Books - Charles Lyell

Product Description:
Gould's subject is nothing less than geology's signal contribution to human thought--the discovery of "deep time," a history so ancient that we can best comprehend it as metaphor.



Customer Review: Does history repeat itself or does it generate a sequence of unique events?:
Does history repeat itself or does it generate a sequence of unique events? This is the fundamental question "Time's Arrow and Time's Cycle" asks. It is my third favourite Gould book, after "Wonderful Life" and "Bully for Brontosaurus". From a literary and philosophical point of view, it's possibly his best book, being more tightly focused than WL and more developed than the essays in BfB.

You'll find here many standard Gould devices such as fascinating segues and the rehabilitation of discredited thinkers. For instance we read the story of how James Hampton built his masterpiece, his throne to the glory of God, out of discarded junk (it's now at the Smithsonian). Gould also rehabilitates the 17th century thinker Thomas Burnet and his unsubstantiated cosmological theories. He also presents two more orthodox thinkers, James Hutton and Charles Lyell, and contrasts their gradual uniformitarianism with the sudden catastrophism of Burnet.

Gould explicitly dismisses Burnet's scientific credentials but still uses Burnet's vision as a starting point. It is by opposing Burnet to Hutton and Lyell that Gould asks the question as to what history is: repetive and uniform, or cyclical? The answer of course is a little of both. Again, Burnet's vision provides the clue to the answer. There are cycles, and within the cycle there are shocks and catastrophes. Or is it the other way around? Clearly Time is a difficult concept to grasp!

Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

Customer Review: Time's Arrow Time's Cycle:
Time's Arrow Time's Cycle written by Stephtn Jay Gould is a book that takes human thought to a new level in comprehending geology's vastness of history... the discovery of deep time. Gould works this book's major theme in the role of metaphor in the formulation and testing of scientific theories as the directionality (narrative history) of time's arrow or the immanence of time's cycle (immanent laws).

This book is both an account of geology's greatest discovery and philosophical commentary on the nature of scientific thought. As this thought takes us from thought of time in thousand of years to billions of years, inspired by empirical observation of rocks in the field.

Gould follows a single thread through three documents that mark the transition in our thinking: Thomas Burnet's four-volume "Sacred Theory of the Earth" (1680-1690), James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth (1795), and Charle Lyell's three-volume "Principle of Geology (1830-1833). Gould shifts through these writings giving the reader a history and background needed for a progressive march to the truth of the geological history through an enlightened observation.

Reading this book will captivate the curious reader and helps the human mind understand the vastness of time and the struggle to understand it.

Customer Review: curve ball that looks like a slider:
The title of the review is an homage to Gould's oft mentioned love of baseball. This book is a cogent explanation of how European scientists (natural philosophers) recounciled the narrative tradition of history inherited from the Judeo-Christian template with the eternal return perspective of the Classical civilizations. Both view points-as-metaphors shed light on interpretation of the geological record. There are both serial and cyclic elements in the history of the earth, so the scientific community found truth in spite of the fact that individual scientists tended to emphasize one perspective over the other.

Gould exposes the 'cardboard cut-out' Whig version of history that most working scientists have received uncritically as hurried historical preambles to their study of geology per se. James Hutton, for example, is held up as a paragon of the field geologist who supposedly preceded his assertion of the existence of 'deep time' with countless hours in the field. Not so, says Gould. In fact, Hutton did his field work after he conceived the idea of a lengthy earth history and merely used his field observations to bolster his claim. Thomas Burnet, author of the much made-fun-of Sacred Theory of the Earth, is revealed to have been a champion of uniformitarianism before Hutton even conceived of it. Burnet refused to advance causes for events described in the Bible that could not be explained by the laws of physics as advanced by Isaac Newton. Finally, Charles Lyell is exposed as a master of rhetoric who conflated methodological and substantive aspects of uniformitarianism in order to sway his audience. No member of the scientific community contemporary to Lyell clung to the Mosaic timescale. He merely used it as a strawman. It was Lyell who managed to mate the narrative and eternal return perspectives into a coherent view of Earth history. First he did so by insisting the apparent progress observed in the fossil record was caused by the immense scale of the cycles of Earth history. Eventually he conceded the reality of evolution and allowed for the existence of an arrow of time whose path did not curve.

