The early 19th century saw a significant rise in the related fields of geology and paleontology, and this context is essential for understanding Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, presented a new view of Earth’s history and suggested that the Earth was much older than previously believed. Lyell argued for the principle of uniformitarianism, which suggested that the processes that shaped the planet in the past were still operating in the present: These slow and gradual changes, Lyell contended, could account for the world’s geological formations. This was a departure from the prevailing view, which held that the Earth’s history was characterized by catastrophic events like floods and earthquakes.

Darwin was deeply influenced by Lyell’s concept of Uniformitarianism and the Gradual Process of Geological Change and carried a copy of the Principles with him on board the HMS Beagle. The geological formations he observed during the voyage, such as the Andes Mountains and the coral islands of Mauritius, provided important evidence for the slow and gradual processes that Lyell had described. More broadly, the notion of deep geological time led to a rapid expansion of paleontology, the study of life on Earth before our current geological epoch.