A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition

by Bill Bryson

  In the winter of 1807, thirteen like-minded souls in London got together at the Freemasons Tavern at Long Acre, in Covent Garden, to form a dining club to be called the Geological Society. The idea was to meet once a month to swap geological notions over a glass or two of Madeira and a convivial dinner. The price of the meal was set at a deliberately hefty 15 shillings to discourage those whose qualifications were merely cerebral. It soon became apparent, however, that there was a demand for something more properly institutional, with a permanent headquarters, where people could gather to share and discuss new findings. In barely a decade membership grew to 400—still all gentlemen, of course—and the Geological was threatening to eclipse the Royal as the premier scientific society in the country.

  The members met twice a month from November until June, when virtually all of them went off to spend the summer doing fieldwork. These weren’t people with a pecuniary interest in minerals, you understand, or even academics for the most part, but simply gentlemen with the wealth and time to indulge a hobby at a more or less professional level. By 1830 there were 745 of them, and the world would never see the like again.

  A sketch, probably by the geologist Sir Henry Thomas de la Beche, showing a meeting of the Geological Society in London in its heyday around 1830. Founded in 1807 with just thirteen members, the society quickly grew to several hundred as geology became the most popular and exciting science of its day. (credit 5.4)

  It is hard to imagine now, but geology excited the nineteenth century—positively gripped it—in a way that no science ever had before or would again. In 1839, when Roderick Murchison published The Silurian System, a plump and ponderous study of a type of rock called greywacke, it was an instant bestseller, racing through four editions, even though it cost 8 guineas a copy and was, in true Huttonian style, unreadable. (As even a Murchison supporter conceded, it had “a total want of literary attractiveness.”) And when, in 1841, the great Charles Lyell travelled to America to give a series of lectures in Boston, sellout audiences of three thousand at a time packed into the Lowell Institute to hear his tranquillizing descriptions of marine zeolites and seismic perturbations in Campania.

  Throughout the modern, thinking world, but especially in Britain, men of learning ventured into the countryside to do a little “stone-breaking,” as they called it. It was a pursuit taken seriously and they tended to dress with appropriate gravity, in top hats and dark suits, except for the Reverend William Buckland of Oxford, whose habit it was to do his fieldwork in an academic gown.

  The field attracted many extraordinary figures, not least the aforementioned Murchison, who spent the first thirty or so years of his life galloping after foxes, converting aeronautically challenged birds into puffs of drifting feathers with buckshot and showing no mental agility whatever beyond that needed to read The Times or play a hand of cards. Then he discovered an interest in rocks and became with rather astounding swiftness a titan of geological thinking.

  Sir Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology went through twelve editions in his lifetime and shaped geological thinking far beyond. Among much else, he devised the system of great epochs—Pleistocene, Miocene and so on—into which geological history is still divided. (credit 5.5)

  Then there was Dr. James Parkinson, who was also an early socialist and author of many provocative pamphlets with titles like “Revolution without Bloodshed.” In 1794 he was implicated in a faintly lunatic-sounding conspiracy called “the Pop-gun Plot,” in which it was planned to shoot King George III in the neck with a poisoned dart as he sat in his box at the theatre. Parkinson was hauled before the Privy Council for questioning and came within an ace of being dispatched in irons to Australia before the charges against him were quietly dropped. Adopting a more conservative approach to life, he developed an interest in geology and became one of the founding members of the Geological Society and the author of an important geological text, Organic Remains of a Former World, which remained in print for half a century. He never caused trouble again. Today, however, we remember him for his landmark study of the affliction then called the “shaking palsy,” but known ever since as Parkinson’s disease. (Parkinson had one other slight claim to fame. In 1785 he became possibly the only person in history to win a natural history museum in a raffle. The museum, in London’s Leicester Square, had been founded by Sir Ashton Lever, who had driven himself bankrupt with his unrestrained collecting of natural wonders. Parkinson kept the museum until 1805, when he could no longer support it and the collection was broken up and sold.)

  Not quite as remarkable in character but more influential than all the others combined was Charles Lyell. Lyell was born in the year that Hutton died and only 70 miles away, in the village of Kinnordy. Though Scottish by birth, he grew up in the far south of England, in the New Forest of Hampshire, because his mother was convinced that Scots were feckless drunks. As was generally the pattern with nineteenth-century gentlemen scientists, Lyell came from a background of comfortable wealth and intellectual vigour. His father, also named Charles, had the unusual distinction of being a leading authority on the poet Dante and on mosses. (Orthotricium lyelli, which most visitors to the English countryside will at some time have sat on, is named for him.) From his father Lyell gained an interest in natural history, but it was at Oxford, where he fell under the spell of the Reverend William Buckland—he of the flowing gowns—that the young Lyell began his lifelong devotion to geology.

  Buckland was a bit of a charming oddity. He had some real achievements, but he is remembered at least as much for his eccentricities. He was particularly noted for a menagerie of wild animals, some large and dangerous, that were allowed to wander through his house and garden, and for his desire to eat his way through every animal in creation. Depending on whim and availability, guests to Buckland’s house might be served baked guinea pig, mice in batter, roasted hedgehog or boiled southeast Asian sea slug. Buckland was able to find merit in them all, except the common garden mole, which he declared disgusting. Almost inevitably, he became the leading authority on coprolites—fossilized faeces—and had a table made entirely out of his collection of specimens.

  The Oxford-based Reverend William Buckland, who is largely remembered for his eccentricities, which included living with wild animals and a fascination with fossilized faeces. The drawing, from 1875, shows him suitably attired to explore a glacier. (credit 5.6)

  Even when conducting serious science his manner was generally singular. Once Mrs. Buckland found herself being shaken awake in the middle of the night, her husband crying in excitement: “My dear, I believe that Cheirotherium’s footsteps are undoubtedly testudinal.” Together they hurried to the kitchen in their nightclothes. Mrs. Buckland made a flour paste, which she spread across the table, while the Reverend Buckland fetched the family tortoise. Plunking it onto the paste, they goaded it forward and discovered to their delight that its footprints did indeed match those of the fossil Buckland had been studying. Charles Darwin thought Buckland a buffoon—that was the word he used—but Lyell appeared to find him inspiring and liked him well enough to go touring with him in Scotland in 1824. It was soon after this trip that Lyell decided to abandon a career in law and devote himself to geology full-time.

  This 1869 Punch cartoon reflected the endless debates over the antiquity of nearly everything, not least the age of the Earth, a matter that would not be resolved definitively until well into the twentieth century. (credit 5.7)

  Lyell was extremely short-sighted and went through most of his life with a pained squint, which gave him a troubled air. (Eventually he would lose his sight altogether.) His other slight peculiarity was the habit, when distracted by thought, of taking up improbable positions on furniture—lying across two chairs at once or “resting his head on the seat of a chair, while standing up” (to quote his friend Darwin). Often when lost in thought he would slink so low in a chair that his buttocks would all but touch the floor. Lyell’s only real job in life was as professor of geology at King’s C
ollege in London from 1831 to 1833. It was just at this time that he produced The Principles of Geology, published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833, which in many ways consolidated and elaborated upon the thoughts first voiced by Hutton a generation earlier. (Although Lyell never read Hutton in the original, he was a keen student of Playfair’s reworked version.)

  Between Hutton’s day and Lyell’s there arose a new geological controversy, which largely superseded, but is often confused with, the old Neptunian-Plutonian dispute. The new battle became an argument between catastrophism and uniformitarianism—unattractive terms for an important and very long-running dispute. Catastrophists, as you might expect from the name, believed that the Earth was shaped by abrupt cataclysmic events—floods, principally, which is why catastrophism and Neptunism are often wrongly bundled together. Catastrophism was particularly comforting to clerics like Buckland because it allowed them to incorporate the biblical flood of Noah into serious scientific discussions. Uniformitarians, by contrast, believed that changes on Earth were gradual and that nearly all earth processes happened slowly, over immense spans of time. Hutton was much more the father of the notion than Lyell, but it was Lyell most people read, and so he became in most people’s minds, then and now, the father of modern geological thought.

  Lyell believed that the Earth’s shifts were uniform and steady—that everything that had ever happened in the past could be explained by events still going on today. Lyell and his adherents didn’t just disdain catastrophism, they detested it. Catastrophists believed that extinctions were part of a series in which animals were repeatedly wiped out and replaced with new sets—a belief that the naturalist T. H. Huxley mockingly likened to “a succession of rubbers of whist, at the end of which the players upset the table and called for a new pack.” It was too convenient a way to explain the unknown. “Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity,” sniffed Lyell.

  A plate from Lyell’s Principles of Geology showing shells associated with the Eocene period. (credit 5.8)

  Lyell’s oversights were not inconsiderable. He failed to explain convincingly how mountain ranges were formed and overlooked glaciers as an agent of change. He refused to accept Agassiz’s idea of ice ages—“the refrigeration of the globe,” as he dismissively termed it—and was confident that mammals “would be found in the oldest fossiliferous beds.” He rejected the notion that animals and plants suffered sudden annihilations, and believed that all the principal animal groups—mammals, reptiles, fish and so on—had co-existed since the dawn of time. On all of these he would ultimately be proved wrong.

  Yet it would be nearly impossible to over-state Lyell’s influence. The Principles of Geology went through twelve editions in his lifetime and contained notions that shaped geological thinking far into the twentieth century. Darwin took a first edition with him on the Beagle voyage and wrote afterwards that “the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one’s mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes.” In short, he thought him nearly a god, as did many of his generation. It is a testament to the strength of Lyell’s sway that in the 1980s, when geologists had to abandon just a part of his theory to accommodate the impact theory of extinctions, it nearly killed them. But that is another chapter.

  Meanwhile, geology had a great deal of sorting out to do, and not all of it went smoothly. From the outset geologists tried to categorize rocks by the periods in which they were laid down, but there were often bitter disagreements about where to put the dividing lines—none more so than a long-running debate that became known as the Great Devonian Controversy. The issue arose when the Reverend Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge claimed for the Cambrian period a layer of rock that Roderick Murchison believed belonged rightly to the Silurian. The dispute raged for years and grew extremely heated. “De la Beche is a dirty dog,” Murchison wrote to a friend in a typical outburst.

