Siccar Point, now a Scottish National Heritage site, has been called the world’s most important geological site.37 It remains today as Hutton and his companions saw it – a marker of the age of the earth. Acceptance of the evidence that mountains fell and rose again and that the human species was a relative newcomer to the planet had as profound an impact as did the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Freud in their time. In 1687 Newton, whose Principia Mathematica (a title Lyell intentionally echoed in his own Principles) set out the mathematical principles of motion and gravity, never questioned the traditional narrative dating the earth’s beginning at the creation. The seventeenth-century genius who opened so many secrets of motion and gravity remained blind to the antiquity of the earth.
2
HEALTHFUL EXERTION
In the 1830s geology was more than new: it was fashionable. The word ‘geologist’ was often preceded by the word ‘gentleman’. Many drawings of early geologists at work make a top hat seem as essential as a hammer, even on the summit of Vesuvius. They also convey the message that these were mainly men of independent means.
The popularity of geology was boosted by its accessibility. Unlike older sciences such as astronomy or chemistry, any enthusiast could perform research. While many of the early British geologists were clergymen, others were scholars or writers who saw themselves as ‘natural philosophers’. One such was George Eliot’s partner, George Henry Lewes. Lewes was the author of books on physiology, animal life and philosophy and an early contributor to the new scientific journal Nature. Together the pair spent many days scouring the coastal rocks around Britain, collecting marine fossils, classifying them and storing them in glass jars. Lewes presented their findings in 1858 in a 414-page popular book, Sea-side Studies at Ilfracombe, Tenby, the Scilly Isles, and Jersey. In it he gave instructions on the proper equipment for embarking on a day’s fossil-hunting:
It is necessary to take with you from London, or any other large town, in or near which you may live, a geologist’s hammer (let it be of reasonable size), and a cold chisel; to these add an oyster-knife, a paper-knife, a landing-net, and if your intentions are serious, a small crowbar. We now go to market for a basket. It must be tolerably large, and flat-bottomed. Having made that small investment, we turn into the chemist’s and buy up all the wide-mouthed phials he will sell us – those used for quinine are the best; but as he probably will only have two or three to sell, we must take what we can get. The short squat bottles, with wooden caps, now sold for tooth-powder, are very convenient.1
Geology was also seen as health-giving. At a time when tuberculosis and myriad digestive ailments were rife, there was a constant search for healing waters and clear mountain air. Many were drawn to hammering rocks and hiking along steep trails because they felt the better for it. In 1817 William Fitton, a physician and an early fellow of the Geological Society of London, declared: ‘Geology has this great advantage, of which not even Botany partakes more largely, that it leads continually to healthful and active exertion, amidst the grandest and most animating scenery of Nature.’2
Four years earlier, in his Introduction to Geology, Robert Bakewell, a professional surveyor who was not a member of the gentlemanly Geological Society, advanced health as ‘an additional recommendation’ to ‘this useful and pleasing science’: ‘it leads its votaries to explore alpine districts, where the surrounding scenery and the salubrity of the air conspire to invigorate the health, and give to the mind a certain degree of elasticity and freshness, which will enable them on their return to discharge with greater alacrity the duties of active and social life’.3
Bakewell included some helpful information on the vegetable origin of coal, the fuel which had begun to be recognised as essential for the new developing industries. ‘Coal,’ he explained, ‘comes from heaps of trees buried by inundations – under beds of clay, sand and gravel.’ He went on to apologise for ‘the irksome labour’ of learning geological terms. He concluded his Introduction to Geology with a blatant self-advertisement. Addressed ‘to Landed Proprietors’, he wished to inform ‘those noblemen and gentlemen who may honour this volume with their perusal, that he undertakes the mineralogical examination of estates, to ascertain the true nature and qualities of the soil, stone, and various minerals or metallic ores, and the uses to which they may be most profitably applied’.4
In 1831 an even grander accolade was awarded to geology by the eminent English astronomer and chemist Sir John Herschel in his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy: ‘Geology, in the magnitude and sublimity of the objects of which it treats, undoubtedly ranks, in the scale of the sciences, next to astronomy.’5
Lyell, too, liked to compare the promise of the new science of geology to that of the older astronomy and looked forward with great optimism to the discoveries that geology would bring. As he wrote in Principles:
Never, perhaps, did any science, with the exception of astronomy, unfold in an equally brief period, so many novel and unexpected truths, and overturn so many preconceived opinions. The senses had for ages declared the earth to be at rest, until the astronomer taught that it was carried through space with inconceivable rapidity. In like manner was the surface of this planet regarded as having remained unaltered since its creation until the geologist proved that it had been the theatre of reiterated change, and was still the subject of slow but never-ending fluctuations. The discovery of other systems in the boundless regions of space was the triumph of astronomy: to trace the same system through various transformations – to behold it at successive eras adorned with different hills and valleys, lakes and seas, and peopled with new inhabitants, was the delightful meed [reward] of geological research.6
He foresaw an exciting future for the new science of geology which calculated ‘myriads of ages..., not by arithmetical computation, but by a train of physical events – a succession of phenomena in the animate and inanimate worlds – signs which convey to our minds more definite ideas than figures can do, of the immensity of time’.7 What the long-term benefits of geology would be, he could not venture to say, but the practical advantages already derived were considerable and more would undoubtedly follow.
