George
Grinnell
The
Origins of Modern Geological Theory*
“Charles
Lyell was a lawyer by profession, and his book [Principles
of Geology, 1830-1833] is
one of the most brilliant briefs ever published by an advocate ...
Lyell relied
upon true bits of cunning to establish his uniformitarian views as the
only
true geology. First, he set up a straw man to demolish ... In fact, the
catastrophists were much more empirically minded than Lyell. The
geologic
record does seem to require catastrophes: rocks are fractured and
contorted;
whole faunas are wiped out. To circumvent this literal appearance,
Lyell
imposed his imagination upon the evidence. The geologic record, he
argued, is
extremely imperfect and we must interpolate into it what we can
reasonably
infer but cannot see. The catastrophists were the hard-nosed
empiricists of
their day, not the blinded theological apologists.”
Stephen
Jay Gould, “Catastrophes and Steady-State Earth”,
in Natural History, February, 1975, pp. 16, 17.
“Gradualism was never ‘proved
from the rocks’ by Lyell and Darwin, but
was rather imposed as a bias upon nature. …has had a profoundly
negative impact
by stifling hypotheses and by closing the minds of a profession toward
reasonable
empirical alternatives to the dogma of gradualism. …Lyell won with
rhetoric
what he could not carry with data.”
Gould, S.
J., Toward the vindication of punctuational change.
In: W. A.
BERGGREN & J. A. VAN COUVERING (Eds.):
Catastrophes and Earth History:
The
New Uniformitarianism,
Princeton University Press, Princeton (New Jersey), pp. 14-16, 1984.
«…I have been trying to show
how I think geology got
into the hands of the theoreticians who were conditioned by the social
and
political history of their day more than by observation in the field…In
other
words, we have allowed ourselves to be brain-washed into avoiding any
interpretation of the past that involves extreme and what might be
termed “catastrophic”
processes».
Ager, D. V., The Nature of the Stratigraphical
Record,
The Macmillan Press Ltd, London, pp. 46-47, 1981.
*
This paper was first presented in May of 1974 at the Symposium titled
Velikovsky and Cultural Amnesia held at the Univ. of Lethbridge
(Alberta). It is here published from its version in KRONOS, Vol. I No.
4, pp. 68-76. © Copyright KRONOS 1976, with permission.
Foreword
"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:
"I think any argument from such a reported radical as
myself would only injure the cause, and I therefore leave it in better
hands." The first part of this paper investigates the political
implications of early 19th Century Geology. The second probes into the
nature of Babbage's and Lyell's "cause."
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 1673 Bishop Bossuet, tutor to the Dauphin of France, had drawn up
his arguments in favour of kingship into a treatise, Politics drawn
from the very Words of Holy Scripture, in which he argued
that monarchy was the most common, the most ancient, and the most natural
form of government. The key word there was "natural." He
argued that nature provided evidence of being ruled by a divine
monarch, God himself, King of the Universe, and that a King was then
emulating God when he ruled with absolute authority: "Thus we have seen
monarchy takes its foundation and pattern from paternal control, that
is from nature itself," Bishop Bossuet writes. The British spokesman
for monarchy, Robert Filmore, echoed Bossuet's words. Monarchy was
natural, because all of nature was ruled by a divine absolute monarch,
God himself.
In
the course of the 18th century, as democratic sentiments grew not only
in America but throughout all of Europe, the political theory of
Bossuet and Filmore was seriously challenged. John Locke in his Treatises
on Government and Jean Jacques Rousseau in his Discourses1
argued against the naturalness of monarchy in favor of a social
contract theory of government. But to prove that monarchy was
unnatural, it was necessary to prove that the Bible's description of
the Deluge was inaccurate; that God had not created the animals and
plants of this earth and that he had not introduced catastrophes to
punish man for his sins, for these were the biblical and geological
models upon which monarchical theory was based. In 1789, on the eve of
the French Revolution, accompanied by Erasmus Darwin and later by Jean
Baptiste Lamarck and Simon LaPlace, the Scottish liberal geologist,
James Hutton, published his Theory of the Earth, in which he
attempted to demonstrate that Nature was not governed by a divine
monarch but by fixed geological laws of volcanic uplift and erosive
weathering. Hutton's friend, Adam Smith, was at the same time arguing
in favor of a laissez-faire economic policy, in which paternal
monarchical power was again eliminated in favor of a free-ranging
liberalism.
