by Peter Watson
Nevertheless, Cuvier’s observations helped keep Neptunism and Catastrophism popular, especially in Britain, where acceptance of Hutton’s theories was delayed at least until the 1820s. Robert Jameson, the leading light of the Wernerian Society of Edinburgh, even managed to stop Hutton’s ideas from having much influence in his native city.41 There was in fact one other reason why many geologists–again, especially in Britain–subscribed to the great Flood theory: this was the existence of huge rocks of a completely different type from the land surrounding them. These would later be shown to have been deposited by the ice sheets during the Ice Age, but to begin with their distribution was attributed to the great Deluge. The man who insisted most on this was William Buckland, Oxford’s first professor of geology. In 1819, in a famous inaugural lecture, Vindiciae Geologicae; or, the Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained, he tried ‘to shew that the study of geology has a tendency to confirm the evidences of natural religion; and that the facts developed by it are consistent with the accounts of the creation and deluge recorded in the Mosaic writings.’42 Furthermore, before he had been at Oxford very long, some miners in 1821 stumbled upon a cave at Kirkdale in the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire, where they discovered a huge deposit of ‘assorted bones’. Buckland saw his chance. Hurrying to Yorkshire, he quickly established that while most of the bones belonged to hyenas, there were also many birds and other species, including animals no longer found in Britain–lions, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses. Moreover, each of the bones and skulls were deformed or broken in much the same way and he concluded that what the miners had found was a den of hyenas. He wrote up the discovery, first as an academic paper, which won the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, and then followed it with a more popular account. His aim in this book was to reinforce the existence of the Flood and the recent creation of man. His thesis was nothing if not neat: most of the bones in Kirkdale belonged to species now extinct in Europe; such bones are never found in alluvial (riverine) deposits of sand or silt; there is no evidence that these animals have ever lived in Europe since the Flood. It therefore followed, said Buckland, that the animals whose remains the miners had found, must have been interred prior to Noah’s time. He finally argued that the top layer of remains was so beautifully preserved in mud and silt ‘that they must have been buried suddenly and, judging by the layer of postdiluvial stalactite covering the mud, not much more than five or six thousand years ago.’43
However, there were still problems with the flood theory, not least the fact that, as even Buckland acknowledged, the various pieces of evidence around the world placed the Flood at widely varying epochs. (Buckland, like many others, didn’t let his faith warp his science too much.)44 In addition, by the 1830s the cooling earth theory was gaining coherence as an explanation as to why geological activity was greater in the past than now, further fuelling the view that the earth developed, and that life forms had been very different in the past. In 1824 Buckland himself described the first known dinosaur, the gigantic Megalosaurus, though the word ‘dinosaur’ wasn’t coined until 1841, by the great anatomist Richard Owen. That was also the year that John Philips identified the great sequence of geological formations, the Palaeozoic, the age of fishes and invertebrates, the Mesozoic, the age of reptiles, and the Cenozoic, the age of mammals.45 This was based in part on the work of Adam Sedgwick and Sir Roderick Murchison in Wales, which began the decoding of the Palaeozoic system. The Palaeozoic period would eventually be shown to have extended from roughly 550 million years ago to 250 million years ago, and during that time plant life had moved out of the oceans on to land, fish appeared, then amphibians and then reptiles had reached land. These new forms of life were all wiped out, about 250 million years ago, for reasons that are still hard to fathom. But it was clear from the analyses of Sedgwick and Murchison that early forms of life on earth were very old, that life had begun in the sea, and then climbed ashore. Deluge or no deluge, all this was again in dramatic contradiction of the biblical account.46
The study of fossils and of rock sequences was also put together now with the growing science of embryology. The key figure here was Karl Ernst von Baer, who argued against the early prevailing wisdom that the human embryo, in developing, recapitulates the invertebrate/fish/reptile/mammal progression, and said instead that all embryos are simple to begin with, then develop specialised characteristics that equip them for their place in the world: lower animals are not, as it were, immature forms of man.47 It was von Baer who also showed that the organisation of life forms is not a ‘man-centred hierarchy’, that the human form is just one end-result among many. Robert Owen in his Archetypes and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848) and On the Nature of Limbs (1849) showed that vertebrates have a basically similar structure, which are adapted in different ways but are not ‘aimed’ in a linear way at man.48
We are running ahead of ourselves, and of the geological story. The importance of the discoveries of Cuvier, Buckland, Sedgwick and Murchison, over and above their intrinsic merit, was that they brought about a decisive change of mind on the part of Charles Lyell. In 1830 he published the first volume of what would turn into his three-volume Principles of Geology. Lyell’s argument was contained in the subtitle, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. He was also much influenced by Georges Scrope, a Frenchman whose studies in the Massif Central had shown, he said, that ‘rivers working over limitless centuries had cut their own valleys’. Before his own book was released, Lyell made a tour of Europe, meeting fellow geologists such as Étienne de Serres, to study a number of geological features, most notably the active volcanoes of Sicily, where he found that the massive cone had been built up gradually though a long series of small eruptions. Furthermore, the volcano was resting on sedimentary rocks of recent origin, as shown by the fact that the fossil molluscs were identical with present-day ones. This convinced Lyell that there was no need to posit a single catastrophe for this mountain.