Gould's book is modified from a series of lectures, which is probably why there is so much uncharacteristic repetition of themes and ideas in this book. It was the only aspect of this book that I found irritating. Gould is also candid about his pride at uncovering various inaccuracies in the received wisdom and unearthing original themes to explain patterns in the history of geology. I have heard other people complain about this personality trait. I have no problem with it and believe that his satisfaction with his own cleverness is quite justifiable.

Customer Review: Meet the mythmakers:
Stephen Jay Gould's love of science history really shows through in this work, which focuses on changing ideas about time and geology. It's well-researched and makes some very intriguing points about science in general, but if you have no patience for geology you probably won't get that far - it's nowhere near as accessible as his essay collections, but that's only to be expected. Every science major should read this book, and so should anyone who likes to think of themselves as well-informed about history and science.

Product Description:

A pioneering geologist from Scotland, Charles Lyell (1797-1875) was one of the nineteenth century's most important and controversial scientists. His landmark 1830 book Principles of Geology, for example, went against the received wisdom of the age and posited that throughout the history of the earth, geological changes occurred largely through slow and ongoing processes. And although he is today perhaps best known as Charles Darwin's mentor, Lyell's contributions are still felt in the disciplines of geology and evolutionary biology. In Lyell in America, Leonard Wilson continues his acclaimed study of Lyell's life and works with this chronicle of Lyell's extensive travels throughout America which blends detailed scientific observations with colorful travelogue.

Lyell first came to America in 1841, remaining for more than a year and touring widely. His immediate reason for the journey was to deliver the prestigious Lowell lectures in Boston. His larger purpose was to study the geology of North America, hoping that the vast scale of the continent -- its mountain ranges, plains, great lakes, and rivers -- would confirm his belief in the uniformity of geological history. The America he and his wife Mary arrived in was a country in transition. Now more than two hundred years old, the English settlements along the Atlantic seaboard had, in relative isolation, developed a distinctly American culture. Over the course of this tour and three subsequent trips to North America (twice for extended periods), Lyell observed both America's geological phenomena and its social landscape. He studied coal deposits, and collected rocks and fossils. He showed how the Niagara River formed its dramatic gorge. He rode to the top of Mount Washington. And he assessed the sophistication of the geological sciences in North America through conversations with his American counterparts.

In his travels, Lyell also made insightful observations about American society and the continent's pronounced regional differences. Traveling along the entire Atlantic coast and as far inland as the Mississippi River, he and Mary saw villages, towns, and cities of every size and temperament, and they met and came to know many Americans. Lyell marveled at the prosperity and rapid growth of pioneer settlements into flourishing cities, as well as at the vigorous enterprise of the American people. He enjoyed the speed and comfort of the river steamboats and the friendliness of the people. In the South, he studied slavery and challenged many of the racist suppositions of white intellectuals there, pondering how the institution of slavery might be ended. Lyell in America provides the first detailed exploration of Lyell's pivotal years of American travel using previously unpublished letters and journals, together with Lyell's published writings. Through the eyes of Charles and Mary Lyell, Leonard Wilson provides a vivid portrait of antebellum America and of Lyell's contributions to American geology.

Product Description:
This digital document is an article from Science and Its Times, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses. The length of the article is 1509 words. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser. The histories of science, technology, and mathematics merge with the study of humanities and social science in this interdisciplinary reference work. Essays on people, theories, discoveries, and concepts are combined with overviews, bibliographies of primary documents, and chronological elements to offer students a fascinating way to understand the impact of science on the course of human history and how science affects everyday life. Entries represent people and developments throughout the world, from about 2000 B.C. through the end of the twentieth century.

Product Description:
The surprising story of three ambitious men and how their clash of egos, ignorance, and imaginations led to the discovery of the Ice Age

Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), extraordinary Swiss scientist and professor, conceived of the Ice Age and then spent decades trying to persuade other scientists he had not gone mad. Charles Lyell (1797-1875) was his century's most influential geologist and a master politician among his fellow scientists. His scientific principles said an Ice Age was impossible, even after his eyes showed him it was real. Elisha Kent Kane (1820-1857), an adventurer trapped for two winters at the top of Greenland, wrote a poetic description of a harsh and frozen landscape. His reports portrayed previously unimaginable great ice and set the stage for the story's unexpected outcome.

