Poulett Scrope on the Volcanoes of Auvergne: Lyellian Time and Political Economy

Abstract

Early in 1826, at the age of 28, Charles Lyell began writing the first of a series of articles for J. G. Lockhart, the new editor of the Quarterly review. These articles gave him his first opportunity to express to the educated public his views on the state of science in general, and of geology in particular, in English society. According to the convention of the Quarterly, each article was nominally a review of one or more recently published works, but like other reviewers Lyell clearly chose them as ‘pegs’ on which to hang his own arguments. In content, the articles form a kind of ‘gradualistic’ series, rather like his own later interpretations of geological phenomena. At one end of the series (though published third) was an essay on the place of science in general in English university education. Another article (the first to appear in print) focused on some of the English institutions specifically devoted to science. Here there was a hint that the need for reform in the place of science in English society was not unrelated to a similar need for reform in Lyell's chosen branch of science. The next article enlarged on this hint by examining the publications of the Geological Society of London, on which Lyell had recently served as Secretary. This essay expressed for the first time in a general context Lyell's characteristic emphasis on the need for actualistic comparison between present and past. Finally, what he needed to complete the series was an article in which he could show in detail the positive explanatory advantages of following this method in geology. The ‘peg’ which he chose for this purpose was a single work, George Poulett Scrope's Memoir on the geology of central France.