charles_darwin

Biographies
Students of the Classes] (1812). In these books, he created a classification
system for invertebrates, reorganized the classification of the
animal kingdom, and postulated a theory of evolution.
Lamarck’s laws of transformation were responsible for the lack
of recognition that his theories received during his lifetime. Lamarck
argued that species progressed or evolved. Use or disuse made some
structures of an organism larger or smaller and these changes were
passed on to the next generation. Lamarck’s colleague Georges
Cuvier was completely opposed to this idea and worked hard to discredit
Lamarck. Unfortunately for Lamarck, Cuvier had much more
support in the Academy and Lamarck never acquired the fame or
financial stability his research deserved. Lamarck went blind in 1818
and died a pauper eleven years later.
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Sir Charles Lyell (14 November 1797–
22 February 1875)
Sir Charles Lyell was Darwin’s friend and mentor. Lyell’s theory
of uniformitarianism was a foundational principle of Darwin’s theory
of descent by modification. (Darwin applied Lyell’s theory of the
slow and steady development of the Earth’s strata outlined in Principles
of Geology to organic life.) Lyell was one of the few people
Darwin told about his belief in transmutation before 1859. Lyell,
with Joseph Hooker, urged Darwin to write out his theory about the
origin of species in the early 1850s; and Lyell and Hooker arranged
for the reading of Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s papers on natural
selection at the meeting of the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858,
which eventually led to Darwin writing The Origin of Species.
Although he became the premier British geologist of the nineteenth
century, geology was a second career for Lyell. He became a
qualified lawyer in 1822. However, as had been the case when he
was a student at Oxford University, natural history, particularly geology,
interested Lyell more than the law. Between 1821 and 1825 Lyell
did a series of tours in southern England, southern Scotland, and
northern France, studying the geology of both areas and meeting important
figures in the field such as Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and
Constant Prevost (1787–1856). He was particularly interested in the
larger questions of geology, such as the reasons why geological strata
were arranged as they were. A paper published in 1826 entitled ‘‘On
the Freshwater Strata of Hordwell Cliff, Beacon Cliff, and Barton
Cliff, Hampshire’’ exemplified the traits that made Lyell famous: clear
writing in a style easily understood by nonspecialists, an emphasis