argued strongly *against* evolution in his book, did argue for what we would now call biogeography, a discipline (which has become) eminently evolutionary, and of which the Galapagos finches are prime examples.

Furthermore, Lyell argues that geological inference is always mediated by the imperfect knowledge of investigators. He suggests, for example, that sea creatures or subterranean gnomes would come to very different and possibly even better geological conclusions than we surface dwellers do. It is, after all, very difficult to see almost anything of the earth's inner workings, stranded out here as we are on an opaque raft of regolith. Again consider Newtonian science: it is perspective-free. Some study systems are simpler and cleaner, but none "in principle" should fail to evince the universal laws. This isn't a question of objective vs. subjective reality; Lyell was not suggesting scientific inferences were subjective or incommensurable. But he was pointing out that, in geological investigations, our reasoning can proceed on a basis of only partial knowledge. Though this is a weakness inescapable in our human existence, if we at least keep it in mind, it can be a moderated weakness.

Reasoning from partials and particulars is difficult. These conditions do not admit, at least reliably, the possibility of using deductive reasoning to fuel your inference. Lyell thus argued for two major tools in scientific reasoning. The first was analogy. Where a local peculiarity, such as a roadcut or canyon, revealed the inner structure of, say, a volcano, the information gleaned from that instance should be judiciously applied to other instances of pertinent similarities. It is necessary to see first-hand much of the world to get an intuition and fact-base for what kinds of similarities and what kinds of differences are prevalent. The second tool was imagination. Yes, Lyell uses this word quite explicitly (see chapter 5 especially). Lyell is not unsophisticated in his treatment of imagination, either. He distinguishes between its use in art and in science; and he further distinguishes between scientists constructing hypotheses and scientists simply trying to envision facts such as vast timespans. Imagination in necessary because we are looking at only a patchy smattering of the total facts, and we must fill in the gaps where deduction won't show us what *must have* happened. It is in this mindset that the tentativeness of scientific knowledge looms much more seriously than it does in physics. Whereas Newton prided his method on requiring him to "feign no hypotheses," Lyellian explanation depends on a modified claim: to take only the observable as a basis for hypothesis.*

Curiously, a superficial reader who somehow hadn't been primed by two centuries of commentary allying Lyell with Darwin might well suppose Lyell is anti-Darwinian. For one thing, on the nature of time Lyell seems to lean toward a perpetual-motion clockwork world, perhaps infinitely old, not an evolving world with a past very different from its present and future. For another thing, Lyell argued strongly *against* the evolvability of species. It was a huge surprise, as I read along through the book, marveling at Lyell's aggressive and innovative advance of scientific reasoning, to see his reasoning fall apart catastrophically when in the later pages he dashes himself against the topic of evolution. It's easy, today, to suppose that opponents of evolution are stodgy and ignorant, but Lyell is a sympathetic case of how mindshattering natural selection is. Evolution before Darwin was pretty unscientific anyhow: no mechanism made it plausible or even evaluatable. Once Darwin was ready to put his own idea forward, Lyell was relatively open-minded and supportive, though he hardly embraced Darwin unreservedly.

But although Lyell didn't summit Darwin's mountain, Lyell articulated and advanced many of the most fundamental conceptual tools Darwin used in his ascent. In my personal experience, it has struck me that the people who have the easiest time thinking about evolution are at ease with their imaginations, and that, in converse, people who keep their imaginations at bay make little sense of evolution. This phenomenon is not widely discussed, presumably because imagination still has little prestige among scientists and is jealously withheld from the evaluations of science by humanities thinkers. In my opinion, Lyell's book offers answers to both scientists and humanists -- answers that require not dropping the basis of the objections, but of better understanding the new place for imagination Lyell meant to establish. In any event, Lyell's treatment of other major ideas -- biogeography, particulars instead of universals, reasoning by analogy, and reasoning from perspective-dependent partial knowledge -- all constitute conceptual adjustments to the Newtonian way of thinking that allowed Darwin to go even farther in making sense of nature.




*The meaning of "hypothesis" in Newton's usage is widely contested, and is probably not very similar to how we use the term today. Newton was speaking of metaphysics and the occult. His point was that his work focused on formalizing, by putting in mathematical terms, material interactions. This is different from saying what, you know, "really causes" something, so to speak. That the gravitational constant is so-and-so can be true and useful knowledge even in the absence of a statement about "why" it is what it is, or how bodies interact gravitationally when they don't appear to be touching eachother. Or so some argue. In any event, the pertinent difference between Newton and Lyell is that the former needed no reason for what is true everywhere and always (Newton was very theological) whereas Lyell needed instances to suggest mechanisms transferable to other instances.


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