ABSTRACT
In 1830, five chapters into his epoch-making Principles of Geology, Charles Lyell invited his readers to imagine a descent into the underworld conducted by a gnome. He asked his readers to indulge their imaginations once again in order to grasp the implications of this point for any consideration of earth history. So daring a disregard of probability, so avowed a violation of analogy, would have been condemned as unpardonable even where the poet was painting those incongruous images which present themselves to a disturbed imagination during the visions of the night. Scientific writers sought to take advantage of the new plethora of print in a variety of ways, and Humphry Davy and Lyell clearly sought to define geological writing as a prestigious mode of authorship as philosophical and imaginative as poetry. For both Davy and Lyell, reinventing science as a literary mode of authorship, the answer to all this was the sophisticated human imagination.
