Lyell and the dilemma of Quaternary glaciation

Abstract

Abstract The glacial theory as proposed by Louis Agassiz in 1837 was introduced to the British Isles in the autumn of 1840 by Agassiz and his Oxford mentor, William Buckland. Charles Lyell was quickly converted in the course of a short period of intensive fieldwork with Buckland in and around Forfarshire, Scotland, centred on the Lyell family’s estate at Kinnordy. Agassiz, Buckland and Lyell presented substantial interrelated papers demonstrating that there had been a recent land-based glaciation of large areas of Scotland, Ireland and northern England — at three successive fortnightly meetings of the Geological Society of London, of which Buckland was then President, in November and December 1840. However, the response of the leading figures of British geology was overwhelmingly hostile. Within six months Lyell had withdrawn his paper and it had become clear that the Council of the Society was unwilling to published the papers, even though they were by three of the Society’s most distinguished figures. Lyell reverted to his earlier interpretation of attributing deposits such as tills, gravels and sands and the transport of erratics to a very recent deep submergence with floating icebergs, maintaining this essentially ‘catastrophist’ interpretation through to his death a quarter of a century later.

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