"Some Judicious persons,
who were present at Geneva during the troubles which lately convulsed
that city," the Reverend William Paley writes in a counter attack
against the new liberalism in his The Principles of Moral and
Political Philosophy (5th edition, corrected 1793), "thought they
perceived in the contentions there carrying on, the operation of that
political theory which the writings of Rousseau, and the unbounded
esteem in which these writings are held by his countrymen, had diffused
amongst the people. Throughout the political disputes," he goes on,
"that have within these few years taken place in Great Britain, in her
sister Kingdom, and in her foreign dependencies, it was impossible not
to observe, in the language of party, in the resolution of popular
meetings, in debate, in conversations, in the general strain of those
fugitive and diurnal addresses to the public, which such occasions call
forth, the prevalency of the ideas of civil authority which are
displayed in the work of Mr Locke. Such doctrines," he continues, "are
not without effect; and it is of practical importance to have the
principles from which the obligation of social union, and an extent of
civil obedience are derived, rightly explained and well understood."
Paley then went on to explain them not only in the ensuing 567 pages of
his Moral and Political Philosophy but also in the two volumes
of a much longer work on Natural Theology in which the cosmological
foundations of monarchy were once again reiterated.
The
"cause," then, to which Babbage was referring when he wrote Lyell ("I
think any argument from such a reported radical as myself would only
injure the cause") was that of discrediting Paley and the other Tory
Monarchists through an attack on its geological and theological
foundations.
The Cause
After
the Napoleonic Wars, England had fallen into a severe depression.
Governmental demands for military supplies ceased, and there was no
market for British goods overseas. To add to the distress and general
unemployment nearly 400,000 troops were demobilized with no place to
go. In order to protect the British farmer from imports of cheap grain,
the corn laws were instituted in 1815 preventing the import of grain
until the price had reached 80 shillings a quarter, a price so high
that laborers were starving without being able to pay it. Although the
corn laws were passed to protect the British farmer, they had a
devastating effect on British Industry and on the towns of the
industrial midlands. High food prices drove not only the workers into
starvation, but also small businesses into bankruptcy. The Tory
solution to the problem was to advise the lower classes not to breed so
copiously. Still the towns of the industrial midlands continued to grow
—mostly, as it turns out, from an influx of the younger sons and
daughters of poor farmers. Manchester, for instance, was a small town
of 4,000 in 1688. A century later it was ten times that size, and by
the time Lyell published his Principles of Geology, it was
approaching half a million, most of whose inhabitants lived in wretched
conditions. Malthus classified towns like Manchester along with wars,
famines and plagues as a natural check on the population because the
death rate was so high.
On August 16, 1819, a crowd of unemployed, underpaid, and underfed
inhabitants of Manchester gathered at St. Peter's field to hear a
speech on Parliamentary Reform and repeal of the corn laws. The local
militia from the countryside, fearing a rebellion, attempted to arrest
the speaker. In the fight that ensued, several were killed and many
injured. The monarchist Tory government instituted the "Six
Acts," which curtailed the right of free speech and forbade the
training of persons in the use of arms. England was on the verge of
revolution —the liberal industrial Midlands versus the Tory
monarchists; but the memory of the French Revolution was still fresh
among the middle class. They wanted reform in Parliament, not riots,
but to reform Parliament meant answering Paley's arguments, and this
entailed destroying Paley's Natural Theology.
Paley had argued that sovereignty descends from God to the King; the
people are his subjects. Because Parliament is an advisory body, if the
king is content with its advice, then there is no need to reform it.
The fact that Parliament did not represent the present distribution of
people in England, Paley argued, was irrelevant since sovereignty did
not stem from the people to begin with. Sovereignty descended from God.
Paley's arguments were amazingly effective. His treatise on Moral
and Political Philosophy, in which he argued that "it is the will
of God that the established government be obeyed," was required for
memorization (one had to know his basic argument) before students could
graduate from Oxford or Cambridge. The only way the liberals from the
midlands could get Parliament reformed was to demonstrate that the
scientific foundations of Paley's natural theology were false, and this
meant destroying diluvial geology and catastrophism.
