Reading the Rocks

by Brenda Maddox

  His claim was no trivial matter. Geology had been increasingly successful in identifying coal seams (or ‘coal measures’ as they were called from an old miners’ term), which became more and more essential for industries at home and abroad.

  De la Beche’s letter was held back until the end of the GeolSoc meeting, which had drawn eighteen members and twenty-seven guests in anticipation of the outburst to come. Roderick Murchison, a former army officer who had not lost his military bearing, led the attack. He was furious, scathing and condescending – his vitriol all the nastier for its snobbery. It was known to all present that De la Beche,* once wealthy with an income of about £3,000 a year from estates in Jamaica, had lost his fortune in 1831 after an uprising of slaves. The loss imperilled his whole career as a gentleman of science. He had been compelled to resign his post as secretary of the Geological Society and to apply to the government for a grant to complete his ordnance survey of Devon.19 Now, without a fortune, he was seen by his fellow geologists as a ‘jobber’ – that is, not a gentleman, but rather a man of a lower class who had to work for a living. Indeed, he was so strapped for money that he could not even afford the coach fare to London to present his greywacke case in person.

  Murchison, supported by Lyell, insisted that the true greywacke of Devon could not possibly contain the fossil plants De la Beche claimed to have found within it. Both men freely acknowledged they had never been to north Devon. Even so, Murchison rejected De la Beche’s claim that the rocks on the table were greywacke or Transition rocks. He was astonished, he said, that so experienced a geologist should have fallen into so great a mistake. There were no land plants before the Transition period – the ancient period when few traces of life could be detected.

  The controversy would boil on for years. It sprang, although unrecognised by the participants at the time, from the disagreement and confusion over the new and important question: should rocks be dated by rock type or by fossil content? Today the answer is known to be both.

  In one talent De la Beche was unquestionably supreme. He drew brilliant caricatures without which the history of geology would be the poorer. His 1830 masterpiece Duria Antiquior showed prehistoric creatures – the plesiosaur, the ichthyosaur and the pterodactyl – in the air, on land and below the sea, flying, swimming, defecating, eating each other. Below the terrified plesiosaur being bitten by an ichthyosaur, a pile of droppings (coprolites) is accumulating. The picture is considered to have been the first scene out of ‘deep time’ to be recreated – possibly the first attempt by the human imagination to portray what earth was like before man walked on it. Subsequently, through its copies, widely circulated, Duria Antiquior created a genre, as Tom Sharpe of the National Museum of Wales has pointed out, that has led to today’s computer-generated reconstructions such as the film Jurassic Park and the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs.

  De la Beche’s cartoon of the Great Devonian Controversy is a brilliant sideswipe at his GeolSoc doubters. It shows him, in a practical topcoat suitable for fieldwork, facing his critics, who wear elegant tailcoats. They hold lorgnettes up to their eyes as they stare at the cringing De la Beche, who, pointing to his nose, declares: ‘This, Gentlemen, is my Nose’, to which they respond: ‘My dear fellow – your account of yourself generally may be very well but as we have classed you, before we saw you, among men without noses, you cannot possibly have a nose.’ Gifted and controversial, De la Beche was a colourful figure, with a fondness for bright checked waistcoats and gold-rimmed spectacles. His glasses identify him in the classic early sketch of the GeolSoc sitting around its T-shaped table.

  Along with his artistic gifts, De la Beche had an outstanding capacity for administration. In 1835 he was appointed superintendent of the small Museum of Economic Geology in Craig’s Court near Charing Cross, an institution formed to show the application of geology to the useful purposes of life. Among his duties was to sit on a commission in 1838 to select the building stone for the new houses of Parliament. (They chose a sand-coloured Yorkshire limestone.)

  In the end, the science of geology was helped by the fight, furious though it was, and De la Beche could be said to have pioneered the career of the professional geologist, transforming what had been a pastime for the privileged few into a serious career opportunity for anyone with the passion and skill to pursue it.

