Abstract

In the second volume of the Principles of geology Lyell had occasion to speak of G. B. Brocchi, ‘whose untimely death in Egypt’, he said, ‘is deplored by all who have the progress of geology at heart’. Whatever he understood to be the debt of other geologists to that Italian fossil conchologist, Lyell himself owed him much for providing scientific data and interpretations integrated in his own geological synthesis, but especially for furnishing the escutcheon of the third chapter in the review of the history of geology which Lyell appended as a late but enthusiastic embellishment to the Principles of geology. The ‘Discorso sui progressi dello studio della conchiologia fossile in Italia’, an eighty-page essay on the history of his subject, was contained in the first volume of Brocchi's Conchiologia fossile subappennina and afforded Lyell succinct notices on Italian geologists from the sixteenth century to his own time, as well as cues for the introduction of other non-Italian sources