Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE ABYSS OF TIME
An era marked by the youth of Britain's queen was the first to grasp the vast age of the earth. By 1837, when the eighteen-year-old Victoria ascended the throne, the new science of geology had shown the planet's hidden past extending back beyond human imagination, certainly beyond human existence.
In 1830 in his bestseller, Principles of Geology, Charles Lyell, a young Scottish barrister turned geologist, brought to a popular audience the information — indeed, the news — that the earth was ancient. The history of nature, Lyell said, showed evidence of 'elevation of the land above the sea' and 'seas and lakes filled up'. There were signs too that some of 'the lands whereon the forests grew have disappeared or changed their form'. He remarked on traces of plants belonging 'to species which for ages have passed away from the surface of our planet'. In older rocks the causes of destruction had been obscured 'by the immense lapse of ages during which they have acted'. He was also one of the first to proclaim that rock strata were like an ancient manuscript that could be read as history.
Lyell's great book achieved its enormous influence because of the new reading public that had been created by the arrival of steam-powered printing, the electric telegraph and railways, as well as by the rise in popular literacy. The expanding rail network, with trains travelling at the magical speed of a mile a minute, carried newspapers, journals and magazines the length of the land to an eager audience waiting to snap them up. Reader demand led to a wide network of circulating libraries, such as Mudie's, offering new books on loan for a yearly subscription fee, and also to railway booksellers such as W. H. Smith whose first bookstall opened at Euston Station in 1848.
While serialised novels by famous authors such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot were most sought after, books on science were also much in demand. Lyell's three-volume Principles started the trend for science books aimed at the ordinary public. The book was so successful that its publisher, John Murray, repeatedly reissued it until the twelfth edition in 1875, the year of the author's death.
When Principles of Geology first appeared, the weekly Spectator, at that time known for its liberal stance, welcomed Lyell's judgement of the morally improving effect of geology. 'There are other investigations which more nearly affect our social happiness than the philosophy of geology,' it stated, 'but perhaps there is none which in an indirect manner produce a more wholesome and beneficial effect upon the mind ... After the perusal of Mr. Lyell's volume, we confess to emotions of humility, to aspirations of the mind, to an elevation of thought, altogether foreign from the ordinary temper of worldly and busy men ...' There are 'sermons in stones and tongues in brooks,' concluded the Spectator, 'but they want an interpreter: that interpreter is the enlightened geologist. Such a man is Mr. Lyell.'
*
The British public were already in love with science. The first balloon crossing of the English Channel had been made in 1785, portable 'chemical chests' were on sale in Piccadilly, and for an expenditure of between six and twenty guineas affluent amateurs could buy the glassware and chemical ingredients for experiments at home, such as an air pump, electrical apparatus and a small heating unit. Open lectures on science regularly drew large crowds to London's Royal Institution on Albemarle Street. Founded in 1799, the RI, as it was (and is still) known, was dedicated to 'the application of science to the common purposes of life'. The institution's Friday night discourses drew such an audience that Albemarle Street was made London's first one-way street due to the crowds arriving in carriages.
The RI's most popular speaker was the boyishly handsome Cornish chemist Humphry Davy. In 1797 Davy had suddenly became fascinated by chemistry because, according to the cultural historian Richard Holmes, the subject was becoming 'the Romantic science par excellence. The last of the old alchemy was being replaced by true experiments, accurate measuring and weighing, and a new understanding of the fundamental processes of combustion, respiration and chemical bonding.' Davy had recently arrived in London from the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, where he had discovered the anaesthetic possibilities of nitrous oxide. He went on to study what he called 'galvanism' — electricity produced by chemical action.
In his inaugural lecture at the RI on 25 April 1801, Davy thrilled his audience with spectacular bursts of sparks and explosions (starting the institution's tradition of vivid displays that continues today). He offered a vision of what new scientific discoveries would mean to mankind, telling his enthralled audience: 'The composition of the atmosphere, and the properties of gases, have been ascertained; the phenomena of electricity have been developed; the lightnings have been taken from the clouds; and lastly, a new influence [nitrous oxide] has been discovered, which has enabled man to produce from combinations of dead matter effects which were formerly occasioned only by animal organs.'
Moving on to the subject of geology, he gave ten lectures at the RI in 1805 — 06 on the subject, treating his audience (which included a large number of women even though, as was the custom of the time, they were not allowed to be members of the institution) to an explanation of the difference between the theories of 'Plutonism', as advocated by the Scot, James Hutton — who believed the extreme heat at the centre of the earth had pushed up and created the continents — and the 'Neptunism' of the German Abraham Werner — who argued that a primordial ocean had once blanketed the earth, and that 'the mountains, deserts, and farm lands had precipitated out of the receding water of the ocean ... and the land on which humans lived was revealed.'
In November 1806, with the naturalist Joseph Banks in the chair, Davy gave a lecture on the nature of electricity that created an international sensation. He did not strive for understatement. 'Till this discovery, our means were limited; the field of pneumatic research had been exhausted, and little remained for the experimentalist except minute and laborious processes,' he declared. 'There is now before us a boundless prospect of novelty in science; a country unexplored, but noble and fertile in aspect; a land of promise in philosophy.'
Many drew inspiration from Davy's lectures, including Michael Faraday, a future star of the institution, who was employed as Davy's assistant. Faraday's research into the magnetism created by an electric current led to the invention of a dynamo that generated electricity, and was the foundation for electric motor technology. A new world opened. Faraday's Christmas lectures would become widely popular and start another RI tradition still alive today.