  * De la Beche pronounced his surname ‘Beach’, his father having embellished the family’s original name ‘Beach’ by changing it to ‘De la Beche’, so as to echo that of a medieval Baron De la Beche of Aldworth who died in 1345; yet he did not change the original pronunciation.

  6

  DATING THE DELUGE

  If not the father of geology, the Reverend William Buckland was its best publicist. In 1818, when thirty-two and a reader of mineralogy at Oxford University (a post equivalent to a professorship, yielding £100 per annum plus £100 for lectures), he persuaded the prince regent to endow a readership in geology as well and to give him the title he craved: ‘Reader of Geology’. His enthusiasm was not shared by other Oxford dons. When Buckland went on a tour of Italy, Dean Gaisford exclaimed: ‘Well, Buckland has gone to Italy; so, thank God, we shall hear no more of this geology.’1

  The natural sciences were not developing at Oxford under a utilitarian guise. They were studied neither for economic nor financial reasons, nor for the purpose of professional training. Quite the contrary. It was the perception of geology as history (albeit history of an antediluvian world) as a branch of humanistic learning that made the subject suitable as a fashionable branch of liberal education. Buckland explicitly stated in his inaugural lecture in 1819 that geology should be given a place at Oxford because it was ‘founded upon other and nobler views than those of mere pecuniary profit and tangible advantage. The human mind has an appetite for truth of every kind, physical as well as Moral; and the real utility of Science is to afford gratification to this appetite.’2

  Both Oxford and Cambridge had been under attack by the Edinburgh Review and other periodicals for neglect of secular learning. Oxford was particularly slow to develop the applied sciences such as medicine and agriculture, failing to keep pace with its older rival, Cambridge, by insisting on much more Greek. Cambridge, where mathematics held a prominent place in the examination system, already had a strong commitment to giving its students a knowledge of science. Neither university offered science as training for professional scientists. As chemistry, botany and geology were extracurricular in the first half of the nineteenth century, there were no examinations in these subjects. Science was offered as an option for Christian gentlemen, half of whom would become clergymen. As James Secord has observed, a theology of nature was one way of maintaining the authority of the state Church.3

  Buckland, who was ordained a priest and made a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1808, presented the new scientific subjects as complementary to the university’s system of classical education. In his inaugural lecture, ‘Vindiciae geologicae’, he respectfully referred to their introduction as an ‘ingrafting (if I may so call it) of the study of the new and curious sciences of Geology and Mineralogy, on that ancient and venerable stock of classical literature from which the English system has imparted to its followers a refinement of taste peculiarly their own’. In Buckland’s opinion, the new sciences were a necessary part of a proper liberal education and should be ‘admitted to serve at least a subordinate ministry in the temple of our Academical Institutions’.4

  ‘Vindiciae geologicae’ was audaciously subtitled: ‘or the Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained’, making him the pioneer in the field which still thrives today: reconciling Genesis and geology. His address, both defensive and aggressive, tackled the crucial question head on: why should a university devoted to classics and training clergy include geology in its curriculum?

  Buckland’s answer was just what the fledgling clerics needed to hear. The science of geology, he asserted, gave historical support for Holy Writ and was consistent with the b
iblical account of creation and Noah’s Flood. In his words: ‘Again, the grand fact of a universal deluge at no very remote period is proved on grounds so decisive and incontrovertible that, had we never heard of such an event from Scripture, or any other authority, Geology of itself must have called in the assistance of some such catastrophe, to explain the phenomena which are unintelligible without recourse to a deluge exerting its ravages at a period not more ancient than that announced in the Book of Genesis.’5

  Confidently he declared the ‘beginning’ in Genesis to be metaphoric; the only mental exercise needed was to interpret the word as referring to the timeless interval between the creation of the earth and man. In any case, he maintained, the very order in nature was proof of ‘the supreme intelligent author’ of creation.6 It was not surprising, therefore, that ‘the real utility of Science is to afford gratification to [this] large and rational species of curiosity’.7

