In 1796 Cuvier observed that the lower the stratum of rock, the greater the difference between its fossils and their present-day counterparts. He seems to have been the first to remark on this phenomenon. However, he did not recognise any progression from lower to higher as species developed. That would come later.
For the publishers John Murray, Charles Lyell was the ‘father of modern geology’. So their archive claims. But Murray’s would say that, wouldn’t they? For the venerable publishing house, founded in 1768, Principles was one of their best sellers, alongside the works of Jane Austen, John Ruskin and Lord Byron. Nonetheless, Lyell is a strong contender for the title.
Like the great geologist James Hutton, Lyell was a Scot. Born in 1797 the eldest son of a Scottish landowner, Lyell was not, however, raised at his birthplace – the family’s large estate at Kinnordy, in Forfarshire – but in the less geologically dramatic New Forest in Hampshire, where his parents lived at Bartley Lodge. His physical appearance was described by his good friend Gideon Mantell as unremarkable, except for ‘a broad expanse of forehead . . . a decided Scottish physiognomy, small eyes, fine chin, and a rather proud or reserved expression of countenance’.14
Lyell’s Principles raised geology to the status of a science by showing the constancy of physical laws throughout time. His fluency, imagination and breadth woke up an age to the importance of studying the earth’s history. The volumes were widely read not only by scientists but by writers such as Dickens, George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, T. H. Huxley and Henry Adams. The questions of species raised in the book opened the way to the evolutionary debate which would burst out with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Principles was the first work in English (perhaps in any language) to try to present the earth’s physical history. It carried also a philosophical message in its subtitle: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. Lyell proclaimed that all geological changes had taken place over millions of years through processes that continued to the present day. In this sense, Lyell may be regarded as a founding father of modern geology.
Lyell’s book set flowing the full tide of what was called ‘uniformitarianism’. This belief held that there had been no violent catastrophes, such as the convulsion that the ardent geologist William Conybeare maintained had thrown up the Alps in a single heave. Lyell believed that geological changes proceeded slowly. Rain and rivers wore down the land; volcanic action and earthquakes raised sediments from the bottom of the sea to form mountains. The division between ‘uniformitarianism’ and ‘catastrophism’ was defined by William Whewell, the philosopher of science, in 1832. In the Quarterly Review, reviewing the second volume of Principles, Whewell asked whether, ‘the changes which lead us from one geological state to another have been, on a long average, uniform in their intensity, or have they consisted of epochs of paroxysmal and catastrophic action, interposed between periods of comparative tranquillity? These two opinions will probably for some time divide the geological world into two sects, which may perhaps be designated as the Uniformitarians and the Catastrophists.’15
Aside from philosophising, Lyell laid down three practical rules for the geologist: ‘travel, travel and travel’ – advice which implied leisure, money and physical strength. Before he wrote his masterwork, Lyell practised what he would preach.
In 1827, as a young barrister, he visited Paris accompanied by the French scientist Alexandre Brongniart and Constant Prévost, one of Cuvier’s former students. They took him to the Paris Basin and demonstrated what they believed was the geological history of the area: tranquil sediment that had lain there over a vast timescale that had been punctuated by occasional sudden alterations between marine and freshwater conditions. Prévost convinced Lyell that the evidence showed how the ancient environments paralleled those of the modern world – a powerful vindication of Lyell’s faith that actual causes would be adequate to explain everything in the geohistorical record. Lyell was also introduced to Baron Cuvier himself.
Cuvier received guests in Paris every Saturday evening in the large drawing room of his library. Warmly welcoming Lyell, he invited him to call at his institute on Monday. Lyell obliged and brought with him a strange unidentified fossil tooth, found in the Tilgate Forest in Sussex, and given to him by Gideon Mantell. Cuvier declared that it was probably the upper incisor of a rhinoceros.16
The following year, once again turning himself from a barrister into a geologist, Lyell toured central France with his geologist friend and former army officer, Roderick Murchison, and Murchison’s new wife, Charlotte. Lyell was interested in the extinct volcanoes around Auvergne known as puys, having read a study of them by the young English geologist George Scrope. Published in 1815, Scrope’s Considerations of Volcanos implied that the landscape had been created step by step. Lyell went off to see for himself.
