Charles Lyell Facts
Charles Lyell Facts
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| Interesting Charles Lyell Facts: |
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| He was the eldest of ten children. |
| Lyell's father was a lawyer and a botanist a he was the one that first exposed his son to the study of nature. |
| Lyell's family's second home was a very open space with lots of wildlife that he could explore. |
| Lyell went to Exeter College, Oxford in 1816. He graduated BA second class in classics. |
| After he graduated, he took up law as a profession, and entered Lincoln's Inn in 1820. He completed a circuit through rural England and observed geological phenomena. |
| In 1827 he quit law to study geology. |
| Lyell married Mary Horner, who was 12 years younger than him, in 1832. |
| In the 1840s, Lyell travelled to the United States and Canada, and wrote two popular travel-and-geology books: Travels in North America and A Second Visit to the United States. After the Great Chicago Fire, Lyell was one of the first to donate books to help the Chicago Public Library. |
| In 1866, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. |
| He was knighted in 1848 and was made a baronet in 1875. |
| Lyell's wife died in 1873, and two years later Lyell himself died as he was revising the twelfth edition of Principles. |
| Mary died very unexpectedly after a short illness. |
| Lyell was given many awards because of his contributions to geology and ecology. |
| The highest point in Yosemite National Park is named after him, and there is a crater on the moon and a crater on Mars named after Lyell. |
| Lyell was a believer of uniformitarianism, which is the belief that all features on the Earth's surface are created by physical, chemical, and biological processes over a period of time. |
| He wrote many works about his studies and theories and they were very important to the field of geology. Some of his works became less popular as time went on, but they were still very important in his time. |
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