By 1815 Davy was best known for his invention of a lamp for miners that removed much of the great danger from the essential and dirty business of mining. Working in darkness at depths as great as 600 feet, men had to carry oil lamps or candles, risking the constant possibility of setting off an explosion in the surrounding flammable gases. The Davy Lamp, as it was known, was a formidable contribution to a vital, growing (yet still dangerous) industry. Davy became 'Sir Humphry', receiving his honour in 1812 as the first scientist to be knighted since Isaac Newton in 1705.
*
In Consolations in Travel, published posthumously in 1830, Davy ventured to examine some of the wider questions of science, faith and geology. Charles Lyell read the book and quoted from it in Principles. Though he was unsure of Davy's argument on the progressive development of organic life, the work helped convince him that man was of comparatively recent origin.
Lyell's own interest in geology had first been aroused by reading in his father's library Robert Bakewell's seminal work, published in 1813: An Introduction to Geology (Illustrative of the General Structure of the Earth, Comprising the Elements of the Science, and an Outline of the Geology and Mineral Geography of England). However, it was during his time at Oxford, between 1816 and 1819, that Lyell learned the 'enlightened geology' that he would pour into his Principles.
Although reading classics at Exeter College, Lyell attended the lectures of the most famous clerical geologist of his time: the flamboyant Reverend William Buckland. Considering the challenge that geology threw down at religion, it may seem surprising in retrospect that so many early geologists were clergymen. Yet geology had been introduced at Oxford expressly in order to prepare the many students about to enter the Church to defend religion against science.
In his entertaining lectures, which were extracurricular (that is, not required for a degree), Buckland passed on to his student Lyell his passion for geology and fossils. (Fossils, from the Latin fossilus, had been defined since 1569 as the remains of animals or plants dug up from the earth.) It was Buckland who introduced Lyell to the debate on Plutonism and Neptunism, the two alternative theories for how the earth's rocks were formed.
After Oxford, Lyell went to London to train as a barrister, becoming a member, as every barrister had to do, of one of the Inns of Court. He entered Lincoln's Inn in 1819 and was called to the bar, required to attend the courts as they moved from town to town in England. But problems with his sight prevented him from continuing. His father wrote to a friend that Charles was nursing 'eyes which threaten to be permanently so weak & painful that the possibility of intense application & consequently of pursuing the law with effect becomes very doubtful ... a temporary cessation from hard reading is indispensable ...' Love of geology would have pulled Lyell away in any case. In 1831 he complained to Gideon Mantell, a young geologist whom he had met ten years before on a field trip in Sussex, that he was 'buried in the study of law [and] I am too fond of geology to do both'.
Lyell published his first scientific papers in 1825. The following year he became a fellow of the Royal Society and in the spring of 1831 he sought and won an appointment as professor of geology at the new (Anglican) King's College London (founded in 1829 to counterbalance that 'godless college in Gower Street', the new secular London University). King's being a clerical institution, the decision on Lyell had to be approved by no less than the Bishop of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Llandaff, and two doctors. The prelates, Lyell informed Mantell, 'considered some of my doctrines startling enough, but could not find that they were come by otherwise than in a straightforward manner ... and that there was no reason to infer that I had made my theory from any hostile feeling towards revelation'. (He was also honoured with an MA from Cambridge.) Fortunately for Lyell, King's seems not to have heard of his wish, expressed to the geologist Poulett Scrope, who was about to review Principles, 'to free the science from Moses'.
The success of Principles – written in his lawyer's rooms in the Temple and Gray's Inn – sparked great interest in Lyell's forthcoming lectures. Some among Lyell's friends wished that ladies (mainly their wives and daughters) might come to hear them. But Lyell, in the misogynist tradition of his time, thought it would be 'unacademical' to admit women into the classroom. In the end a few were admitted and the audience at his King's lectures swelled to nearly 300. The lectures were judged a great success, not least by Lyell himself. As he wrote to his fiancée, Mary Horner: 'I kept the attention of all fixed, by not reading, & you cd. have heard a pin drop when I paused.'
Lyell felt he worked hard in his second lecture on the delicate subject of the relation of geology to natural theology, the branch of theology that attempts to prove the existence of God from natural observations. He had a good audience, including many of his friends and King's professors. He concluded with what he saw as a 'noble and eloquent passage' from the Bishop of London's inaugural discourse at King's, which proclaimed that 'Truth must always add to our admiration of the works of the creator [so] that one need never fear the result of free enquiry.' Science, in short, could only glorify God. For this declaration, he was applauded.
Once appointed to King's, however, Lyell was disappointed to find that, as in Oxford, the geology lectures were extracurricular and therefore he could expect little income from fees for his lectures given on Tuesdays and Thursdays. For him this was a setback for, unlike many of the other early geologists, he was not wealthy and needed an income. When the publisher John Murray of Albemarle Street paid him the hefty sum of £400 (the equivalent of about £20,000 today) for the first edition of Principles, with a promise of further payment for future editions, Lyell saw that his future might lie in authorship. He resigned from King's, even though he had been there only two years.
In a journal entry intended for Mary Horner, Lyell spelled out his thoughts: 'If I could secure a handsome profit in my work, I should feel more free from all responsibility in cutting my cables at King's College. Do not think that my views in regard to science are taking a money-making, mercantile turn. What I want is, to secure the power of commanding time to advance my knowledge and fame, and at the same time to feel that in so doing I am not abandoning the interests of my family, and earning something more substantial than fame.' When the first volume of Principles sold out, Lyell knew he had made the right decision. He warmed to the compliment he received from Murray: 'There are very few authors, or ever have been, who could write profound science and make a book readable.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Reading the Rocks"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Brenda Maddox.
Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
