Reading the Rocks

by Brenda Maddox

  Inviting married fellow cleric Dr William Somerville and his wife – the celebrated science writer, Mary Somerville – to visit him at Trinity in April 1832, Sedgwick wrote ‘we shall have a small party to welcome you and Mrs Somerville . . . A four-posted bed (a thing utterly out of our regular monastic system) will rear its head for you and Madame in the chamber immediately under my own; and your handmaid may safely rest her bones in a small inner chamber.’36 The visit lasted a week.

  Sedgwick’s envy of happy marriages extended to the throne. When Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited Cambridge in October 1843, Sedgwick wrote to his sister: ‘it is plain that the royal pair love one another’.37 Sedgwick and the prince consort got along very well and shared many views about science and university reform. The professor of geology’s great contribution came in helping Albert reform the curriculum of Cambridge University. Unsurprisingly, Sedgwick was rewarded with several royal invitations.

  On a visit in December 1847 to Osborne, Queen Victoria’s country house on the Isle of Wight, bought and renovated by Prince Albert, Sedgwick told his sister (in an extremely long Christmas letter), how amused he was to see ‘carts, toys and other signs of young children, scattered about the hall in considerable confusion’. Everything had ‘a happy, domestic look’. Dressing for dinner was another matter. The gentlemen dressed like gentlemen in a private party – with one exception: ‘They wear not loose trousers at Court, but tight pantaloons or shorts; of course I had, as a clergyman, a pair of shorts. I wish this custom had continued in society. For more than twenty years after I came to College men commonly appeared at dinner in shorts and silks.’ He also observed that a dish of ‘well-toasted oat-cake is handed round with the cheese. I believe the Queen likes it.’ Sedgwick admired Prince Albert’s knowledge and also his children: ‘Five finer and more healthy children I never saw.’38

  In his fifth decade, Sedgwick declined to accept the living of East Farleigh in Kent, worth an annual £1,000, because it would mean abandoning his Cambridge geology professorship. Yet it would have allowed him to marry. His decision was deplored by his friends, Lyell especially. Happily married himself, Lyell was convinced that were Sedgwick to leave Cambridge and marry ‘he would be much happier, and would eventually do much more for geology’.39 But it was never to be.

  10

  FROM SILURIA TO THE MOON

  Roderick Impey Murchison would prove to be the most politically powerful of the ‘brethren of the hammer’. Regarded by some as the greatest geologist of them all, Murchison was certainly the most combative. He turned geology into an instrument of British imperialism, directing skills into mapping and the exploration of countries within Britain’s expanding empire. In 1844 his predictions of gold in Australia led to a gold rush. His encouragement of ventures such as the search for a Northwest Passage through Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific is recognised today in at least fifteen features around the globe bearing his name. These include Murchison Sound in British Columbia, Murchison Falls in Uganda, Murchison River in Western Australia along with two of its tributaries (the Roderick and the Impey) and the Murchison River in New Zealand. There is also a Murchison crater on the moon.

  Another mark of his successful cultural imperialism can be found in the British names given to the periods of the geological timetable. It was Murchison who decided to keep the basic categories of eras – Primary, Secondary, Tertiary – the huge blocks of time designated earlier by Abraham Werner. Into these he introduced important subdivisions that he called ‘periods’. These were the Silurian, the Devonian and the Permian.

  The Silurian was Murchison’s most famous coinage. Its adoption was encouraged by the addition of a new name for the period between the Silurian and the Carboniferous – the Old Red Sandstone became the Devonian. As a military man, Murchison admired the ancient British tribe of Silures for their resistance to their Roman occupiers. As he himself explained: ‘British geologists, therefore, will not doubt that “Siluria” is a name entitled to be revived, when they are reminded that these struggles of their ancestors took place upon the very hills which it is proposed to illustrate under the term “Silurian system”.’

