Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Each of these discoveries pushed back the age of mankind and began to cast a new light on the scriptures. But, save for the Gilgamesh epic, there was nothing that was radical about the new dating: it did not fundamentally contradict the biblical chronology. All that began to change in 1856 when workers started clearing out a small cave in the side of the Neander valley (Neander Thal in German) through which the river Düssel flows into the Rhine. There, a skull was found, buried beneath more than a metre of mud, together with some other bones. The workmen who found the bones passed them to a local friend who, they felt, was educated enough to make something of them, and he passed them on to Hermann Schaaffhausen, professor of anatomy at Bonn University. Schaaffhausen identified the remains as the top part of a skull, two thigh-bones, parts of a left arm, part of a pelvis, and other smaller remains. In the paper he subsequently wrote on the discovery, Schaaffhausen drew attention to the thickness of the bones, the large size of the scars left by the muscles that were attached to them, the pronounced ridges above the eyes, and a low, narrow forehead. Importantly, Schaaffhausen concluded that the bones were not deformed, either because of where they had been kept over the years, or because of some pathological process. ‘Sufficient grounds exist,’ he wrote, ‘for the assumption that man coexisted with the animals found in the diluvium; and many a barbarous race may, before all historical time, have disappeared, together with animals of the ancient world, whilst the races whose organisation is improved have continued the genus.’ He concluded that his specimen ‘may probably be assigned to a barbarous, original people, which inhabited the north of Europe before the Germani’.19 This is not quite the same as what we mean today by Neanderthal but it was nonetheless a breakthrough. It didn’t immediately change attitudes to time because it was too controversial, but it formed part of the ‘background radiation’ of ideas in the late nineteenth century, against which the insights and discoveries of Boucher de Perthes, and others, discussed in the Prologue, took hold. One of the first outlines of pre-history, as we now understand it, was given by John Lubbock’s The Origin of Civilisation and The Primitive Condition of Man (1870): ‘The archaeological evidence revealed a steady improvement in technical ability from the earliest crude stone tools to the discovery of bronze and iron. In the absence of fossil evidence for the biological improvement of man, evolutionists seized on the evidence for cultural progress as at least indirect support for their claims. The great development of prehistoric archaeology that took place in the late nineteenth century allowed the construction of a sequence of cultural periods that were supposed to have succeeded one another as the human race progressed. Little thought was given to the possibility that different cultures might exist side by side in the same epoch.’20

  By this time, the word ‘science’ had begun to acquire its modern meaning. (The term ‘scientist’ was coined by William Whewell in 1833.) Until the end of the eighteenth century, the phrases ‘natural philosophy’ or ‘natural history’ had been preferred. This was so because natural philosophy sounded softer, more humane and it was also a portmanteau term: many local ‘natural history’ societies ran lectures on, say, literary topics, the humanities, and philosophy. Gradually, as the various disciplines emerged, first in Germany and then elsewhere, and as specialisation proliferated, science began to be the preferred term for these new activities.

  It may be difficult for us to understand now but, in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, when the philologists were attacking the very basics of Christianity, the men of science did not for the most part join in. For the most part biologists, chemists and physiologists remained devoutly religious. Linnaeus is a case in point. One of the main figures of the Enlightenment and one of the fathers of modern biology, who also formed part of the deep background to evolution, he was very different from, say, Voltaire. An early break with the Chain of Being had been made by John Ray, a naturalist who realised that every species–thousands of which were discovered in the New World and in Africa–could not all be graded on one meaningful hierarchy, that forms of life varied in many ways. Linnaeus therefore thought that reclassifying the organisms of the world might give him some idea of the divine plan. He didn’t claim to know the mind of God and freely confessed that his system of classification was an artificial one. But he thought it might produce some approximation of the Creator’s divine design. What turned out to be especially crucial was that in his own field, botany, he drew on R. J. Camerarius’ discovery (in 1694) of plant sexuality, which meant that Linnaeus made the reproductive organs the key characteristic on which to base his system.21 (At that time, sexual reproduction was variously believed to be due to spontaneous generation, to ‘germs’, to male and female semen ‘mixing’ in the womb, with these germs or seminal fluids containing ‘memories’ which ensured they ‘knew’ which forms to develop into.) Also, the binomial nomenclature that Linnaeus developed, in Species Plantarum (1753), Genera Plantarum (1754) and Systema Naturae (1758), drew attention to the systematic similarities between species, genera, families and so on. It became obvious from this that the Creator’s plan was not linear and led Buffon, in attacking Linnaeus, to his theory of ‘degeneration’, that for example all two hundred mammalian species known to him had been derived from thirty-eight ‘original’ forms. This was an early idea of evolution.22

