Out of the Shadow of a Giant

by John Gribbin

  Your advice to me was prophetique, viz, not to lend my Mss. You remember Mr J. Ray sent me a very kind letter concerning my Naturall History of Wilts: only he misliked my Digression, which is Mr Hooke’s Hypothesis of the terraqueous Globe whom I name with respect. Mr. Ray would have me (in the letter) leave it out. And now lately is come forth a book of his in 8º which all Mr. Hooke’s hypothesis in my letter is published and without any mention of Mr. Hooke or my booke. Mr. Hooke is much troubled about it. ’Tis a right Presbyterian trick.fn12

  With great restraint, Drake notes that ‘the circumstances seem suspicious’. It was, she says, ‘an age of free-for-all piracy of ideas’, giving the lie to the widespread accusations of paranoia levelled at Hooke’s complaints about plagiarism. Hooke had more (and better) ideas than other people, so it is hardly surprising that he was a victim of this piracy.

  Ironically, in one case the suggestion of plagiarism seems inappropriate, because the ideas of the supposed plagiarist were decidedly inferior to Hooke’s. He was Niels Stensen, a Danish physician usually referred to as Steno, who has a place in the history books as the founder of the science of geology, based on rather limited evidence and a widespread ignorance of the significance of Hooke’s earlier ideas.

  By the time Steno, who was born in 1638, qualified as a physician, Hooke had already published Micrographia and given the talks on the Terraqueous Globe idea that Aubrey mentions. In the mid-1660s, Steno identified so-called tonguestones as the petrified remains of sharks’ teeth. Because these were found in rock layers far inland today, he argued that the rocks themselves had been laid down underwater at various times in a series of floods, the latest of which was the biblical Deluge. In 1669, Steno published his only significant scientific work, with a title that translates as ‘Predecessor of a dissertation of a solid naturally contained within a solid’. The solids within solids were, of course, fossils. But the promised full-length dissertation never appeared, because Steno became a priest; not just an ordinary priest, but an ascetic who took self-deprivation to extremes and gave everything he had to the poor. He abandoned science completely, possibly because he realised that science could not be reconciled with the literal interpretation of the Bible.

  Did he learn anything from Hooke? Maybe. In a letter read at the Royal on 27 April 1687, Hooke claimed that Oldenburg had admitted to Hooke that he had ‘transmitted the substance’ of Hooke’s early geological Gresham lectures to Steno, ‘Some time before Mr Steno had published his Booke.’ If so, however, Steno did not make good use of the information, since Hooke went much further. Hooke’s real complaint was that Oldenburg, by getting Steno’s book translated into English and promoting it, had contributed to the elevation of Steno and the overshadowing of Hooke. He had a point.

  But although Hooke’s geological thinking was overshadowed in his lifetime, and for a little while afterwards, within fifty years of his death it was widespread knowledge, in no small measure thanks to the publication of the Posthumous Works. Among a great deal of evidence presented by Drake to show how widely Hooke’s work on ‘earthquakes’ was known in the second half of the eighteenth century, one stands out. Rudolf Erich Raspe, who is remembered today as the author of Travels of Baron Münchausen, but who was a serious geologist, published a book in 1763 whose title is translated by Drake as ‘A Model of the Natural History of the Terraqueous globe, especially about new Islands born out of the sea, and from their exact descriptions and observations, further corroborating, the Hookian hypothesis of the Earth, on the origin of mountains and petrified bodies’. On the strength of this work, Raspe was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

  The most significant influence of Hooke’s writings on this topic was, however, on James Hutton, the ‘father of modern geology’. Hutton wrote a book, Theory of the Earth, published in 1795, which contained a wealth of observational facts and a carefully argued case for, among other things, gradualism and the immense age of the Earth; but his writing style was so impenetrable that it might have made no impact if his acolyte John Playfair, had not presented a beautifully clear summary of Hutton’s work in his own book, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, published in 1802. It was Playfair’s book that kick-started the nineteenth-century geological revolution, most notably through its influence on Charles Lyell.fn13 But who were Hutton’s influences?