But essentially Principles was a work of synthesis, rather than of original research, in which Lyell clarified and interpreted already-published material to support two conclusions. The first, obviously enough, was to show that the main geological features of the earth could be explained as the result of actions in history that were exactly the same as those that could be observed in the present. In a review of his book, the term ‘uniformitarianism’ was used and caught on. Lyell’s second aim was to resist the idea that a great flood, or series of floods, had produced the features of the earth that we see around us. He laid great store by Scrope, supporting his view that the world’s rivers had carved out their own valleys, and that ‘gently winding river beds’ could not be the product of–nor produce–violent events, still less catastrophes. On the religious front, Lyell took the common-sense view, arguing that it was unlikely God would keep interfering in the laws of nature, to provoke a series of major cataclysms. Instead, he said, provided that one assumed that the past extended back far enough, then the geological action that could be observed as still in operation today was enough to explain ‘the record in the rocks’.49 There was, he added, no shortage of evidence to show that volcanoes had erupted regularly throughout history and that this had nothing to do with either floods or catastrophes. And he compared the findings of stratigraphy, palaeontology and physical geography to identify three separate eras with three distinct forms of life. These became known as the Pliocene, Miocene and Eocene epochs, the last of which went back 55 million years. Yet again this was a much longer time-frame than anything in the Old Testament.
Volume One of the Principles took issue with the Flood, and began the process whereby the idea would be killed off. In volume two, Lyell demolished the biblical version of creation. Inspecting the fossils as revealed in the record of the rocks, he showed that there had been a continuous stream of creation, and extinction, involving literally countless species. In the eighteenth century, Linnaeus had speculated
that there must once have been ‘a special corner of the globe’ that had been reserved as a ‘divine incubator’, where life and new species had started. Lyell demonstrated how mistaken this notion was. Life, he showed, had begun in different ‘foci of creation’. He thought that man had been created relatively recently but by a process that was just the same as for other animals.50
The big problem with Lyell’s theory was that it revived Hutton’s ‘steady-state’ theory of the earth, arguing that the world we see about us is the product of constructive and destructive forces. But where did the energy for all this come from? As the science of thermodynamics developed in the middle years of the nineteenth century, physicists such as Lord Kelvin argued that the earth must be cooling and calculated on that basis that it was at least 100 million years old. This was nowhere near the truth but still very much greater than it said in the Bible. (Only in the twentieth century did physicists realise that the radioactivity of certain elements is capable of maintaining the earth’s central heat.)51 With hindsight, one can say that Lyell’s book flirted with evolution. But it was only flirtation: he had no concept of natural selection. On the other hand, he did kill off Neptunism.
There were, however, a number of last-ditch attempts to marry the biblical narrative with the flood of scientific discoveries, and these culminated in a series of papers that became known as the Bridgewater Treatises. ‘This strange and, to the modern reader, deadly series was commissioned by the will of the Reverend Francis Henry Egerton, eighth earl of Bridgewater, a noble clergyman who had always neglected his parish assiduously and who died in 1829. Lord Bridgewater charged his executors, the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of London, and the president of the Royal Society, with the duty of selecting eight scientific authors, each from a main branch of the natural sciences, who were capable of demonstrating “the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation; illustrating such work by all reasonable arguments, as for instance, the variety and formation of God’s creatures in the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms…”.’ The eight ‘scientific’ authors chosen in fact comprised clergymen, physicians and geologists.52 None of them said anything that much advanced the debate but the very existence of the series showed how far some people were prepared to go to try to keep science in its place. Among the arguments used were the view that the universe is so improbable statistically that ‘divine direction’ must be at work, and that our world is so benevolent that it can only have been made by God–examples included the observation that fish have eyes specially suited to marine vision, that iron ore is always discovered in the neighbourhood of coal, by means of which it can be smelted, and so on.53 In the final treatise, Dr Thomas Chalmers insisted that the very existence of a conscience among men, the very notion of morality, was ‘conclusive evidence of an exquisite and divinely established harmony…’54
The treatises proved popular. Released between 1833 and 1836, each had gone through four editions at least by the 1850s. Their main weakness lay in their unreflective approach to science, each being composed as a final word, as if geology, biology, philology and the other new disciplines would not have further shocks up their sleeves, to add to those that had already occurred and which it had been the aim of the treatises to explain away.