  Though a relative latecomer to geology, Murchison ascended swiftly to the top. His first biographer, Archibald Geikie, writing in 1875, said: ‘Such was the state of geological science at the time that a great work could be done by a man with a quick eye, a good judgment, a clear notion of what had already been accomplished, and a stout pair of legs.’1 Murchison had all of these. He took up geology in 1823 – only eight years after William Smith’s formulation of the law of strata identified by fossils. Despite his late start, he rose to rank above Buckland, Sedgwick, De la Beche, Conybeare and perhaps even Lyell.

  Murchison was born in Scotland in 1792 into a wealthy Ross and Cromarty family where he acquired his love of fox-hunting. He attended Durham School and after passing out from the Royal Military College at Great Marlow spent eight years in the army. As captain with the 6th Dragoons he served in Spain and Portugal as the British tried to help the Spanish expel the invading French. In January 1809 he survived (as 900 others did not) the retreat from Corunna in northwest Spain. His military ambitions were scotched by the advent of peace in 1815.

  Unlike many of his fellow ex-officers, Murchison avoided becoming a clergyman. On leaving the army he married Charlotte Hugonin of Nursted House, Hampshire, a general’s daughter and woman of considerable intelligence and means. They toured Europe for the first two years of their marriage and settled initially in Barnard Castle, County Durham. It was there that Murchison met Sir Humphry Davy, who told him he was wasting his time fox-hunting. Davy encouraged him to come to London and throw himself into science. As a lure, Davy promised to get him into the Royal Society.

  Murchison was persuaded. He saw geology as a science that would allow him free air and could be combined with his hunting and shooting. When in London, he began attending lectures on chemistry at the Royal Institution and in 1825 he joined the Geological Society. He loved its boisterous meetings and welcomed the acquaintance of Sedgwick, Conybeare, Buckland and Lyell. Within two years he was made a fellow. That summer, exploring with his wife, Murchison studied the geology of the south of England and concentrated on stratigraphical research. It was on the Jurassic Coast that he first met fossil-hunter Mary Anning (who, as we have seen, was as impressed by his good looks and soldierly bearing as by his knowledge). Murchison clearly enjoyed the experience, describing it as ‘perhaps about the happiest period of my life’. That research provided the basis for his first scientific paper, read to the GeolSoc later in the year.

  His explorations continued, accompanying Lyell to southern France, northern Italy, Switzerland and the volcanic region of Auvergne; then Sedgwick, to the Alps, resulting in their first joint paper. These field trips were no idle strolls through the countryside. They involved strenuous bending, hammering rocks, picking up and examining, then carrying them home. For twenty years Murchison undertook exhausting journeys in search of new strata. He was not a theoretician, rather an observer and reporter.

  When geology was new, naming was as important as finding. To place the strata in accurate order of their deposition and to give a new division a name was an absorbing and fraught exercise. What were the identifying marks of their rocks – colour, texture, fossils or absence thereof?

  In the 1830s, with Adam Sedgwick, Murchison began to study the Old Red Sandstone formations in the Welsh Borders – the long north–south strip between Shropshire and what is now the county of Powys. Murchison wondered whether the fossiliferous rocks underlying the Old Red Sandstone could be grouped into an order of succession.

  It was a good question. The rocks and quarries near Builth Wells showed an astonishing frequency of trilobites. Murchison observed and described five species of these distinctive tiny creatures, with their domed eyes, fringed haloes, three lobes (whence the ‘tri’), furrows and ribs.

  His 1831 field trip – while Sedgwick w
as conducting his own investigations in North Wales – marked the occasion when, claims Martin Rudwick, Murchison came out from under Charles Lyell’s shadow.2 What Murchison looked back on as his ‘Eureka moment!’ came at a spot about eight miles east of Builth Wells, where a stream flows into the River Wye at Trericket Mill near Llanstephan Bridge. At this spot he saw the junction between the Old Red Sandstone and the Transition strata below. (‘Transition’ is a term formerly applied to the lowest uncrystalline stratified rocks – greywacke – supposed to contain no fossils. Such rocks were called ‘transition’ because they were thought to have been formed when the earth was passing from an uninhabitable to a habitable state.)