  Playfair tells us that in his search for geological information and other interesting natural phenomena Hutton had ‘carefully perused almost every book of travels from which anything was to be learned concerning the natural history of the Earth’.fn14 Such a voracious reader surely cannot have missed two travel books, written by J. J. Ferber and by I. von Born, that were popular at the time; they had been translated into English and published by the Royal Society. The translator was Rudolf Erich Raspe, FRS, and in each of them he took the opportunity to give an overview of Hooke’s ideas, quite apart from pointing the interested reader towards Hooke’s own writings. And surely Hutton must have seen Raspe’s own book. Another widely read eighteenth-century book, published anonymously, was The History and Philosophy of Earthquakes, from the Remotest to the Present Times: Collected from the best Writers on the Subject. This appeared in 1757, and nearly a third of the volume (106 pages out of 334) deals with Hooke’s work.

  Hutton, it seems, must have been aware of Hooke’s ideas about ‘earthquakes’. The points of agreement between Hooke and Hutton include, as Drake points out, ‘the cyclic nature of sedimentation and denudation’, as well as the whole concept of gradualism. Hooke, though, had the better grasp of deep time. In a paper published in 1788, Hutton wrote that ‘we find no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end.’ His cycles are perfect. But Hooke’s version was almost cyclical. He envisaged the younger Earth as more dynamic and active, and the future Earth being less active and in effect dying.

  Drake also draws attention to points of disagreement between the two where Hutton is at pains to dismiss certain ideas, such as polar wandering, which he has no need to introduce into his theory at all. ‘One might wonder with whom Hutton is arguing,’ she says, and concludes that he is arguing with the (unnamed) Hooke.

  So we can trace a direct line from Hooke to Hutton (perhaps via Raspe), to Lyell (via Playfair), and to the whole of modern Earth science. Charles Darwin used to say that Lyell had given him ‘the gift of time’ – a long geological timescale, sufficient for the processes of evolution by natural selection to do their work. He seems to have been unaware that the first person to begin to understand the extent of geological deep time was also the first person to begin to understand the evolution of life on Earth, although that person had no inkling of the process of natural selection.

  It is almost overkill, but cannot be allowed to pass without mention, that Hooke was also a pioneer thinker when it came to the circulation of the atmosphere of the Earth. Indeed, he seems to have been the first person to develop a proper model of atmospheric circulation at all, although his ideas tied in with the observations made by Halley at St Helena. Hooke inferred from travellers’ tales of mist and fog at high latitudes that ‘in and near the Polar Regions’ there is ‘dense and heavy air’. By contrast, ‘Hurricanes, Tornadoes’ and the like suggested to him that in the Torrid Zone the atmosphere is ‘much more extended upwards, and of the vaporous Parts carry’d to a much greater height than elsewhere.’ He was more or less right, although not entirely for the right reasons, and concluded:

  From these Considerations also will follow a necessary motion or tendency of the lower Parts of the Air near the Earth, from the Polar Parts towards the Aequinoctial, and consequently of the higher Parts of the Air from the Aequinoctial Parts towards the Polar, and consequently a kind of Circulation of the Body of the Air, which I conceive to be the cause of many considerable Phaenomena of the Air, Winds and Waters.

  This is another example of the kind of thing Hooke could produce almost as an aside.

  As we have seen, daringly for the century he lived in, Hoo
ke didn’t just question the biblical timescale, in particular for the Deluge, but dismissed it.fn15 A couple of hundred days could not have been long enough to lay down ‘so many and so great and full grown Shells, as this which are so found’. For Hooke, when science could not be reconciled with the literal interpretation of the Bible, it was the literal interpretation of the Bible that had to give. In a deliberate paraphrase of the Royal Society’s motto, he says that when ‘Nature speaks or dictates’ it is appropriate to ‘Jurare in Verba’ and listen to what she says.fn16 Referring to his observations of the cliffs on the Isle of Wight, he writes: ‘the quantity and thickness of the Beds of Sand with which [fossils] are many times found mixed, do argue that there must needs be a much longer time of the Seas Residence above the same, than so short a space [as 200 days] can afford’. He also reports that one of these beds, containing ‘Oysters, Limpits, and several sorts of Periwinkle’, extends along the cliff ‘I conceive near half a Mile, and may be about sixty Foot or more above the high Water mark.’fn17 He explains the conflict between fact and Bible ‘history’:

