CHAPTER III

THE ORIGINAL PENGUIN

Pinguinus impennis

The word “catastrophist” was coined in 1832 by William Whewell, one
of the first presidents of the Geological Society of London, who also
bequeathed to English “anode,” “cathode,” “ion,” and “scientist.”
Although the term would later pick up pejorative associations, which
stuck to it like burrs, this was not Whewell’s intention. When he proposed
it, Whewell made it clear that he considered himself a “catastrophist,” and
that most of the other scientists he knew were catastrophists too. Indeed,
there was really only one person he was acquainted with whom the label
did not fit, and that was an up-and-coming young geologist named
Charles Lyell. For Lyell, Whewell came up with yet another neologism. He
called him a “uniformitarian.”
Lyell had grown up in the south of England, in the sort of world
familiar to fans of Jane Austen. He’d then attended Oxford and trained to
become a barrister. Failing eyesight made it difficult for him to practice
law, so he turned to the natural sciences instead. As a young man, Lyell
made several trips to the Continent and became friendly with Cuvier, at
whose house he dined often. He found the older man to be personally
“very obliging”—Cuvier allowed him to make casts of several famous
fossils to take back with him to England—but Cuvier’s vision of earth
history Lyell regarded as thoroughly unpersuasive.
When Lyell looked (admittedly myopically) at the rock outcroppings
of the British countryside or at the strata of the Paris basin or at the
volcanic islands near Naples, he saw no evidence of cataclysm. In fact,
quite the reverse: he thought it unscientific (or, as he put it,
“unphilosophical”) to imagine that change in the world had ever occurred
for different reasons or at different rates than it did in the present day.
According to Lyell, every feature of the landscape was the result of very