The discovery of the Ice Age is one of science's greatest and least-known stories. Like James Watson's The Double Helix and Dava Sobel's Longitude, The Ice Finders shows that, for all their boasting about reason, scientists are driven by their passions and obsessions-human traits that actually advance the evolution of scientific discovery.

Amazon.com Review:
Edmund Blair Bolles is investigating a mystery: human creativity. Garbage in, garbage out is the rule for even the most intelligent machines; but with human minds, the rules change. Sometimes the rule is as true for us as for any computer, but every once in a while it's Ignorance in, insight out.

The example Bolles looks at is the Ice Age. Nowadays it's familiar to every schoolchild, but this familiarity has dulled our appreciation of just how wild an idea it once was. Earth-girdling floods seemed both reasonable and biblical, volcanoes unusual but not unknown. But a mile-thick sheet of ice covering much of the North Temperate Zone only 20,000 years ago was beyond anyone's experience or imagination.

The professor and the politician of Bolles's title are Louis Agassiz and Charles Lyell, two of the most famous geologists of the 19th century. The unusual character in Bolles's story is the poet: Elisha Kent Kane. To call Kane a poet is both over- and understatement: he was a celebrity, a romantic, a self-promoter, a mediocre explorer, and a particularly poor leader of men. He was also a dreamer who tried to find the lost Franklin expedition, and found the far north very different from his (or anyone else's) expectations: "dreams in, nightmares out." Yet it was Kane's bestselling book about his travels that brought the reality of great ice into the minds of laypeople and scientists alike: writes Bolles, "He is the one who made the Ice Age imaginable." --Mary Ellen Curtin



Customer Review: An eye-opener:
Very, very compressed book -- 250 pages to introduce the dominant theories of the time, sketch the characters of some of the people involved, outline the bones of the story, and describe the utter revolution in thinking and beliefs brought about by the discovery (realization) of the Ice Age.

What struck me most were these petty, bickering, status-conscious scientists resolute in their refusal to acknowledge new information even when seen with their own eyes -- refuting obvious conclusions, choosing pride over reality. The bitter rivalries, the entrenched positions, the profound egos of these people, ... you can see it today in the debate over man's role in climate change.

Today, you have scientists and true believers gripping so hard to the theory of anthropogenic global climate change because their personalities and egos are wrapped up in their belief. The book underscores the staggering refusal to consider new evidence on the part of highly esteemed scientists.

I think the book's connection to today's world is glaringly obvious -- the reader *must* conclude that it is an exoneration of global warming "deniers". I'm shocked that it was published.

I'm a fan of the explorer-discoverer-adventurer-survivor genre. This is not the best book I have read of its type -- I liked Endurance better, for one. But as far as describing the theories, personalities, and conflicts of the time as the setting for the exploration, this book is great.

Customer Review: yeah, a very nice book:
Although the title is a stretch (the poet, philosopher, politician stuff), this is a great read. The author not only is a very good writer, but also a very good storyteller, an expert at weaving his way back and forth between the Swiss Alps (and the Juras) and the glaciers of the west coast of Greenland. Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz is the biggest star, although I often found myself wanting to get back to the trials faced by Elisha Kent Kane and company on the coast of Greenland.

I learned a lot, all in the context of a great story.

Customer Review: Saga of Mind and Place:
Fun to read, well-organized, and sprightly in style. We are lucky to live in a Golden Age of writing about the history of science. The Ice Finders is about explorers both of extreme environments and extreme realizations. One such realization still has power to change our culture: the evolutionary implications of the ice ages and the corollary age of the Earth. Like poor Louis Agassiz, who propounded the ice-age theory but rejected Darwinism, an amazing number of people today still stand with one foot in religion and one in science.

