Item 114 - Letter from Charles Lyell

3 pp.

2 Raymond Buildings, Gray's Inn - CL was surprised and complimented that WW had already read the 300 pages he had sent him ['Principles of Geology', volume 2, 1832]: 'Recollect that all I have hitherto said against catastrophe is little else than dogmatizing to one who has not seen or read of the evidences which forced me against all my prepossessions to adopt my present creed...I hope you will be an umpire on this question, and therefore restrict yourself for a time to the ample subject of the evidence of organic changes already left you and reject as not yet proved, or attempted to be proved whatever advance respecting the slowness and uniformity of geological changes'. WW may be convinced by the next three chapters. CL has found that 'Hoffman [Friedrich Hofmann?] sent from Sicily an account of the country to which I owe my conversion just when von Dechen [Heinrich von Dechen], Miterlisch [Eilhard Mitscherlich?], and Von Hoff [Karl E A von Hoff?] were reading my book and to this I attribute the now favourable reception of my doctrine at Berlin'. Hoff has reviewed CL at length - an expose of his views as opposed to a critique. 'Dechen writes to Murchison [Roderick Murchison] 'Conybeare's [William Conybeare] reply in the annals is the work of a learned and able divine in support of a lost cause''.