  The son of a clergyman, Buckland was born in 1784 in Axminster, Dorset, six miles from the beautiful ninety-five-mile-long shoreline formed by rocks laid down in the Jurassic period (about 200 to 150 million years ago) when shallow seas, far higher than today’s, covered much of what is now Western Europe. (This famed stretch from west Dorset to east Devon, known as the Jurassic Coast, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its remarkable high limestone cliffs full of marine sediments show interleaved horizontal bands of shale and blue limestone, known as the ‘Blue Lias’.) He became interested in fossils when walking with his father, the Rector of Templeton and Trusham, around the quarries and cliffs. Of these rocks, he later told his daughter: ‘They were my geological school. They stared me in the face, they wooed me and caressed me, saying at every turn, Pray, Pray, be a geologist!’8 At first, he had called his new passion ‘undergroundology’, but soon dropped the neologism for ‘geology’.

  With his education guided by an uncle (his father having become blind), Buckland went to school at St Mary’s College, Winchester, and in 1801 won a scholarship to study for the ministry at Corpus Christi, Oxford. It was then that he began stuffing rooms with bones and fossils. He received his BA degree in classics and theology in 1804, having supplemented his scholarship funds by tutoring pupils in classics. He attended the lectures of regius professor John Kidd and benefited from the acquaintance of a younger student, William Broderip. Broderip was working on the succession of strata and was an expert conchologist – student of shells – who opened Buckland’s mind to the importance of their gradations. Together they would walk Shotover Hill, east of Oxford, Broderip pointing out fossil shells which, Buckland later said, ‘formed the nucleus of my collection for my own cabinet’.9 From then on, he made many excursions on horseback, often wearing a white cloak, riding an old mare and carrying his heavy blue bag of fossils and hammers.

  Buckland had been greatly assisted in preparing his inaugural lecture by his colleague, Reverend William Conybeare, much of whose energies were expended on making geology acceptable to Anglicans. Conybeare, aside from being a cleric (he was made Bishop of Llandaff in 1848) was also one of the most experienced geologists of his time. An early member of the GeolSoc, he had joined in 1809 as the leading authority on the fossil reptiles he had named ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. He was already persuaded that the position of fossils in rock layers showed their age. At Oxford, Conybeare became a close friend of Buckland, three years his senior. The pair went to the north coast of Ireland together and published a description of one of its features, the Giant’s Causeway, in Transactions of the Geological Society.10

  In the summer of 1811, Conybeare made a long geological expedition to southwest Wales with John Kidd, whose lectures, delivered in the basement of the Ashmolean Museum, he had much enjoyed. When in 1813 Kidd, as Reader of Mineralogy, needed a successor (as, also a medical doctor, he had accepted a readership in anatomy), his first choice was Conybeare, who was regarded as the brightest member of the geological circle of his day. However, Conybeare wanted to take a wife, which was forbidden to Oxford dons at the time; moreover, his inheritance gave him a certain independence in the form of £3,500 a year. Kidd’s second choice, Buckland, who was less impatient to marry (he would wait another fifteen years) was therefore given the job. Conybeare, forsaking what might have been a distinguished academic career, was left free to devote himself to his passion for ancient rocks and fossils. Yet Buckland so appreciated Conybeare’s originality that he sought his advice in preparing his inaugural lecture, and his help is in evidence in the eloquent and highly regarded ‘Vindiciae geologicae’ that emerged.

  In 1816, Conybeare, Buckland and George Greenough, first president of the Geological Society, visited Germany to study German mineralogy and geology. They met, among others, Goethe and Werner (then in his sixties), and compared the rocks with what they knew from Britain, and saw famous fossil sites such as the beds of bears’ bones in a cave at Franconia in Germany. Conybeare incorporated many of their observations into his authoritative book, co-authored by his publisher, William Phillips, Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales. This was an important work, summarising the state of geological knowledge in his country, starting with the most recent at the top and descending to the Old Red Sandstone and, for the first time, naming the Carboniferous, which owes its name to the coal beds that were laid down globally during this period, about 359.2 million years ago. It listed all the fossils found in each formation. The same year of their tour, Buckland published the first table comparing the strata of England with those of the Continent. Well before the Great Devonian Controversy, he called attention to the resemblance of the greywacke slates he saw to the Transition formations found on the English and Welsh borders.