Customer Review: Splendid Little Book On The Discovery Of The Ice Age:
Edmund Blair Bolles' "The Ice Finders" is an insightful little book that gives a slight, yet penetrating, overview on the sociology of 19th Century science. Here Bolles is interested in the impact creativity has on science; or more simply put, how imagination coupled with facts can propel scientific research. Here he has interwoven the careers of the three who were most responsible for establishing the fact of an Ice Age Earth: the "politician" Charles Lyell who advocated a uniformitarian view of the Earth that was often at odds with "professor" Louis Agassiz's vision of a catastrophic Ice Age that had covered the globe, wiping out life, and finally the "poet" Elisha Kent Kane, who found evidence for the Ice Age in the massive continental glaciers of Greenland. Bolles is interested not only in the facts behind the development of an Ice Age scientific theory, but also in the motivations of all three men, which led them to accept parts of the geological and climatic evidence that they had observed. Although Agassiz was the first to recognize the possibility of continental glaciation, it was only after Kane's observations of the Greeenland ice sheet, that geologists and others recognized the possibility of an Ice Age. Bolles' narrative is told in a crisp, lucid style that occasionally sounds like a well-written mystery. Although this is not the definitive history of science tome on this subject, it is nonetheless a fascinating little book that should be of interest to anyone intrigued with 19th Century exploration as well as the history of 19th Century science.

Customer Review: Showing how science is made:
Dava Sobel's Longitude seems to have established a new trend for science and technology writing. Instead of trying to produce broad histories, more books are coming out that focus on a specific area or development.

This one, for example, covers the development of the theory that there was once an "ice age," an era when glaciers covered much of the earth. This was heady stuff for the geologists of the 1830s, already reeling from evidence that the earth was millions or billions of years old, rather than the thousands indicated by the Bible. In fact, one of the tales of this book is the sometimes irrational resistance of established scientists to this radical but evident new concept, as Louis Agassiz turns himself from an establishment figure into a maverick by championing it and guardian of the orthodoxy Charles Lyell, author of the authoritative textbook of geology, first resists it and finally adopts it in a way that suggests he was right all along. The making of science is not always a pretty sight and is often rather different from the tidy displacement of an outdated theory by a more current, better supported one. It's frequently much more of a fight than that, and the theory of an ice age is an example of such.

But that's just one of the threads of this book. The other is the adventure of explorer-poet Elisha Kent Kane, who ostensibly seeks the remains of Franklin's polar expedition, gets stuck in the ice for two years (a harrowing experience related in painful detail), and finally returns with clear documentary evidence of the massive ice formations that Agassiz needs as the final justification for his theory.

The two threads are related in episodes, which gets a little confusing, particularly when one notes that the Kane expedition narrative covers a time period well after most of the Agassiz narrative. However, one quickly gets used to this and moves on.
All in all, it's a very interesting story that shows how science is made.

Product Description:
This digital document is an article from Science and Its Times, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses. The length of the article is 602 words. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser. The histories of science, technology, and mathematics merge with the study of humanities and social science in this interdisciplinary reference work. Essays on people, theories, discoveries, and concepts are combined with overviews, bibliographies of primary documents, and chronological elements to offer students a fascinating way to understand the impact of science on the course of human history and how science affects everyday life. Entries represent people and developments throughout the world, from about 2000 B.C. through the end of the twentieth century.

Product Description:
Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Charles Lyell," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Charles Lyell in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Charles Lyell when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Charles Lyell, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain.

Product Description:
This is a study which deals with reactions to geological discoveries in early 19th-century England. How did theologians cope with new scientific evidence of the antiquity of the world which was contrary to accepted biblical chronology? What repercussions did this picture have on philosophers, poets and novelists? The book first concentrates on Charles Lyell's religious and scientific views, followed by a study of William Buckland, Adam Sedgewick and William Whewell, three clergymen who were also geologists. The last section explores the literary reception of the revolutionary discoveries of Lyell and his contemporaries.

Product Description:
This digital document is an article from Science and Its Times, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses. The length of the article is 778 words. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser. The histories of science, technology, and mathematics merge with the study of humanities and social science in this interdisciplinary reference work. Essays on people, theories, discoveries, and concepts are combined with overviews, bibliographies of primary documents, and chronological elements to offer students a fascinating way to understand the impact of science on the course of human history and how science affects everyday life. Entries represent people and developments throughout the world, from about 2000 B.C. through the end of the twentieth century.