‘Auvergne is beautiful,’ wrote Lyell, ‘rich wooded plains, picturesque towns, and the outline of the volcanic chain unlike any I ever saw.’17 With innumerable old ruins to be sketched, lakes and waterfalls, he wondered that the English had not discovered the area. Everywhere he saw evidence that millions of years of rainfalls, rivers and eruptions had created the landscape. The sight convinced him that all geological changes took place over millions of years through processes that were still continuing. The fossil record, he decided, showed the relatively recent arrival of man. ‘Although we have not yet ascertained the number of different periods at which the Alps gained accession to their height and width,’ he wrote, ‘yet we can affirm, that the last series of movements occurred when the seas were inhabited by many existing species of animals.’18
It was with eager anticipation of more travel, therefore, that he could inform readers of the distinguished Quarterly Review, for whom he was reviewing Scrope’s Memoir on the Geology of Central France, that the Auvergne in the Massif Central was ‘a theatre of extinct volcanos’. He reported that ‘this fascinating area may be reached in a journey of less than forty hours by the public conveyance from Paris’.19
Lyell concluded that the rivers of the region, however small they appeared, had carved out their own valleys. When he reached Nice in August 1828, he found seashells 200 feet or more above the level of the sea. He realised at once that the shell-containing rocks must have been elevated since first deposited.20
When the Murchisons decided to return home to England, Lyell proceeded on his own to Italy. In Tuscany he worked out the geology while being driven in a gig on the road from Florence to Siena. To Rome he brought the same geological reporter’s eye that would later enliven his Travels in North America. ‘At Rome I found the geology of the city itself exceedingly interesting,’ he wrote to his sister Eleanor. ‘The celebrated seven hills of which you have read, and which in fact are nine, are caused by the Tiber and some tributaries, which have cut open valleys almost entirely through volcanic ejected matter, covered by travertin containing lacustraine shells.’21
From Rome he went by post-chaise to Naples where, finding that his planned boat for Sicily would not leave for another twelve days, he took himself to the island of Ischia at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples. The journey was worthwhile. At an elevation of 2,600 feet he found the same kind of shellfish still living in the sea: another confirmation of uplift. Looking for signs of elevated beaches, once more he found them. He wrote to his sister that he would let the world know that Ischia had been populated with the same oysters and cockles ‘which have now the honour of living with or being eaten by us’.22
Over the next few months, Lyell conducted an extended tour of Italy and Sicily. Near Naples he climbed Vesuvius, where he studied the lavas left after the great eruption six years earlier. In Sicily he ascended Etna, the largest volcano in Europe, where, on the summit, he was astounded to find once more what he had found in Ischia: fossil shells of the same species as were then living in the Mediterranean. These proved to him that Etna’s summit had once been part of
the sea floor. On the eastern side of Etna, he studied the dramatic circular crater called Valle de Bove and saw it as a cross-section of the mountain, revealing how the mountain had been built up slowly over an immense period of time. Etna, to him, was ‘placed as if to give just & grand conceptions of Time to all in Europe’.23 Around it were minor cones of widely different ages. ‘Nothing can be more beautiful,’ he wrote to Murchison, ‘than the view from many parts of Etna down into these wooded volcanoes covered with oak & pines & with their craters variously shaped.’24 His guide told him that Etna smoked most when the sea was high.