  Buckland preached geology as a kind of religion, in which its hammer blows were forcing rocks to give up their secrets, or, as he put it in his inaugural lecture: ‘it is surely gratifying to behold Science, compelling the primeval mountains of the Globe to unfold the hidden records of their origin’.11 He lectured on geology from 1814 at Oxford and had the distinction of being the first to teach a geology course at an English university (though the subject had been taught in Edinburgh since 1781). In 1818 his grasp of the subject was recognised by the Royal Society, which made him a fellow. He also became director of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum of Natural History.

  Buckland would become a popular and humorous lecturer, waving bones and fossils about to illustrate his argument. University lectures had to be entertaining or nobody would attend them. Natural science, as Charles Lyell had found at King’s College London, was extracurricular – that is, optional. There were no examinations. Buckland had to work hard to persuade students to come to hear him and he badly needed the money from the fees they paid for attendance.

  Sometimes Buckland would draw an audience by lecturing outdoors in a quarry or on a hill to demonstrate stratigraphy in situ, after which he would gallop off, sometimes sporting a fossil around his neck. He kept beside him his large blue sack of fossils and accoutrements from which he was never parted, even at formal dinners. And his stunts were legendary. Behind a large showcase he would pace up and down, holding, say, a huge hyena’s skull. According to one student’s account, he suddenly dashed down the steps, skull in hand and shouted at a young man on the front bench: ‘What rules the world?’ The youth shrank back. Buckland rushed at another, pointing the skull straight in the student’s face, and got the reply: ‘Haven’t an idea.’ Buckland, mounting his rostrum, announced triumphantly: ‘The stomach, sir, rules the world. The great ones eat the less, and the less the lesser still.’12

  Conybeare scoffed at Buckland’s fondness for making a religion of geology. In a sarcastic poem, ‘Ode to a Professor’s Hammer’, he wrote:

  Hail to the hammer of science profound! . . .

  Beneath the storm of its thundering blows

  Bending, and opening, and staggering, and reeling,

  Mountains reluctant their story disclose,

  The secret of millions of ages revealing.

  The
fossil dead that so long have slept,

  And seen world after world into ruin swept

  Start at the sound

  Of its fearful rebound.13

  Buckland never disappointed his audience. In Oxford in 1832, at the second meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he gave a theatrical performance on the subjects of geology and the courtship of primitive reptiles. (The first meeting of the association that became familiarly known as ‘the British Ass’ had been held the previous October, 1831, at York where the subjects discussed were comets, railways, geological strata, the Aurora Borealis and marsupial mating habits.14) At the Oxford meeting Buckland used the occasion for one of his jokes. Behind him, as he spoke, stood a skeleton of a giant fossil, a megatherium, from Argentina. He invited the geologist William Clift to step through the bones and ‘come a second time into the world through this cavity in the pelvis of the megatherium’.15 There was great applause and the session went on until midnight. The Times, however, dismissing the lecture as ‘a mere unexplained display of philosophical toys’, wrote reprovingly that Buckland sometimes seemed to forget that he lectured in the presence of ladies.16

  He was also a formidable party-giver. Drink flowed freely at Buckland’s gatherings and, as always, he worked hard to amuse his guests. A fossil skeleton of an Ichthyosaurus served as a candelabrum. The jumble of bones, stones and animal relics in his rooms in Corpus Christi was celebrated. A wit mocked them in a poem, ‘Picture of the Comforts of a Professor’s Rooms in C.C.C., Oxford’: