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The Origins of the Modern Geologic Theory

"I think any argument from such a reported radical as myself," Charles Babbage wrote to the geologist Charles Lyell on May 3, 1832, "would only injure the cause, and I therefore willingly leave it in better hands."

Charles Babbage (1792-1871) was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (1828-39) at the time, a dabbler in geology, theology, and manufacturing, and had recently made an unsuccessful bid for a seat in parliament. In 1837, he would publish his The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, an attack on the theology of the Anglican establishment, and in 1851, he would carry the attack into the Tory camp in his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, the purpose of which was to argue that wealthy Tory amateurs had a stranglehold on science policy and were discriminating against socially less well positioned scientists, who were more deserving of support.

Charles Lyell (1797-1875), to whom he was writing, had just published the second volume of his Principles of Geology (volume I, 1830; volume II, 1832; and volume III, 1833), a work written in support of political liberalism --although ostensibly it was an objective work in Science free from any political implications. In his letter of May 3 to Lyell, Babbage was explaining why he would not write a favorable review of the book. Quite wisely, the whig scientists, like Babbage, Lyell, Scrope, Darwin and Mantell, did not want the public to know that that which was being promoted as objective truth was little more than thinly disguised political propaganda.

The purpose of this paper is to explicate what Babbage means by the words "radical" and the word "cause," when he writes, as quoted above:

The Political Implications of Early 19th Century Geology

In 1807 Humphrey Davy wrote to his friend William Pepys: "We are forming a little talking geological dinner club, of which I hope you will be a member." Of the original thirteen members, four were doctors, one an ex-unitarian minister. Two were booksellers. Another, Comte Jacques-Louis, had fled the French Revolution. Four were Quakers, and two, William Allen and Humphrey Davy, were independently wealthy amateur chemists. Only one, George Greenough, had any training in geology or mineralogy --having paid a visit to the Academy at Freiberg some years earlier along with Goethe-- but he did not pursue the subject for a living by any stretch of the imagination. He was a member of Parliament. Indeed, what is extraordinary about the London Geological Society is that none of the original members were geologists. "The little talking dinner club," as Davy put it, was a club for gentlemen given to talk, not to hammering rocks.

The following year 26 Fellows of the Royal Society' joined, including Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Philosophical Society, and the year after the number of members had jumped to 173. The "little talking dinner" club concept became unfeasible; apartments were rented instead. There was talk of publishing transactions, and Sir Joseph Banks, fearing that the Geological Society would soon grow bigger than his prestigious and ancient Royal Philosophical Society, resigned in protest. By 1817, only ten years after its founding, the Geological Society had more than 400 members, and in 1825 it was incorporated with a membership of 637.

The founding and early growth of the London Geological Society is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Earlier scientific societies, like the Royal Academy in France and the Philosophical Society in London, had had a much broader base. There had been a few abortive attempts to start specialized scientific societies in chemistry and in botany, but they had come to nothing. The Geological Society of London was really the first specialized scientific society, and its early growth was unprecedented --in fact, very difficult to account for, especially when one recalls that its early members were almost all doctors, lawyers and members of Parliament; the Reverend William Buckland was Dean of Westminster, and Sir Roderick Murchison was an independently wealthy retired Army Officer.

That is not to say that there were no persons in England actively engaged in what we would now consider to be geological pursuits, for, indeed, England was at the time going through a crash program of canal building and mine exploration and was about to enter the railroad age; but one is hard pressed to find these working geologists on the membership list. William Smith, for instance, the most famous drainage engineer of the age, who discovered the technique of correlation of strata by means of fossils and is generally mentioned in modern geological texts as the key geologist of the era, was not invited to join the London Geological Society. Perhaps he was too busy doing geology to have time to talk about it, but if the truth be told, the London Geological Society was a group of talking amateurs whose interest in geology was for its theological and political implications, not for its application to mining and canal digging. These theological and political implications were crucial to the social stability of England and were therefore by no means irrelevant to the early history of geology.

The term "geology" had only recently been introduced by the Swiss diluvialist, de Luc. In the Medieval University curriculum one finds no place for the study of the earth, which was deemed corrupt, a product of the devil and therefore not worth studying. Geometry, numerology, harmony and astronomy better reflected the wisdom of God than did the study of things of this world, the Medieval Catholics believed, following Plato, but the Protestant Reformation had changed all that. Between the years 1680 and 1780 some five hundred books and articles were published on geology, ranging from Bishop Burnet's popular Sacred Theory of the Earth (which ran through seven editions between 1681 and 1753) to J. T. Klein's scholarly monograph on a single class of fossils, Dispositio Echinodermatum (1732). The Protestants were keen to demonstrate that God's handiwork was as easily seen in this world as in the next, and particularly they were eager to demonstrate the literal truth of a Bible which declared that God had not only created all the creatures of the earth, but had also brought down the Deluge to punish man for his sins.