The most immediate response to the Bridgewater Treatises was Charles Babbage’s unofficial Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, published in 1838, which argued that a creator could work as he himself had worked in creating his famous ‘calculating engine’, a forerunner of the computer, in which, he noted, he could programme his machine to change its operations according to some pre-determined plan. Thus was born an idea that was to prove popular–the ‘laws of creation’, rather like the laws of reproduction. This was made the most of by Robert Chambers, yet another Edinburgh figure, whose Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844, was a very radical break, so radical that Chambers published the book anonymously. This work promoted the basic idea of evolution, though without in any way anticipating Darwinian natural selection. Chambers described the progress of life as a purely natural process. He began by saying that life started through spontaneous generation ‘citing as evidence certain soon-to-be-discredited experiments in which small insects had apparently been produced by electricity’.55 Using Babbage’s Ninth Treatise as an example, he posited vague laws of creation to account for the progression. But his main contribution, as was introduced in the Prologue, was to organise the palaeontological record in an ascending system and to argue that man did not stand out in any way from other organisms in the natural world. Though he had no grasp of natural selection, or indeed of how evolution might work, Chambers did introduce people to the idea of evolution fifteen years before Darwin.56 James Secord, in his book Victorian Sensation (2000), has explored the full impact of Vestiges. He goes so far as to say that Darwin was, in a sense, ‘scooped’ by Chambers, that wide and varied sections of (British) society discussed Vestiges, at the British Association, in fashionable intellectual salons and societies, in London, Cambridge, Liverpool and Edinburgh, but also among ‘lower’ social groups, that the ideas the book promoted passed into general discussion, being referred to in paintings, exhibitions, cartoons in the new, mass-circulation newspapers, and that it was discussed among feminists and freethinkers. Secord makes the point that Chambers was not really a scientist but a middle-brow intellectual from a publishing family and that his book, which in essence provided a narrative of the ‘progress’ of history, drew as much on the narrative technique of recent novels (themselves a relatively new phenomenon) as much as science. Chambers believed his book would create a sensation: one reason he published it anonymously was in case it didn’t do well; another reason was in case it did do well. But the need for anonymity by the author, Secord says, shows that the whole question of evolution was very much in the air in the 1840s and very controversial. His especially important point is that it was Vestiges that introduced evolution to a huge range of people (there were fourteen editions) and that, viewed in such a light, Darwin’s Origin of Species resolved a crisis and did not create one: ‘The idea of evolution is not a Darwin-centred narrative’. This is a major revision in the history of ideas.57
A no less convincing response to the Bridgewater Treatises came at almost the same time as Vestiges and underlined the unfolding nature of science. This was the discovery of the great Ice Age, by Louis Agassiz and others. Agassiz was a Swiss geologist who later, in 1847, on account of his work on glaciation, was invited to Harvard. The original idea of a great Ice Age was not his: in 1795 James Hutton, in one of his rare instances of speculation, had wondered whether some strange, ‘erratic’ boulders near Geneva had been carried and left there by glaciers that had since retreated. But it was Agassiz who collected and collated the greatest mass of detail that put the issue beyond doubt. What Lyell did for the antiquity of the earth, Agassiz did for the Ice Age.
By observing present-day glaciers (of which there was no shortage in the Swiss Alps), Agassiz came to the conclusion that much of northern Europe had once been buried by a covering of ice, in places up to three kilometres thick. This conclusion (all the more remarkable because, at the time, he was more interested in fossil fishes) was based chiefly on three types of evidence found at the edges of glaciers even today–‘erratics’, moraines, and tills. Erratics are large boulders–like those near Geneva–whose constitution is quite different from the rock all around them.58 They are pushed by the edges of glaciers, as the ice expands, and then left in a ‘foreign’ environment, when the earth warms up again and the ice retreats. Thus geologists suddenly find a massive boulder of, say, granite, in an area otherwise made up of limestone. Early geologists had thought that this type of phenomenon was produced by the Flood, but Agassiz showed that it was ice that produced this effect. Till is a form of gravel formed by the ice as it expands over the earth and acts, in J. D. Macdougall’s words, like a giant sheet of sandpaper.59 (Till provides a lot of gravel resources for
modern construction industries.) Moraines are mounds of till that build up at the edges of glaciers and can be quite large: most of Long Island, in New York state, is a moraine more than 110 miles from end to end. Agassiz and others concluded that the most recent great Ice Age began about 130,000 years ago, peaked at 20,000 years ago, and ended quickly at 12,000–10,000 years ago. In time this would prove extremely significant, in that it tallied with the emerging evidence for the beginnings of agriculture.60 This provided coherence in both chronological terms and in respect of cultural evolution.