  Some sense of the strength of feeling can be gained by glancing through the chapter titles of Martin J. S. Rudwick’s excellent and sombre account of the issue, The Great Devonian Controversy. These begin innocuously enough with headings such as “Arenas of Gentlemanly Debate” and “Unraveling the Greywacke,” but then proceed to “The Greywacke Defended and Attacked,” “Reproofs and Recriminations,” “The Spread of Ugly Rumours,” “Weaver Recants his Heresy,” “Putting a Provincial in his Place” and (in case there was any doubt that this was war) “Murchison Opens the Rhineland Campaign.” The fight was finally settled in 1879 with the simple expedient of coming up with a new period, the Ordovician, to be inserted between the Cambrian and Silurian.

  Because the British were the most active in the early years of the discipline, British names are predominant in the geological lexicon. Devonian is of course from the English county of Devon. Cambrian comes from the Roman name for Wales, while Ordovician and Silurian recall ancient Welsh tribes, the Ordovices and Silures. But with the rise of geological prospecting elsewhere, names began to creep in from all over. Jurassic refers to the Jura Mountains on the border of France and Switzerland. Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains. For Cretaceous (from the Latin for chalk) we are indebted to a Belgian geologist with the perky name of J. J. d’Omalius d’Halloy.

  Originally, geological history was divided into four spans of time: primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary. The system was too neat to last, and soon geologists were contributing additional divisions while eliminating others. Primary and secondary fell out of use altogether, while quaternary was discarded by some but kept by others. Today only tertiary remains as a common designation everywhere, even though it no longer represents a third period of anything.

  This nineteenth-century diagram depicts the different geological eras, showing the rock strata, flora and fauna associated with each. (credit 5.9)

  Lyell, in his Principles, introduced additional units known as epochs or series to cover the period since the age of the dinosaurs, among them Pleistocene (“most recent”), Pliocene (“more recent”), Miocene (“moderately recent”) and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene (“but a little recent”). Lyell originally intended to employ “-synchronous” for his endings, giving us such crunchy designations as Meiosynchronous and Pleiosynchronous. The Reverend William Whewell, an influential man, objected on etymological grounds and suggested instead an “-eous” pattern, producing Meioneous, Pleioneous and so on. The “-cene” terminations were thus something of a compromise.

  Nowadays, and speaking very generally, geological time is divided first into four great chunks known as eras: Precambrian, Palaeozoic (from the Greek meaning “old life”), Mesozoic (“middle life”) and Cenozoic (“recent life”). These four eras are further divided into anywhere from a dozen to twenty subgroups, usually called periods though sometimes known as systems. Most of these are also reasonably well known: Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Silurian and so on.1

  Then come Lyell’s epochs—the Pleistocene, Miocene, and so on—which apply only to the most recent (but palaeontologically busy) 65 million years; and finally we have a mass of finer subdivisions known as stages or ages. Most of these are named, nearly always awkwardly, after places: Illinoian, Desmoinesian, Croixian, Kimmeridgian and so on in like vein. Altogether, according to John McPhee, these number in the “tens of dozens.”

  Fortunately, unless you take up geology as a career, you are unlikely ever to hear any of them again.

  Further confusing the matter is that the stages or ages in North America have different names from the stages in Europe and often only roughly intersect with them in time. Thus the North American Cincinnatian stage mostly corresponds with the Ashgillian stage in Europe, plus a tiny bit of the slightly earlier Caradocian stage.

  Also, all this changes from textbook to textbook and from person to person, so that some authorities describe seven recent epochs, while others are content with four. I
n some books, too, you will find the tertiary and quaternary taken out and replaced by periods of different lengths called the Palaeogene and Neogene. Others divide the Precambrian into two eras, the very ancient Archaean and the more recent Proterozoic. Sometimes, too, you will see the term Phanerozoic used to describe the span encompassing the Cenozoic, Mesozoic and Palaeozoic eras.

  Moreover, all this applies only to units of time. Rocks are divided into quite separate units known as systems, series and stages. A distinction is also made between late and early (referring to time) and upper and lower (referring to layers of rock). It can all get terribly confusing to non-specialists, but to a geologist these can be matters of passion. “I have seen grown men glow incandescent with rage over this metaphorical millisecond in life’s history,” the British palaeontologist Richard Fortey has written with regard to a long-running twentieth-century dispute over where the boundary lies between the Cambrian and Ordovician.

  At least today we can bring some sophisticated dating techniques to the table. For most of the nineteenth century, geologists could draw on nothing more than the most hopeful guesswork. The frustrating position then was that although they could place the various rocks and fossils in order by age, they had no idea how long any of those ages was. When Buckland speculated on the antiquity of an ichthyosaurus skeleton he could do no better than suggest that it had lived somewhere between “ten thousand [and] more than ten thousand times ten thousand” years earlier.