Geology rode the crest of the Romantic movement with its reverence for pastoral landscape and the beauties of Nature. This preoccupation may help to explain the subject’s surge of popularity in Britain. As the scientific historian Roy Porter observes: ‘spurred by Romanticism and muscular Christianity, nineteenth-century geologists celebrated “doing geology on your feet” as the hard-core activity of their science’.8
The poet-philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1771–1834), supported by a five-foot walking stick, conducted many epic walks through the Severn Valley and the Welsh hills, and had a passionate response to wild nature that, claims his biographer Richard Holmes, was so physical and direct that he felt almost at times like a child suckling at her rocky breasts: ‘From Llanvunnog we walked over the mountains to Bala – most sublimely terrible!’ wrote Coleridge. ‘It was scorchingly hot – I applied my mouth ever and anon to the side of the Rocks and sucked in draughts of Water as cold as Ice.’9 Humphry Davy, a friend of Coleridge who corrected the proofs of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, used similar oral imagery writing in his own blank verse: ‘For I have tasted of that sacred stream/Of science, whose delicious water flows, From Nature’s bosom.’10
Yet not every Romantic poet appreciated the aesthetics of the new science. William Wordsworth recoiled from the spectacle of geologists thwacking the hills of his beloved Lake District. In The Excursion, written in 1814, the poet deplored:
He who with pocket-hammer smites the edge
Of luckless rock or prominent stone, disguised
In weather-stains or crusted o’er by Nature
With her first growths – detaching by the stroke
A chip or splinter – to resolve his doubts;
And, with that ready answer satisfied,
The substance classes by so
me barbarous name,
And hurries on . . .11
The barbarous sound (to English ears) of geological terms such as ‘greywacke’, ‘schist’ and ‘gneiss’ derived from geology’s German roots. Serious scientific study of the earth began as mineralogy on the Continent in the late eighteenth century for the purpose of assisting the growing mining industry in northern Europe. Schools of mines in Germany, France and Hungary analysed rocks, stones and minerals for their commercial value. France had an estimable Journal des Mines to publish its information. Other disciplines too – architecture, medicine and agriculture – sought information on the physical composition of the materials found in the earth’s crust.
Leading this new field was Abraham Gottlob Werner. From 1775 Werner was professor of mineralogy at Freiburg School of Mines, the first mining school in Europe, where his charm and eloquence elevated his Bergakademie (mountain or hill academy) to the status of a great university. Lyell later described Werner as kindling ‘enthusiasm in the minds of all his pupils, many of whom only intended at first to acquire a slight knowledge of mineralogy; but when they had once heard him, they devoted themselves to it as the business of their lives’.12
It was at Freiburg that geology became a scientific discipline, establishing some of the terminology that so annoyed Wordsworth and which, in some forms, still persists. Werner was the first to highlight the constant relations of certain mineral groups and their regular order of superposition. His native Saxony was an important mining centre, and it was here that the science of geology grew out of mineralogy and first became a scientific discipline. Werner called attention to the fact that the position of minerals in rocks was invaluable knowledge for the purposes of mining. So too was the grouping of rocks. He saw the economic use of minerals and their application to medicine. He also observed the contribution of rocks to the soil, which itself influenced human wealth, intelligence, architecture and patterns of migration.
Werner had no doubt that the earth was very old. He observed that the lowest level of rocks, composed of granite, gneiss and schist, contained no fossils – that is, no remains of living things. He called these ‘Primary’. The rocks above these he designated as ‘Transition’. These included a type of dark gritty sandstone which he named ‘greywacke’ (‘Grau-wacke’ in German), characterised by embedded rock fragments and a few traces of life evidenced by a small number of fossils. Higher up still were layers of rocks he called ‘Secondary’ – sedimentary rocks, filled with fossils and derived either from the deposition of mineral and organic particles or from the breakdown of existing highly stratified rocks. On top of both levels lay the more recent ‘Tertiary’ rocks consisting of loose gravels, sand and clays.
In 1786 Werner expressed his conviction about the origin of the earth: ‘The solid globe, insofar as we know it, was originally formed entirely from water.’ He decided that the planet had been formed by multiple great deluges and that all its rocks had been precipitated from a common ‘chaotic fluid’ (hence the term ‘Neptunism’).
Lyell, criticising this theory in his Principles of Geology thirteen years after Werner’s death, sarcastically pointed out that Werner was provincial: he had ‘merely explored a small portion of Germany’ yet took it as a prototype for the whole world and went on to teach that ‘the whole surface of our planet, and all the mountain chains in the world, were made after the model of his own province’. Unfortunately, Lyell continued, ‘the limited district examined by the Saxon professor was no type of the world, nor even of Europe’ and his students were later to discover ‘that “the master” had misinterpreted many of the appearances in the immediate neighbourhood of Freyberg’.13
By the start of the nineteenth century, the scientific centre of Europe had moved to Paris. French science, already strong, had benefited from the French Revolution, for in its wake new and revived institutions were created. These included the Ecole des Mines, re-established in 1794, the Institut National des Sciences et des Arts in 1795, the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in 1793, and the Jardin des Plantes replacing the monarchistic Jardin du Roi.
Best known among the pioneering French naturalists was Georges (Baron) Cuvier. Born in 1769 to a bourgeois family in Montbéliard, then part of the German duchy of Württemberg, Cuvier spent the years of the Revolution as a tutor in Normandy. An ardent reader of books on natural history, he corresponded with leading naturalists of the time and at the age of twenty-seven was invited to lecture at the new Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, an institution much admired in Britain, which at the time had nothing comparable. Examining the skeletal remains of large mammals, Cuvier identified the mammoth, the mastodon and the megatherium (literally: huge beast), an elephant-size fur-covered creature like a giant sloth. He became professor of animal anatomy at the museum and remained there under Napoleon. In 1798 he asserted that there had been ‘thousands of centuries’ before man.
In 1812, Cuvier published his four-volume Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles (‘Researches on fossil bones’), a blend of geology and comparative anatomy, in which he called attention to the significance of the relics of past forms of life – ‘palaeontology’, as the new science came to be called. The remains of extinct creatures in the Tertiary rocks found in the Paris Basin and also in private collections brought from Holland startled him by showing that large mammals such as mastodons, pterodactyls and elephants had lived in that region. To Cuvier’s trained eye, the fossil teeth and jawbones showed them to have come from different species to those of modern Asian and African elephants. He could see that the climate had once been much warmer than in his day, that the geological record was marked by many dramatic breaks and that the sea had covered the land at many times.
Cuvier’s work dazzled the novelist Honoré de Balzac, who in 1831 asked in La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin):
Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt cities, like Cadmus, with monsters’ teeth; has animated forests with all the secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has discovered a giant population from the footprints of a mammoth. These forms stand erect, grow large, and fill regions commensurate with their giant size . . .
He can call up nothingness before you without the phrases of a charlatan. He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an impression in it, says to you, ‘Behold!’ All at once marble takes an animal shape, the dead come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you.14
Such Continental discoveries were of little immediate benefit to Britain, however. The Napoleonic Wars from 1799 to 1815 effectively confined the British to their island. There were notable exceptions. The newly ennobled Sir Humphry Davy, together with his assistant Michael Faraday, travelled to Paris in 1813 carrying a permit from Napoleon himself. Napoleon had presented Davy with a medal for his electrochemical work, leading to the London press criticising Davy for being unpatriotic in a time of war.15 To a friend he countered: ‘Some people say I ought not to accept this prize; and there have been foolish paragraphs in the papers to that effect; but if the two countries or governments are at war, the men of science are not.’16
For the most part, not only travel but the exchange of ideas was cut off. The exclusion was all the more deliberate because the British ruling classes were alarmed by the rise in Britain of a radical press whose books and pamphlets might bring about a replication of France’s Revolution. So great was the fear of the French that in 1799 Herschel, as George III’s astronomer, was secretly commissioned by the War Office to provide a hundred-guinea spy telescope to be mounted on the walls of Walmer Castle on the southeastern coast of Kent to give early warning of an approaching French invasion fleet.
The end of the wars with France would come as a much-anticipated liberation for British intellectuals and scientists. Writing from Suffolk in 1812, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, a Cambridge University clergyman w
ho would become one of the giants of British geology, described the intense excitement on hearing of victory at Salamanca:
No railroads, and no telegrams then. So day by day we went out to meet the mail-coach on its first entrance . . . I said to myself, if England lose her freedom I will pack up all I have and go to settle along with my relations among the free-men of the United States. We had heard reports of good news, and I took my stand on a little hill that overlooks the London road along with my party. Several hundred of the inhabitants joined us. At length the mail-coach came in sight, rapidly nearing us. On its top was a sailor, waving the Union Jack over his head, and gaudy ribbons were streaming on all sides, the sure signs of victory.17
Peace, following the Duke of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo in June 1815, put an end to Britain’s isolation. There began a mass exchange of scholars across the Channel.
Some historians today use the term ‘savants’ for these pioneering academics, arguing that the word ‘scientist’ did not come into use until 1833. But the same early practitioners could very well have been called ‘geologists’ – the term having come into use in 1795. (The word ‘geology’ itself appeared in 1735 when The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary described it as ‘the science which treated the earth in general as well as investigating the earth’s crust and the rock layers composing it’.)
Whatever their label, the scholars brought German and French knowledge of geology to a rapid industrialising Britain, while British geological adventurers were now free to wander abroad, hammer in hand, to inspect the crags and crevasses of their choice.
Reading the Rocks Page 3