Shortly after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Catholics were driven out of England, a rash of works appeared reconciling the book of Genesis with the new research into nature. The most successful of these was John Woodward's Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth, in which he explained the stratigraphic sequence of rocks by supposing that during Noah's flood, all the surface rocks of the earth had been dissolved by the sea, later to be gradually precipitated out into the stratigraphic sequences which now comprise the secondary formations. Because the Woodwardian idea preserved the theme of Genesis that the flood was caused by divine decree to punish men for their sins, it was favorably received by the Anglican Church and later became, at the hands of the Tories, a major bulwark in their defense of monarchy. In 1728, the Woodwardian professorship was founded at Cambridge, the first academic recognition of the field of what is now called "geology." Woodward's ideas were articulated not only in England, but also on the continent --particularly in the popular classes of Abraham Gotlob Werner at Freiberg later in the century, where Greenough, von Buch, MacLure, Jamieson, Berger, and most of the other founders of geology studied.

In the pursuit of Woodwardian geology, a number of anomalies occurred --in particular, a lack of correlation between new and old world strata as well as overlays of basalt and granite in what were supposed to be secondary deposits. As a result. Leonard von Buch and Georges Cuvier modified the early diluvial theory into a more general catastrophic theory of the earth in which the earth was seen as not having suffered one catastrophe, but numerous catastrophes, of which the Deluge was but the most recent example. To deny catastrophism altogether was to deny the truth of the Bible, and hence the theological implications of early geology were quite clear...

In this day and age when geology is far removed from religion and politics and when political issues are settled by election rather than at meetings of geological societies, it is difficult for us to understand the extent to which the social shift in world view which took place not only in geology but in astronomy and in natural history was related to the Great Reform movement of 1832. All were part of the far more general shift in world view from paternalism to liberalism, but the persons responsible for engineering this shift were very conscious of what they were doing. "It is a great treat to have taught our section-hunting quarry men, that two thick volumes may be written on geology without once using the word "stratum," Scrope wrote to Lyell on September 29, 1832, after Lyell's second volume appeared. "If anyone had said so five years back, how he would have been scoffed at." Just as the conservatives had refused a hearing to the Huttonian camp earlier, now the liberals pulled the same tactics when they got into power. The stronghold of catastrophism lay in a stratigraphy where unconformity and nonconformities, to say nothing of massive conglomerates, told of wide-ranging geological disasters in the past. Lyell, like Scrope before him, simply suppressed the evidence which did not fit in with his doctrines, and once he was voted into power, the catastrophists found it increasingly difficult to publish their research.

The liberal takeover of the geological society and the suppression of evidence favoring the catastrophist position did not come about overnight. Rather there was a slow assimilation of catastrophist data until there was virtually noting left to the theory as a whole. When, in 1839, Louis Agassiz attempted to argue in favor of catastrophism with his theory of ice ages, the uniformitarians simply adopted all his evidence, but reinterpreted it in uniformitarian terms. Thus the data did not change, but the Gestalt by which that data was organized and given coherence was transformed from catastrophism to uniformitarianism, just as the social structure of England was changed from Tory Paternalism in which sovereignty descended from God down to the King, to the new liberalism in which sovereignty ascended up from the people through Parliament to its ministers.

Ironically enough, the political battle which underlay the catastrophist-uniformitarian debate of 1832 is now long over, but owing to the paradigmization of science, the uniformitarian Gestalt is still assiduously cultivated at universities and in professional geological societies. The "cause" for which Babbage, Scrope, and Lyell were fighting is now long since over, and we should feel free to look again at the geological evidence itself, which, if the truth be told, provides ample evidence for catastrophism, as it always has.

Epilogue

In 1905, Physics had been in a dilemma; some of the evidence from optics indicated that light moved in waves, other evidence indicated that it moved in particles. The two concepts seemed contradictory, but Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were able to show mathematically that the two concepts were actually complementary and provided us with a fuller picture of reality if we accepted them both. Geology is today perhaps in the same situation. We have inherited from our ancestors the idea that either catastrophism must be correct or uniformitarianism must be correct but not both. The reason they put this either/or proposition was political. Either sovereignty belonged to God and the King, or it belonged to the people, it could not belong to both; therefore Geology had either to go with the Tories to catastrophism, or to the liberals with uniformitarianism; it could not go both ways. Today we no longer have to worry about that; from the evidence of Geology, it seems quite clear that both theories are correct. The normal course of events is indeed as Lyell describes it: gentle uplift and slow erosion; but there is also ample evidence that Velikovsky is correct as well and that the earth has indeed been subject to severe catastrophes as he has so convincingly argued in his Earth in Upheaval.

In the ensuing years of the 19th century, geology became fully professional and dogmatic. It became a scientific heresy to believe in catastrophic theory; and many years later, the reaction of the scientific community was one of instinctive repression, not because Velikovsky was wrong, but because it basically feared that he may be right.