  But another discipline was in the process of formation that would put history, and in particular pre-history, on to a different footing and further prepare the way for Darwin–this was geology. Geology differed fundamentally from all the other sciences, and from philosophy. It was, as Charles Gillispie has said, the first science to be concerned with the history of nature rather than its order.

  In the seventeenth century Descartes had been the first to link the new astronomy and the new physics to form a coherent view of the universe, in which even the sun–let alone the earth–was just another star. He speculated that the earth might have formed from a ball of cooling ash and become trapped in the sun’s ‘vortex’. (To avoid criticism from the church, he said only that this ‘might’ have happened.) Bernard de la Fontenelle, in A Plurality of Worlds (1688), had stressed man’s insignificance in the new order of things, and had even wondered if other stars might be inhabited.23 The idea that physics operated on the same principles throughout the universe was a major change in thinking that could not have occurred to the medieval mind. The basic ideas of heaven and earth, as understood in the West at least, were Aristotelian and the two realms were held to be fundamentally different: one could not give rise to the other.24 Eventually, Descartes’ physics were replaced by Newton’s, the ‘vortex’ with gravity, but that didn’t alter early geological theories very much. In 1691 Thomas Burnet published his Sacred Theory of the Earth, in which he argued that various materials had coalesced to form the earth, with dense rock at the centre, then less dense water, then a light crust, on which we live. This conveniently explained the Flood–just beneath the thin crust were vast tracts of water. A few years later, in 1696, William Whiston, Newton’s successor at Cambridge, proposed that the earth could have been formed from the cloud of dust left by a comet, which coalesced to form a solid body, and was deluged with water from a second passing comet.25 This idea, that the earth was once covered by a vast ocean, which then retreated, proved enduring. G. W. Leibniz added the thought that the earth had once been much hotter than it is now, and that earthquakes would therefore have been much more violent in the past. (Even then it was clear that present-day earthquakes had very trivial effects on the surface of the earth.)

  In the eighteenth century, in his ‘nebular hypothesis’, Kant proposed that the entire solar system was formed from a condensing cloud of gas, a theory that received support from the observations of William Herschel, whose vastly improved telescopes showed, or appeared to show, that some of the nebulae ‘or hazy patches’ seen in the night sky were gas or dust clouds ‘apparently condensing into a central star’.26 Buffon built on this, but like Descartes before him he too so
ught accommodation with the church, arguing that the earth started out as very hot, but cooled in seven phases (analogous to the seven days of the week in biblical creation), the last of which gave rise to man.

  Slowly, then, a view was forming that the earth itself had changed over time. Nonetheless, however the earth had formed, the central problem faced by the early geologists was to explain how sedimentary rocks, formed by deposition from water, could now stand on dry land. As Peter Bowler has pointed out, there can be only two answers–either the sea levels have subsided, or the land has been raised. ‘The belief that all sedimentary rocks were deposited on the floor of a vast ocean that has since disappeared became known as the Neptunist theory, after the Roman god of the sea.’27 The alternative became known as Vulcanism, after the god of fire. By far the most influential Neptunist in the eighteenth century, in fact the most influential geologist of any kind, was Abraham Gottlob Werner, a teacher at the mining school in Freiburg, Germany, who proposed that, once one assumed that the earth, when it cooled, had an uneven surface, and that the waters retreated at a different rate in different areas, the formation of rocks could be explained. Primary rocks would be exposed first. Then, assuming the retreat of the waters was slow enough, there would be erosion of the primary rocks, which would drain into the great ocean, and then these sediments would be revealed as the waters retreated further, to create secondary rocks, a process that could be repeated and repeated. In such a way the different types of rock had been formed in a succession which comprised five stages. The first of them produced the ‘primitive’ rocks–granite, gneiss, porphyry–which had crystallised out of the original chemical solution during the Flood, and the last, which was not formed until all the flood waters had receded, was generated by volcanic activity–accounting for how lavas and tuff, for example, had been produced. According to Werner, volcanoes around the earth were caused by the ignition of coal deposits.28 He thought that volcanic activity had a trivial effect on the formation of the earth and though he was himself in no way interested in religion his Neptunist theory fitted very well with the biblical account of the Flood, which is one reason why it was so popular across Europe. It gave rise to the phrase ‘scriptural geology’.

  This theory had tidiness to recommend it, but beyond that there were some serious problems. For a start, it did not even begin to explain why some types of rock that according to Werner were more recent than other types, were often found situated below them. Still more problematical was the sheer totality of water that would have been needed to hold all the land of the earth in solution. It would have to have been a flood many miles deep, and in turn that provoked an even bigger problem: what had happened to all that water when it had receded?

  The chief rival to Werner, though nowhere near as influential to begin with, was a Scot, from the Edinburgh Enlightenment, James Hutton (1726–1797), and his Vulcanism. From the middle of the eighteenth century, some naturalists began to suspect that volcanic activity had produced some effect on the earth. It was noticed, for instance, that certain mountains in central France had the form of volcanoes though there was no record of such activity in history. Others pointed to the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, which appeared to consist of columns of basalt that had solidified from a molten state and were therefore of volcanic origin. Hutton did not begin with the origins of the earth, but instead confined himself to observation rather than speculation. He looked around him at the geological changes he could see occurring in his own day and adopted the view that these processes had always been going on. In this way he observed that the crust of the earth, its outermost, most accessible layer, is formed by two types of rock, one of igneous origin (formed by heat), and the other of aqueous origin. He further observed that the main igneous rocks (granite, porphyry, basalt) usually lie beneath the aqueous ones, except where subterranean upheavals have thrust the igneous rocks upward. He also observed what anyone else could see, that weathering and erosion are even today laying down a fine silt of sandstone, limestone, clay and pebbles on the bed of the ocean near river estuaries. He then asked what could have transformed these silts into the solid rock that is everywhere about us. He concluded that it could only have been heat. Water was ruled out–an important breakthrough–because so many of these rocks are clearly insoluble. And so where did this heat come from? Hutton concluded that it came from inside the earth, and that it was expressed by volcanic action. This action, he realised, would explain the convoluted and angled strata which could be observed at many places all over the world. He pointed out that volcanic action was still occurring, that different landmasses were still rising and falling (there was evidence just then that areas of Scotland and Sweden were being raised), and that the rivers–again as anyone could see–were still carrying their silts to the sea.29

  Hutton first published his theories in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788, followed by the two-volume Theory of the Earth in 1795, ‘the earliest treatise which can be considered a geological synthesis rather than an imaginative exercise’.30 One of Hutton’s important premises was that the origin of fossils had been fully settled (‘fossils’ originally meant anything dug up). They were recognised by Nicholas Steno and John Woodward in the seventeenth century as the residue of living creatures, many of which were now extinct.31 But it was also understood that the presence of fossils on the tops of mountains was accounted for by Noah’s Flood. At the time Hutton’s book appeared, the historical reality of the Flood was beyond question. ‘When the history of the earth was considered geologically, it was simply assumed that a universal deluge must have wrought vast changes and that it had been a primary agent in forming the present surface of the globe. Its occurrence was evidence that the Lord was a governor as well as a creator.’ Just as the Flood was undisputed, so the biblical narrative of the creation of the world, as revealed in Genesis, was also beyond question. On this account, the length of time since creation was still believed to be about six thousand years, and though some people were beginning to wonder whether this was long enough, no one thought the earth very much older. A separate question was whether the animals had been created earlier than mankind, but even this did not, of itself, greatly add to the antiquity of man.32

  There was no question but that Hutton’s Vulcanism fitted many of the facts better than Werner’s Neptunism. Many critics resisted it, however, because Vulcanism implied vast tracts of geological time, ‘inconceivable ages that went far beyond what anyone had envisaged before’.33 As Werner and others had observed, volcanic and earthquake activity today actually produce only ‘trivial’ effects on the surface of the earth. If this has always been the case, then not only must the earth be of very great antiquity, for great mountains, say, to have been raised to such heights, but Hutton’s ideas also posited a ‘steady state’ for the earth. This compared badly with the idea that the earth was once much hotter than it is now, when geological events–Flood or no Flood–were much grander. This at least implied a development of the earth. There was also something unromantic about Hutton’s theory because it argued that the earth as we know it had been formed by a succession of ‘infinitesimally small events’, rather than by dramatic catastrophes, such as floods. It further required a number of nimble intellectual tricks to reconcile Hutton’s vulcanism with the Bible. One effort had it that there was once a ‘great evaporation’ (which would explain how all the flood waters had disappeared). Nevertheless, as Charles Gillispie has shown, there were many eminent men of science in the nineteenth century who, despite Hutton’s theories, still subscribed to Neptunism: Sir Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy and James Watt, not to mention W. Hyde Wollaston, secretary of the Royal Society.34 Hutton’s theory did not really begin to catch on until John Playfair published a popular version in 1802 (see Chapter 35, below, for the crucial role of popularisers in the nineteenth century, and their part in the decline of faith).

  But Hutton (a deist) was not alone in believing that the observation of processes still going on w
ould triumph. In 1815, William Smith, a canal builder often called the ‘father’ of British geology, pointed out that similar forms of rock, scattered across the globe, contained similar fossils. Many of these species no longer existed. This, in itself, implied that species came into existence, flourished, and then became extinct, over the vast periods of time that it took the rocks to be laid down and harden. This was significant in two ways. In the first place, it supported the idea that successive layers of rock were formed, not all at once but over time. And second, it reinforced the notion that there had been separate and numerous creations and extinctions, quite at variance with what it said in the Bible.35

  Objections to the biblical account were growing. Nevertheless, it was still the case that hardly anyone at the beginning of the nineteenth century questioned the Flood. Neptunism, the biblical account, was still the most popular version. Peter Bowler says that at this time geological texts sometimes outsold popular novels, but that science ‘was respectable only so long as it did not appear to disturb religious and social conventions of the day’.36 Neptunism did, however, receive a significant twist in 1811 when the Frenchman Georges Cuvier published his Recherches sur les ossements fossiles (Researches on Fossil Bones). Going through four editions in ten years, this showed that a new, updated Neptunism was what people most wanted. Cuvier, a curator at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, formed from the pre-1789 Jardin du Roi, argued that there had been not one but several cataclysms–including floods–in the history of the earth. Looking about him, in the Huttonian manner, he concluded that, because entire mammoths and other sizeable vertebrates had been ‘encased whole’ in the ice in mountain regions, these cataclysms must have been very sudden indeed. He also argued that if whole mountains had been lifted high above the seas, these cataclysms could only have been–by definition–unimaginably violent, so violent that entire species had been exterminated and, conceivably, earlier forms of humanity.37 Excavations in the Paris basin further showed an alternation of deposits between salt and fresh water, suggesting ‘a series of major changes in the relative position of land and sea’.38 But Cuvier’s researches weren’t entirely consistent with the biblical account. He also observed, and this was important, that in the rocks the deeper fossils were more different from life forms in existence today and that, moreover, fossils occur in a consistent order everywhere in the world. This order was: fish, amphibia, reptilia, mammalia. He therefore concluded that the older the strata of rock the higher was the proportion of extinct species. Since, at that time, no human fossils had turned up anywhere, he concluded that ‘…mankind must have been created at some time between the last catastrophe and the one preceding it’.39 He also observed that the expedition to Egypt had brought back mummified animals thousands of years old, which were identical to those now living, which confirmed the stability of species. Fossil species must therefore have lived for a long time too, before dying out.40 This was, in a sense, a half-way version of the biblical story. Man had been created since the Flood, but not the animals, which were much older.