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Date: 1831
Format: Drawn in the back of a 1830-31 field notebook
Description: Lyell serves theoretical soup to a strange parade. "Green glasses" are the spectacles of theoretical speculation, and "the go" was slang meaning "the hip fashion"
The cook leading the procession is presumably Lyell, and the soup is his theory. Rudwick (1975) has difficulty identifying the components of the Lyell's broth, but one is possibly a figure of Father Time (identified only by his appearance by later sketches). This would be a reference to Lyell's extreme form of uniformitarianism. Another might be a blowing wind, wind and water being the prime agents of change in Lyell's theory. All members of the procession, even an owl (the symbol of wisdom) wear colored glasses.
More directly antagonistic than the previous cartoons, Rudwick describes it as "verging on the libelous". Casting Lyell as a cook might be a reference to "cooking the books", or it might be a winking reference to letter written by Lyell. Lyell believed that fossil assemblages in the geologic record were controlled by climate alone. Lyell referred to this part of his theory in a letter as a recipe "for growing tree ferns at the pole, or if it suits me, pines at the equator". De la Beche would take up criticism of this concept again in Awful Changes.
To be honest, I don't know that I agree that the caption says "One fool makes many", the first "O" in "One" looks awfully like an "f". I have no alternate suggestion.
For more on De la Beche vs Lyell, see this page.
For more on Lyell himself, see his entry on the biography page.
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Sources & further discussion:
First described in Rudwick, M. J. (1975). Caricature as a source for the history of science: De la Beche's anti-Lyellian sketches of 1831. Isis, 66(4), 534-560. Link [www.journals.uchicago.edu]
Image yoinked from:
Rudwick (1975)
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