  The great transactions of the Alterations, Formations, or Dispositions of the Superficial Parts of the Earth into that Constitution and Shape which we now found them to have, preceded the Invention of Writing, and what was preserved till the times of that Invention were more dark and confused, that they seem to be altogether Romantick, Fabulous, and Fictious, and cannot be much relied on or heeded, and at best will only afford us Occasions of Conjecture.

  This is exactly the modern view. It is clear that way back in prehistory there was a catastrophic flood, perhaps related to the melting of great ice sheets at the end of the latest Ice Age, that affected early civilisations. It is recorded in, for example, the story of Gilgamesh, as well as in the Bible. But what knowledge of this event has passed down to us does indeed seem ‘Romantick, Fabulous, and Fictious’.

  Hooke also drew attention to the presence in the fossil record of the remains of creatures that are not found on Earth today. Using modern terminology, he realised that species went extinct, and that new species took their place. He noticed, for example, the similarities between the modern nautiluses and the extinct ammonites, but was also well aware of their differences (such as the smooth shell of the nautilus and the corrugated shell of the ammonite). Ammonites had disappeared from the Earth, perhaps being replaced by nautiluses:

  There have been, former times, certain Species of Animals in Nature, which in succeeding and in the present Age have been and are wholly lost; for neither have we in Authors any mention made of such Creatures, nor are there any such found at present, either near the places of their position (as on the Shores or Sea about this Island) nor in any other part of the World for ought we yet know.fn18

  And:

  There have been many other Species of Creatures in former Ages, of which we can find none at the present; and that ’tis not unlikely but that there may be divers new kinds now, which have not been from the beginning.

  What would Darwin have made of these passages:

  There may have been divers new varieties generated of the same Species, and that by the change of the Soil in which it was produced; for since we find that the alteration of the Climate, Soil and Nourishment doth often produce a very great alteration in those Bodies that suffer it.

  And:

  Certainly, there are many Species of Nature that we have never seen, and there may have been also many such Species in former Ages of the World that may not be in being at present, and many variations of those Species now, which may not have had a Being in former Times … it seems very absurd to conclude, that from the beginning things have continued in the same state that we now find them.

  This is evolution at work, and not far off natural selection. Extinction and variation, along with natural selection itself, are key features of the Darwinian understanding of evolution. Darwin did have a copy of Micrographia, but as far as we know never saw Hooke’s writings on earthquakes.

  Hooke also appreciated that the geological record might be used to construct a chronology of prehistory. He made an analogy with the way coins found in ancient remains in different locations (such as Roman coins in the north of England) could reveal the influence of a particular ruler in that place at a certain time, suggesting that fossil remains found in different strata could reveal when the strata were formed:

  Tho’ it must be granted, that it is very difficult to read them, and to raise a Chronology out of them, and to state the intervalls of the Times, wherein such Catastrophes and Mutations have happened; yet ’tis not impossible, but that, by the help of those joined to other means and assistances of Information, much may be done in that part of Information also.

  Partly to that end, Hooke makes an eloquent plea for the establishment of a truly scientific collection of fossils, not just a cabinet of curiosities, ‘where an Inquirer might peruse, and turn over, and spell, and read the Book of Nature’.

  Much has indeed been done along those lines since Hooke wrote those words, starting with the work of William Smith, yet another candidate for the title ‘father of English geology’, whose work as a surveyor of canals made him familiar with rock strata and an expert at using fossils to tell which layers were older and which younger, although an absolute chronology in terms of years had to await the twentieth century and such ‘other means and assistances of information’ as radioactive dating. Smith’s geological map of England was published in 1815.