Lyell continued on a long circular tour of the eastern part of the island, ending up in Palermo on 29 December 1828, just before the rains came and turned the roads to mud. The trip committed him to his new chosen subject. ‘I shall never hope to make money by geology, but not to lose, and tax others for my amusement,’ he wrote to Murchison from Naples on 15 January 1829. ‘My work is in part written and all planned. It will not pretend to give even an abstract of all that is known in geology, but it will endeavour to establish the principle of reasoning in the science; . . . that no causes whatever have, from the earliest time to which we can look back, to the present, ever acted, but those now acting; and that they never acted with different degrees of energy from that which they now exert.’25
Continuing his Italian travels, Lyell visited Pozzuoli, a port just to the west of Naples. (Lyell spelled it ‘Puzzuoli’; its Latin name was ‘Puteoli’.) The region was not the tourist attraction it would become after 1834 when Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s vivid novel, The Last Days of Pompeii, depicted the people and animals of AD 79 trapped by the lava and ash spewed out by a cataclysmic eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Pozzuoli’s celebrated ancient monument, the Temple of Serapis, greeted Lyell’s eyes like a vision from on high to tell him that his theory of earth movements was right: its three ancient columns, each over forty feet high, were riddled halfway up with mollusc holes. What plainer proof could there be that the ground on which the columns had been built had sunk below the sea and then been raised again? Clearly, while the pillars had been submerged, hard-shelled creatures had burrowed into the stone. Lyell could also recognise that the slow movements of lowering and raising had been gentle, for the columns had neither toppled nor cracked. He dated these movements to have happened ‘since the Christian era’.26
Lyell was so pleased with this dramatic illustration of his theories that he used an etching of the ‘Temple’ as a frontispiece for the first volume of Principles.27 Expanding on this evidence in Principles, he declared that there was scarcely any land in Europe, Northern Asia, or North America ‘which has not been raised from the bosom of the deep’;28 if there were a new submergence, only the tops of the highest mountains would remain above the waters.
From other evidence gathered by the Geological Society, Lyell sketched a dramatic past for the British Isles as well. Animal remains found in coal and chalk showed that Britain’s climate had once been much warmer and its land covered by a tropical sea. However, he warned that any who wished to comprehend the volcanic phenomenon must leave Britain and travel to countries where earthquakes were a frequent occurrence.29
His guiding tenet – that the present is the key to the past – was correct in essence. He stated that geological phenomena should be explained ‘by references to causes now in operation’. The shifting relations between land and sea, he said, were enough to produce the alterations in climate and land masses that had been observed. He reminded his readers that, despite the newness of geology, the laws of nature such as gravity held constant over time.
In his Principles, Lyell devoted an entire chapter to the work of the French aristocrat, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, the Chevalier de Lamarck. The ‘father of the idea of progress in the development in forms of life’, Lamarck was regarded by some as an ‘upstart scientist’. His ideas remain controversial.
In 1793, Lamarck was appointed professor at the Jardin du Roi. In his Philosophie Zoologique, he argued that species did not become extinct but rather changed or transmuted into another, higher, form of creature. In his reasoning, wolves had become dogs. Species, he argued, by adapting to their environment moved upward and changed to higher forms of life. The neck of the giraffe had become longer by generations of stretching for higher and higher leaves. By 1801 Lamarck had classified spiders and crustaceans as distinct from insects. He had coined the word ‘invertebrate’ and argued his philosophy that there were no gaps in nature: one form of life grew out of another. In 1809 he published his evolutionary theory, arguing that all species had evolved in a continuous progression. Changes in structure arose from new conditions.
Lamarck had his later followers, notably twentieth-century Marxist biologists who found his views on the inheritance of acquired characteristics nicely compatible with Marxist teaching on the transferable effect of changes in society on future generations. Yet from the start, Lamarck’s theories were easily disproved. The nineteenth-century German evolutionary biologist August Weismann cut off the tails of hundreds of rats over several generations and found that not one rat was subsequently born without a tail. Julian Huxley later gave a better example. By Lamarckian reasoning, he pointed out, Jewish male babies should be born without a foreskin as their fathers had none.30 There was clearly no evidence that circumcision induced a genetically inherited characteristic.
