‘The Geohistorical Revolution’: The Emergence of Geology as an Historical Science

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Notes

¹Richard Corfield, Architects of Eternity: The New Science of Fossils (London, 2001), 150–51.

²‘Martin Rudwick: Historian of Geology’; transcript of recorded interview, Metascience, 7 (1998), 167–80.

³Martin J. S. Rudwick, The New Science of Geology: Studies in the Earth Sciences in the Age of Revolution (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2004); Lyell and Darwin, Geologists: Studies in the Earth Sciences in the Age of Reform (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2005).

⁴Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists (Chicago and London, 1985).

⁵David R. Oldroyd, ‘Historicism and the Rise of Historical Geology’, History of Science, 17 (1979), 191–213; 18 (1980), 227–57. But that was a relatively meagre effort, which cost me about six months of study-leave, whereas Rudwick's magnum opus is the result of half a lifetime of scholarly effort.

⁶For example, the ‘spike’ for the Silurian/Devonian boundary is located on a hillside in the Czech Republic, and a special structure has been erected to enable one to view it from a distance.

⁷Earlier, in his study of the almost vertical sediments (including conglomerates) at Nant d'Arpenaz near Chamonix (published 1779), which provided incontrovertible evidence in favour of large-scale earth movements, de Saussure could not find an adequate causal explanation. But he was looking for one, so in this context, his work might be said to have belonged to the ‘theory of the earth’ tradition.

⁸Actually, Nicolaus Steno's famous sequence of sections for Tuscany in the seventeenth century also involved a ‘backward unravelling’ from the present.

⁹Simon Winchester, The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (New York, 2001).

¹⁰Whether Smith was doing geognosy or stratigraphy is perhaps a matter of definition. The OED's definition is: ‘knowledge of the structure of the Earth, its strata, their relative position, and the probable conditions of its interior. The Edinburgh Review (1804, p. 66) opined that ‘geognosie is synonymous with geology’. With these considerations in mind, it seems reasonable to call Smith a geognost; and he was not (I think) greatly concerned with earth history. But something is a bit awry if ‘thinking historically’ is regarded as the essence of being a geologist or doing geology, though the emergence of historical thinking about the Earth was indeed a major feature of the emergence of geology as a modern science. One can write big books on this theme!

¹¹Martin Rudwick, Geology & Genesis: A Historical Perspective on the Interaction of Two Historical Sciences (Baylor University, 2005). I thank Professor Rudwick for a copy of this valuable pamphlet, which is, in a sense, a highly condensed version of the argument of Bursting the Limits of Time. Personally, I do not find ‘eternalism; alarming, albeit hard to understand’. See David Oldroyd, ‘Evolution, Paleontology, and Metaphysics’, in Darwinism & Philosophy, edited by V. Hösle and C. Illies (Notre Dame, IN, 2005), 30–57.

¹²James Hutton, Hutton, Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1795), I, 363.

¹³See M. J. S. Rudwick, ‘Georges Cuvier's Paper Museum of Fossil Bones’, Archives of Natural History, 27 (2000), 51–68. The term is said to be due to Mark Hineline (1993), Rudwick's former Ph.D. student at San Diego.

¹⁴Cuvier's own specimens could also be disseminated as proxies, as illustrations in printed books. See M. J. S. Rudwick, ‘Georges Cuvier's Paper Museum of Fossil Bones’, Archives of Natural History, 27 (2000), 51–68.