  Hooke’s geological studies, together with his thoughts about the history of life on Earth, alone qualify him as one of the leading scientists of the seventeenth century; the fact that he was also a pioneering microscopist and telescope-maker, a leading architect, contributed at least half of the ‘Newtonian’ revolution in physics, and found time for a wealth of other activities, almost defies belief. Although Jardine has suggested that the shadow of Newton ‘for ever frustrates the possibility of allowing Hooke real standing in the history of science’, we prefer the summing up made by E. N. Andrade in a lecture at the Royal Society in 1949, and published the following year:fn19

  All those who have gone direct to Hooke have conceived the highest admiration for his astonishing industry, his whole-hearted devotion to science, his inventiveness, his ingenuity, his fertility and his brilliant theoretical insight.

  That has certainly been our experience.

  CHAPTER TEN

  TO COMMAND A KING’S SHIP

  Nobody knows where or when Edmond Halley gained the nautical experience to make him fit to command a king’s ship, but gain it he certainly did. One of the earliest clues we have to Halley’s career at sea actually concerns work beneath the waves, not above them. As early as 1689 (the same year he estimated the size of atoms of gold) Halley presented to the Royal a chart of the mouth of the River Thames, discussed plans for a lighthouse on the Goodwin Sands, and reported on the use of diving bells to enable people to work underwater. The production, seemingly out of the blue, of the Thames chart is intriguing. It was presented to the Royal in the summer, so presumably was a result of a survey carried out by Halley in 1688 or earlier in 1689. At that time, William III was the new king, and war with France was anticipated, so there were strict controls on shipping. But, of course, if war threatened, accurate charts of the Thames approaches were essential. Anything moving in the area of the Thames Estuary ought to have had official permission, but no mention is made in the records of any vessel that might have been used by Halley. Cook refers to this as the ‘dog that did not bark’, alluding to the Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’. ‘Halley’s activities from midsummer 1688 to midsummer 1689’, Cook says, ‘may have been secret then and remain mysterious now.’

  Halley’s diving work is less mysterious. Diving bells – airtight containers open at the bottom and big enough for a man to stand in – had already been used on various occasions, but the divers inside the bells still had to hold their breath when they swam out to work. Halley suggested, in
a paper titled ‘A Method of Walking under Water’, a heavy diving bell on wheels that could be moved around the seabed while the men worked. By providing the diver ‘with such boots as the fishermen use he may be cloathed and stand dry on the bottom of the sea’, he said, but the device was never built. Halley had the opportunity to put some of his ideas into practice, however, in 1691, when one of the ships of the Royal African Company, the Guynie, sank off the coast near Pagham, in Sussex.

  The Guynie carried a particularly valuable cargo, including gold and ivory. She was a fast and relatively well-armed ship, referred to as a frigate, although the terminology was not as precise as it later became. The Company (in the form of a governing body known as the Court of Assistants) arranged for Halley to see what could be done about salvaging the cargo, which is why he was in Pagham when the possibility of obtaining the chair of astronomy in Oxford came up. The arrangement seems to have been an informal one at first. Halley investigated the wreck using a diving bell, in which he descended himself, which was replenished with air from barrels brought down from the surface. The success of the technique led to the grant of a patent to Halley, two members of the Company, and a City financier for a technique for taking air down to a diving bell, but the Company had financial problems and it was not until February 1692 that the Court formally decided to investigate the task of salvaging the Guynie, and only in April 1693 that Halley and his colleagues were contracted ‘for the recovery of what was sunk with the Guynie frigatt’. Which is why Halley was still working on the project (off and on) almost up to the time he went to the Chester Mint; this may explain why the undated letter mentioned earlier in which Halley apologises for not being able to call on Newton to discuss that appointment begins ‘I had [i.e. would have] waited on you on Saturday, but I was obliged to go on board my friggat’, but the letter may alternatively refer to another project, the main subject of this chapter.