THE IMPORTANCE OF FRENCH TRANSFORMIST IDEAS 
FOR THE SECOND VOLUME OF LYELL'S PRINCIPLES OF GEOLOGY

RECENTLY there has been considerable revaluation of the development of natural 
sciences in the early nineteenth century, dealing among other things with the 
works and ideas of Charles Lyell. The task of interpreting Lyell in balanced 
terms is extremely complex because his activities covered many fields of 
research, and because his views have been unwarrantably distorted in order to 
make him the precursor of various modern scientific positions. Martin Rudwick in 
particular has contributed several papers relating to Lyell's Principles of 
geology, and has repeatedly stressed the need for a comprehensive evaluation of 
Lyell's scientific proposals, and of his position in the culture of his time 
(1). In the present paper I hope to contribute to the reassessment of Lyell's 
work by concentrating on his discussion of transformism, which constituted the 
central theme of the second volume of the Principles of geology : the very 
length of Lyell's detailed and critical analysis of Lamarck's theories reveals 
the importance he attributed to the question of transformism in the contemporary 
natural sciences (2).
 

Several authors have analyzed major aspects of Lyell's work in relation to 
contemporary debates in the biological and geological sciences, but no one has 
yet paid sufficient attention to the question of Lamarckism, or to theories and 
attitudes sympathetic to Lamarck's ideas in the 1820s and early 1830s, or to 
Lyell's awareness of the renewed circulation of transformist ideas. Furthermore, 
a careful if not exhaustive inquiry into the French biological thought of these 
years reveals that the ‘Âge de Cuvier’ was more complex than historians of 
science have tended to admit.
 

In the preface to the third volume of the Principles, Lyell informed the reader 
that after the publication of the first volume, in January 1830, he applied 
himself ‘to perfect what I had written on the Changes in the organic world - a 
subject which merely occupied four or five chapters in my original sketch, but 
which was now expanded into a small treatise’(3). Between the initial plan - to 
write four or five chapters on the changes in the organic world - and the final 
result of his work on this subject - the first eleven chapters of the second 
volume - Lyell made two long geological expeditions to the continent. The first 
journey lasted from May 1828 to the beginning of March 1829 ; the second 
occupied the summer of 1830 (4). 

(1) For recent works on Charles Lyell see : M. J. Bartholomew, ‘Lyell and 
evolution : an account of Lyell's response to the prospect of an evolutionary 
ancestry for man’, The British journal for the history of science, 1973, 6, 
261-303 ; ‘Lyell Centenary issue’ of The British journal for the history of 
science, 1976, 9, and to particular R. Porter, ‘Charles Lyell and the principles 
of the history of geology’, pp. 91-103, and M. J. S. Rudwick, ‘Charles Lyell 
speaks in the lecture theatre’, pp. 147-55. Amongst other recent publications by 
Professor Rudwick see : ‘Poulett Scrope on the volcanoes of Auvergne. Lyellian 
time and political economy’, ibid., 1974, 8, 205-42 ; ‘Charles Lyell, FRS 
(1797-1875), and his London lectures on geology’, Notes and records of the Royal 
Society of London, 1975, 29, 231-63.
 

(2) M. J. S. Rudwick ‘The strategy of Lyell's Principles of geology’, Isis, 
1970, 61, 4-33. For discussions of the French natural sciences in the early 
nineteenth century, see the works cited in notes 4, 49, 59 below.
 

(3) Charles Lyell, Principles of geology, 3 vols., London, 1830-33, iii, XIV. 
Hereafter cited as Principles.
 

(4) On Lyell's journeys to Italy and France, see L. G. Wilson Charles Lyell. The 
years to 1841, the revolution in geology, New Haven, 1972, passim ; and ‘The 
intellectual background to Charles Lyell's Principles of geology, 1830-1833’, in 
Cecil J. Schneer, ed., Towards a history of geology, Cambridge, Mass., 1969, 
426-33.