Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
After graduation, Lyell divided his time between reading for the bar and traveling
through Europe. Visiting Paris again in 1823 as a representative of the Geological Society,
he met Constant Prévost, a colleague of Cuvier, who believed that the alternating fresh-
water and marine strata of the Paris basin were deposited gradually in a coastal inlet that
periodically turned into a freshwater lake. Perhaps geological change could occur through
observable causes, if given enough time.
The following year, in the fall of 1824, Lyell visited sixty-three-year-old James Hall at
his estate on the Scottish coast. Now about the age Hutton was when they first sailed to
Siccar Point, Hall took Lyell there to absorb Hutton's insight through his own eyes. See-
ing firsthand how earth history involved a lot more time than conventionally thought, Lyell
began to believe that gradual changes could shape the land.
That same year, Lyell joined Buckland for a geological excursion through Scotland. Al-
though it may have been clear to both that their views had started diverging, neither could
have known that within a decade the apprentice would dethrone the master.
Lyell was not particularly interested in questioning religious views. Like many of his
peers, however, he was deeply concerned about the effect that ignoring geological evidence
could have on both science and religion. In 1827, he concluded a review of George Poulett
Scrope's Memoir on the Geology of Central France with an appeal for interpreting Genesis
broadly and letting the rocks speak for themselves:
We must recollect that the Mosaic narration is elliptical in the extreme, and that it makes no pretensions whatever
to supply those minute scientific details which some would endeavour to extort from it. 11
Lyell was echoing Augustine in believing that it would be hard to convince rational men to
follow a religion that denied things one could see for oneself.
Scrope's topic was the culmination of extensive fieldwork in the Auvergne region, where
dozens of conical hills made of loose piles of volcanic cinders overlook acres of black
basalt. Deep valleys were carved into stacked lava flows on which these delicate cinder
cones stood. Identical sequences of lava flows exposed in the walls on opposing sides of
individual valleys proved that the river cut down into the lava. Lyell was intrigued by
Scrope's description of how the lava flows buried the river gravels now exposed in the val-
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