In 1825, Lyell's liberal cohort George Poulen Scrope (1797-1876)
published his Considerations on Volcanos in which he
transformed the arguments of the Tories: every time they ascribed a
natural event to God, Scrope ascribed the same event to a volcano,
thereby attempting to revive the geological theories of James Hutton.
So perfect were the laws of volcanic uplift and erosion which God had
created at the beginning of time aeons ago, Hutton and Scrope argued,
that no more had been seen of God since, nor was there any need of him
to run the affairs of the universe any more than was there need of a
king to interfere with the natural and intrinsic laws of economics and
of society.
Scrope's book was too radical for the London Geological Society at that
time, and it was dismissed without a hearing. Scrope, the son of a
wealthy London merchant, bought himself a seat in Parliament and
pursued the cause by more direct means. But without a cosmological
proof that monarchy was unnatural and that sovereignty belonged to the
people, the liberals remained relatively powerless.
Undaunted by Scrope's failure, the young whig lawyer Charles Lyell now
tried his hand at destroying the geological foundation of monarchical
theory. In his Principles of Geology he took a much more
subtle line than had Scrope. In the 100-page introduction to the Principles,
Lyell
argued not so much that the diluvial theory was wrong, as that it was
mythological and impeded the "progress" of geology. In the
first volume he went on at great length concerning the forces of
erosion and the effects of volcanic uplift in what was a brilliant
avoidance of all evidence of catastrophism. It was just what the
moderates were looking for. They rallied around Lyell and elected him
secretary first, and then president of the Geological Society.
"By espousing you," Scrope
wrote to Lyell on April 12, 1831, "the conclave have decidedly and
irrevocably attached themselves to the liberal side, and sanctioned in
the most direct and open manner the principal things advocated. Had
they on the contrary made their election of a Mosaic geologist like
Buckland or Conybeare, the orthodox would have immediately taken their
cue from them, and for a quarter of a century to come, it would have
been heresy to deny the excavations of valleys by the deluge and
atheism to talk of anything but chaos have lived before Adam. At the
same time I have a malicious satisfaction," Scrope continues, "in
seeing the minority of Bigwigs swallow the new doctrine upon compulsion
rather than from taste and shall enjoy their wry faces as they find
themselves obliged to take it like physics to avoid the peril of worse
evils. I feel some satisfaction in this."
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.
Afterword
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 this paper I have attempted to make five major points: first, the
London Geological Society, which gave birth to the uniformitarian
paradigm, did not originally consist of a group of practicing field
geologists, but was comprised of gentlemen, members of Parliament,
clergymen and lawyers who were primarily concerned with the political
and theological implications of Geology at the time of the Great Reform
Bill of 1832 when the concept of monarchical sovereignty was being
challenged by the Whigs and defended by the Tories. Second, that the
London Geological Society had been split into two camps with the Tory
catastrophists prevailing before 1832 and liberal Whigs, under the
leadership of Lyell, Scrope and, later, Darwin, taking over in the
second quarter of the century. Third, that "uniformitarianism" was
promoted by the liberals as part of "the cause" to undermine the
theoretical foundations of monarchy and was not derived from field
research. Fourth, because the Tories were using repressive tactics in
politics to prevent the reform of Parliament, the social tension
spilled over into the geological debate causing the intense interest in
geology in the 1820's and 1830's and the exponential growth of the
newly founded London Geological Society. The liberals, by seizing
control of the London Geological Society before the Reform Bill was
passed, presaged what was soon to follow in the political arena. And,
fifth, once in control, the liberals attempted to cement their hegemony
by repressing the catastrophists and by assimilating their data.
. . . "uniformitarianism" was promoted by the liberals as
part of "the cause" to undermine the theoretical foundations of
monarchy and was not derived from field research.
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.
NOTE
1.
The "Discourses" are three: "A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,"
"A Discourse on the Originality of Inequality," and "A
Discourse on Political Economy."
Originally
published in KRONOS, Vol. I n 4, pp. 68-76. © Copyright KRONOS
1976, reproduced by permission of the author.
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