In Principles, Lyell described at length Lamarck’s thesis of transmutation of species. He then proceeded to try to demolish it in the following chapter, under the uncompromising title, ‘Theory of the Transmutation of Species Untenable’.31 He attributed the new preoccupation with species to the great varieties of animals and plants discovered in the previous half-century ‘which poured in such multitudes into our museums’. He conceded ‘none can doubt that there is a nearer approximation to a graduated scale of being’.32 In his determined opposition to any idea of evolution, Lyell even abandoned the idea of Buckland, his Oxford professor, that there had been a traceable narrative of progress in the development of life. Instead he stressed the geographical causes of climate change and the piecemeal nature of the geological record that, to him, made it impossible to trace a clear path from the past to the present. In a letter to his wife, Mary, in October 1830, Lyell stated that if species of seashells showed no change after thousands of years, it ‘must therefore have required a good time for Orang-Outangs to become men on Lamarckian principles’.33
Lyell’s meandering thoughts reveal that he was utterly opposed to the idea that one species had transformed into another. ‘An attack on evolution became central to the Principles,’ writes geological historian James Secord, ‘because of the threat Lamarck posed to the special status of humanity.’34
5
FIGHTING FELLOWS
British geologists shared their enthusiasm in the club they founded in a Covent Garden tavern on 13 November 1807. Briefly they considered calling their society ‘mineralogical’ but soon settled on ‘geological’: The Geological Society of London.
That the day was a Friday the thirteenth caused some merriment. Humphry Davy, an early member, joked that he never knew anything begun on a Friday the thirteenth to prosper. That the number of men present was also thirteen heightened the joke. The Freemasons’ Tavern, where they met, occupied the front half of the spacious Freemasons’ Hall on Great Queen Street off Drury Lane and was known for its good food. Sociability was the prime object. Members included doctors with an interest in chemicals and minerals – notably James Parkinson who, before turning his attention from medicine to geology, gave his name to the shaking palsy he was the first to describe. At that time doctors did consider themselves to be scientists; so did the Royal Society, which received a large number of academic papers from doctors.
The majority, however, were wealthy owners of land whose commercial potential they were eager to understand. Theirs was not a club for men with grubby fingernails; rather, a gentlemen’s dining club. Within f
ive years, the society included two dukes, two earls and ten clergymen. They recognised their common interest in sharing ideas, presenting their discoveries and adopting a common nomenclature (no small task) for the evidence they were accumulating with their hammers and sacks.
A constructive early decision was to disregard abstract theorising. The Geological Society would not fight the battle of the Neptunists who believed the world emerged from water, or the Plutonists who held that rocks were created by fire, and certainly not that of Genesis versus geology. Religion did not enter their debates in any way. Rather, they determined to be strictly empirical and to concentrate on collecting evidence – fossils in particular. These were men for whom a fine storage cabinet was a treasured possession and who were in awe of the Royal Institution’s great collection, overseen by Davy, which held more than 3,000 minerals and fossils. They also reflected the general British fear of any speculative philosophising that might inspire a counterpart to the French Revolution.
The society’s nickname – ‘GeolSoc’ (or ‘Jollsoc’ as it was and still is pronounced) – suggested a good time. It was an elite and expensive private club. The price of its dinner – fifteen shillings (about £60 today: a week’s wages for many at that time) – in itself made it clear that the society was not for outdoor working men such as surveyors. The group grew rapidly. Within a year it had 136 members and a nomenclature committee ‘to remove the confusion which now prevails’.1 By 1810 it had eight committees, including one dedicated to chemical analysis, another to maps.
After only a year, the Geological Society boasted among its members thirty-seven fellows of the Royal Society. That distinguished society, chartered in 1662, which was and remains the most prestigious learned society in the world, acquired the ‘Royal’ designation in 1662 with the granting of a charter by Charles II. It initiated scientific publishing with its distinguished Philosophical Transactions, begun in 1665. (The seriousness of this journal may be judged by its subtitle: Giving some Accompt of the Present Undertaking, Studies and Labours of the Ingenious in many Considerable Parts of the World.)
Reading the Rocks Page 5