  Murchison, repeating what he had already published, placed the Silurian above the Cambrian. Elaborating his classifications, he divided the Silurian into Upper (subdivided into Ludlow and Wenlock) and Lower (with subdivisions Caradoc and Llandeilo); and below the Lower Silurian, he (or with Sedgwick in a joint paper) listed the Cambrian – Upper Cambrian, Middle Cambrian and Lower Cambrian. Sedgwick then outlined his ideas on the lower rocks. Noting the absence of fossils the further down the Cambrian one looked, Sedgwick suggested that their first appearance marked the beginning of life itself. The sudden emergence of many varied fossils at the base of the Cambrian rocks is now referred to as the ‘Cambrian explosion’.

  In the Wye and also in the hills on the north bank of the river, Murchison could see slabs of greywacke, while in and around a small waterfall on the river’s south bank lay the Old Red Sandstone, with its distinct fossils. According to Rudwick, Murchison at that moment ‘found a project that might make him independently a leading man of science’. This gave him ‘a distinctive personal stake in fossil-based methods in geology, and ranged him even more clearly behind his adopted father-figure, William Smith’.3

  The outcome was Murchison’s declaration of the Silurian system: a series of formations, each with distinctive organic remains, distinct from the older Cambrian rocks below. In his research notes from the same trip, Murchison drew sketches of other Welsh rocks, from the Swansea coalfields to the Transition rocks at Llandeilo – no small matter in the 1830s. He described the coalfields and overlying formations in South Wales and the English borders. His work in turn provided important new information for the burgeoning coal industry.

  With his growing reputation, Murchison became president of the Geological Society in February 1832. Re-elected a year later, he was returned for a further term from 1841 to 1843. Lyell dedicated the third edition of his Principles to him.

  In August 1835, Murchison and Sedgwick presented a joint paper to the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Dublin on ‘the Transition formations’ in Wales. Murchison then tucked all these findings into 768 pages, published in 1839 as The Silurian System. Although there was no way of determining absolute ages in the nineteenth century, he claimed the age of the Silurian to have been 443 million to 417 million years ago and dedicated the book ‘to my dear Sedgwick’. Its publication marked the point when his reputation, if not his book sales, exceeded Lyell’s.

  It was only to be a few years, however, before Murchison and Sedgwick fell into bitter conflict over the division between Cambrian and Silurian. Neither man denied that Sedgwick had identified the Cambrian; but neither recognised the large overlap between the two. Murchison proved to be a formidable adversary, publishing in 1843 a geological map of Britain in which the whole of Wales was shown as Silurian. His designation of the Silurian system brought him the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1849, and drew a wordy accolade: ‘for eminent services rendered to geological science during many years of active observation in several parts of Europe and especially for the establishment of that classification of the older Palaeozoic deposits designated the Silurian System, as set forth in the two works entitled The Silurian System as founded on Geological Researches in England, and The Geology of Russia in Europe and the Ural Mountains.’

  In 1854 the publication of his book Siluria, which summarised Palaeozoic research across the globe with tantalising hints of where gold and coal might be found, secured for him, according to his biographer Robert Stafford, the ‘reputation as the premier practical geologist of his day’.4

  Murchison might be remembered even more for another designation: ‘Permian’. This naming came about in 1840 when he went with two French scientists to carry out the first geological survey of European Russia. His trip, subsidised by the Emperor Nicholas I, took in the city of Perm in the Urals and prompted him to give the name ‘Permian’ to the last period of the Palaeozoic era. For his efforts, the emperor awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of St Stanislaus and a ceremonial dagger (it sold at Bonham’s in London for £48,000 in 2010).

  In 1846, two years before Lyell received the honour, Murchison was knighted. A more unique title was awarded him during the 1849 meeting of the BA in Birmingham. Sir Roderick led an excursion to the nearby Dudley Caverns and up to the top of the Wren’s Nest, a formation of exceptional Silurian features, and there invited the public to hear his lecture on the submarine formation of the rock on which they were standing. For this exercise he wore a green Tyrolean hat and a shepherd’s plaid scarf, and bowed his head as the Bishop of Oxford dubbed him the ‘King of Siluria’. (He used this pseudo-enthronement to seek a peerage through the Earl of Clarendon, an important member of the Whig government, but failed.)

