Lyell was born in Kinnordy, Scotland, the son of well-todo parents. When Lyell was less than a year old, his father moved his family to the south of England where he leased a house near the New Forest in Hampshire. Lyell spent his boyhood there, surrounded by his father's collection of rare plants. At the age of seven, Lyell became ill with pleurisy and while recovering began to collect and study insects. As a young man he entered Oxford to study law, but he also became interested in mineralogy after attending lectures by the noted geologist William Buckland. Buckland advocated the theories of Abraham Gottlob Werner, a neptunist who postulated that a vast ocean once covered the earth and that the various rocks resulted from chemical and mechanical deposition underwater, over a long period of time. This outlook...