‘Non-Progression’, the interpretation of life-history launched by Lyell in 1830 and defended by him for over twenty years, can be summarized as follows. Palaeontologists, Lyell contended, should assume that at every period of the earth's recoverable past, each class of plants and animals has been represented somewhere on earth. Species have been created solely as responses to perpetually shifting environmental conditions, and not as temporally conditioned stages in the unique unrolling of a grand plan. If certain environments are especially suited (...) to reptiles, then the Creator tailors collections of beautifully adapted terrestrial, aquatic, and even aerial reptiles for them—as He did, for example, for the environments recorded in the British Jurassic; as He did, much more recently, for the Galapagos Islands; and as He will do again, if conditions somewhere on earth ever force mammals into extinction, leaving ecological niches which can more suitably be filled by reptiles. If, for example, changes in the topography and climate of the Sussex Weald eventually lead to the re-establishment of an environment that particularly suits iguanodons, then iguanodons will assuredly appear there again. The essential point about Lyell's interpretation is that time does nothing to determine a particular flora and fauna. When designing a new animal, the Creator, according to Lyell's view, has to take into account only the creature's or plant's destined environment: He has to consult no timetable, or lineage, governing the production of new forms. In notes for a speech given in 1852 Lyell reduced his interpretation to the epitome, ‘Adaptation to geographical circumst5 not progressive develop the real history of past changes’. (shrink)

Early in 1826, at the age of 28, Charles Lyell began writing the first of a series of articles for J. G. Lockhart, the new editor of theQuarterly review. These articles gave him his first opportunity to express to the educated public his views on the state of science in general, and of geology in particular, in English society. According to the convention of theQuarterly, each article was nominally a review of one or more recently published works, but like other (...) reviewers Lyell clearly chose them as ‘pegs’ on which to hang his own arguments. In content, the articles form a kind of ‘gradualistic’ series, rather like his own later interpretations of geological phenomena. At one end of the series (though published third) was an essay on the place of science in general in English university education. Another article (the first to appear in print) focused on some of the English institutions specifically devoted to science. Here there was a hint that the need for reform in the place of science in English society was not unrelated to a similar need for reform in Lyell's chosen branch of science. The next article enlarged on this hint by examining the publications of the Geological Society of London, on which Lyell had recently served as Secretary. This essay expressed for the first time in a general context Lyell's characteristic emphasis on the need for actualistic comparison between present and past. Finally, what he needed to complete the series was an article in which he could show in detail the positive explanatory advantages of following this method in geology. The ‘peg’ which he chose for this purpose was a single work, George Poulett Scrope'sMemoir on the geology of central France. (shrink)

Central to the development of geology has been the growth of systematic empirical observation as a programme of scientific practice. Fieldwork has focused on many objects—strata, fossils, and landforms—and has issued in a variety of products, such as maps, sections, and monographs on regional geology, particular rock formations and fossils. Early in the nineteenth century, above all, many influential geologists sought to define their science as one exclusively of field observation, description, and the accumulation of data. The rise of fieldwork, (...) in Britain as elsewhere, is an important phenomenon in the making of geology. It must be explained. (shrink)