“One biographer summed up Lyell’s influence on Darwin as follows: “Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin.” Darwin himself, after publishing his account of the voyage of the Beagle and also a volume on coral reefs, wrote, “I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brains.”

“One biographer summed up Lyell’s influence on Darwin as follows: “Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin.” Darwin himself, after publishing his account of the voyage of the Beagle and also a volume on coral reefs, wrote, “I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brains.”

— Elizabeth Kolbert