  He had more immediate matters on his mind, though. In 1855 he succeeded Henry (now Sir Henry) De la Beche, his old antagonist, as director general of the British Geological Survey and director of the Royal School of Mines, as well as of the School of Practical Geology. Moreover, he became one of the founders and subsequently four times president of the exploratory, Empire-minded, Royal Geographical Society. Murchison supported the African explorations of the Scottish medical missionary Dr David Livingstone, who discovered, among other places, the Victoria Falls. When Livingstone lost contact with the outside world for six years, Murchison led the Royal Geographical Society’s campaign to try to find him.

  Sadly, Livingstone’s rescue by H. M. Stanley (who uttered the celebrated understatement, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’) came too late to be witnessed by Sir Roderick, who died five days before the discovery, on 22 October 1871, aged seventy-nine.

  The loss of Charlotte two years earlier had hit Murchison badly, and he suffered a stroke in 1870 from which he only partially recovered. Her death had brought him, after twenty years’ silence, a letter from Sedgwick, who apologised for having waited several months after his bereavement before writing. ‘I did not wish to intrude on your sorrows too soon,’5 he wrote. He hoped that Murchison could bear the loss of his wife ‘like a Christian’.

  It was not until both Murchison and Sedgwick were dead that the Cambrian–Silurian boundary dispute was resolved. In 1879 the distinguished geologist Charles Lapworth provided the solution. He introduced a new system, the Ordovician, to come between the Cambrian and Silurian and to cover the period he calculated as extending from 488 to 444 million years ago. Once again the Welsh past provided a name: the Ordovices were a tribe who had inhabited the area between that held by the Silures to the south and by the Cambrians to north, the region where the distinctive rock strata occur. The tripartite nomenclature – Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian – survived into the twentieth century. The Ordovician was subdivided into six units, starting from the lowest: Tremadoc, Arenig, Llanvirn, Llandeilo, Caradoc and Ashgill – the first four after place names in Wales.

  Yet there has been increasing discontent with this provincial terminology. Some of the criteria used for identification of the base of each subdivision do not seem relevant in regions far from Britain and sometimes not even in Britain itself. The International Commission on Stratigraphy’s subcommission on the Ordovician, after visits to many different rock sections throughout the world, proposed a new set of stages by which the bases could be widely recognised and correlated. After much discussion, most of the British nam
es for these bases were dropped and new, more varied, names were introduced – including Floian, Dapingian and Katian.

  Not everyone was pleased. ‘What have they done to the Ordovician?’ wailed John C. W. Cope, professor of palaeontology and stratigraphy at Cardiff University.6 The answer seems to be that ‘they’ have dragged the terminology of the subdivisions into the twenty-first century and into the world of international geology. But the classic names for the systems – Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian – remain.

  11

  ALPS ON ALPS ARISE

  Rocks presented themselves not only as objects of study but also as peaks for conquest. Early geology demanded as much in cartography, draughtsmanship, physical courage and good luck as it did scientific method and deduction. Rock samples had to be gathered, sites visited, sketches drawn in situ and in all these pursuits dangers were encountered and overcome. None was more dramatic than the attempt by Edward Whymper, a young English illustrator and explorer, to conquer the Matterhorn in 1865. The Matterhorn was, and remains, the quintessential pinnacle of rock. An ideal peak drawn from collective imagination would look just like this Swiss pointed triangle; a Jungian archetype towering above Zermatt on the Swiss side and Cervinia on the Italian.

  At 5.30 in the morning of 13 July 1865, Whymper, accompanied by two guides, Michel Croz and Peter Taugwalder, Taugwalder’s two sons, and the alpinists, Lord Francis Douglas, the Reverend Charles Hudson and his nineteen-year-old friend Douglas Hadow (a novice climber) set out from Zermatt to climb the Matterhorn. It was Whymper’s seventh attempt at the most difficult Alp, which had yet to be conquered. What happened over the next twenty-four hours is the stuff of climbing lore and legend.