Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, here we go, I guess. Um, let's talk about, uh, those people who were, you know, hitting rocks back in the day.
So, while this other dude, Henry Cavendish, was like, doing his experiments in London, you know, like, far away in Edinburgh, there was another big thing happening. This guy, James Hutton, was, uh, you know, about to kick the bucket. Which, obviously, bummer for him, but, like, good news for science, because it, like, totally paved the way for this other guy, John Playfair, to rewrite Hutton's stuff in a way that, like, people could actually understand.
Hutton was, for sure, a sharp guy, a good conversationalist, fun to hang out with. He was, like, amazing at understanding how the Earth, you know, was formed, this slow, mysterious process. But the thing is, he, like, couldn't write it down in a way that made sense to anyone. One biographer even said he, uh, "hardly knew how to use language." He'd, like, fall asleep trying to write a sentence. In his big book, "Theory of the Earth," he wrote something like, get this: "The world which we inhabit is not composed of the matter which composed the earth that was the immediate predecessor of the present; but the matter which composed that earth is formed from the land, which had been produced from the bottom of the sea..." and so on and so forth. Jeez.
But, okay, he, like, pretty much single-handedly, and brilliantly, started geology and changed how we see the Earth. He was, like, born into a wealthy family in Scotland and, you know, could just kinda chill and learn stuff. He studied medicine, didn't dig it, switched to agriculture. Farmed his family's land. Then he got bored with that and moved to Edinburgh. Started a business making ammonium chloride, all while doing science stuff. Edinburgh was a total hot spot for intellectuals, and Hutton loved it. He joined this group called the Oyster Club and hung out with people like Adam Smith, Joseph Black, David Hume, and sometimes even Benjamin Franklin and James Watt.
He was into, like, everything. From rocks to metaphysics. He, like, messed around with chemicals, looked into coal mining and canals, studied salt mines, came up with ideas about genetics, collected fossils, and even had theories about rain, air, and motion. But, you know, his biggest thing was geology.
Back then, a big question that bugged people was, like, why are there, you know, seashells and other sea creature fossils on top of mountains? How did they get up there?
A lot of people thought they knew the answer. They were split into two groups, you know? There were the Neptunists, who thought everything on Earth, even those high-up seashells, could be explained by the sea levels rising and falling. They thought mountains and stuff were as old as the Earth and had just been shaped a bit by, like, floods.
Then you had the Plutonists, who thought, no way, volcanoes and earthquakes were constantly changing the planet's surface, with nothing to do with the ocean. They had a good point, like, where did all the water go when there wasn't a flood? And how did the seashells get on top of the mountains?
So, Hutton, you know, he was thinking about all this and came up with some cool ideas. He looked at his farmland and saw how rocks were, like, eroding into soil, and the soil was being washed away and deposited somewhere else. He realized that if that kept happening, the Earth would eventually be, like, totally flat. But there were hills everywhere! So, he figured there had to be, like, some other process, something that lifted up new hills and mountains, over and over. He thought the seashells on mountains weren't from floods, but that they were lifted up *with* the mountains. He even thought that heat from inside the Earth was creating new rocks and land, pushing up mountains. Geologists didn't really get all this until, like, 200 years later, when they finally accepted plate tectonics. Basically, Hutton's ideas meant that the Earth was way older than anyone thought.
Hutton wrote all this down in a long paper and read it at the Royal Society of Edinburgh. But, like, nobody really paid attention. And it's not hard to see why. He read something like this to them: "The powers which form the bodies are in the inside of the bodies..." and on and on.
So, yeah, pretty much nobody understood what he was saying. His friends were like, "Dude, you gotta explain this better." So he spent ten years writing this huge book and published it in two volumes.
The books were, like, a thousand pages long and even worse than his friends feared. And, get this, half of it was in French! A third volume didn't even come out until way later, and the fourth never came out at all. Charles Lyell, you know, one of the greatest geologists of all time, even said he couldn't get through it.
Luckily, Hutton had John Playfair, who was a math professor at the University of Edinburgh and a close friend. Playfair could actually write well, and he knew what Hutton was trying to say. So, after Hutton died, Playfair wrote a shorter version of Hutton's ideas called "Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth." And, you know, people who were interested in geology liked it. But there weren't many of those people back then. But, you know, things were about to change.
In London, a bunch of like-minded people got together and started a dining club, which later became the Geological Society. They met once a month, had some wine, ate a nice dinner, and talked about geology. The dinner was, like, intentionally expensive to keep out the riff-raff. But soon they realized they needed a real place to share and discuss new discoveries. In less than ten years, they had, like, four hundred members, and it was on its way to becoming the top science society in the country.
They met twice a month from November to June, because after that, everyone was out doing fieldwork. And these people weren't, like, looking for minerals to get rich. It was just a hobby for rich people with time on their hands. By the 1830s, there were, like, seven hundred and forty-five members.
It's hard to imagine now, but geology totally grabbed people's attention back then. It was, like, something no other science had ever done, and probably never will again. This guy, Roderick Murchison, wrote this thick book about a type of rock called greywacke, and it became a bestseller! It went through four editions, even though it cost a ton and was, like, totally unreadable.
When Charles Lyell went to America and gave a series of lectures in Boston, three thousand people showed up to hear him talk about zeolites and earthquakes.
People were going out into the countryside, doing what they called "hammering rocks." They were serious about it, too. They'd dress up in top hats and suits. Except for this one guy, William Buckland, who would wear his academic robes.
The field drew in a lot of interesting people. Murchison, for example, spent the first thirty years of his life hunting foxes and shooting birds. He didn't seem to have much going on upstairs. Then he got into rocks and became a geology superstar.
Then there's James Parkinson, who was, like, an early socialist. He wrote a bunch of pamphlets, including "Revolution Without Bloodshed." He was involved in this crazy plot to shoot King George III with a poisoned dart. He got questioned by the government, but the charges were dropped. He mellowed out, got into geology, and became one of the founders of the Geological Society and wrote this important book. But we remember him today for his work on a disease called "shaking palsy," which we now call Parkinson's disease. Oh, and he also won a natural history museum in a raffle once.
And then there was Charles Lyell. He was born the year Hutton died. He was pretty much the typical nineteenth-century gentleman scientist, came from a wealthy, intellectual family. His dad was a big deal in the study of Dante and mosses. Lyell got interested in natural history from his dad, but it was William Buckland who got him into geology.
Buckland was a weird guy. He made some real contributions, but he's also remembered for being eccentric. He was famous for having a bunch of animals, some of them big and dangerous. And he was known for eating every animal that had ever existed. He'd serve things like roast guinea pig, fried mice, baked hedgehog, or boiled sea cucumbers to his guests. He thought they all tasted good, except for garden moles, which he said were disgusting. He was, like, the expert on fossilized poop, and he even had a table made out of it.
Even when he was doing serious science, he was kinda nuts. One night, he woke up his wife in the middle of the night and shouted, "I think the fossil footprints are tortoise tracks!" They rushed to the kitchen in their pajamas. Mrs. Buckland made some dough, and Buckland got their pet tortoise. They put the tortoise on the dough, and sure enough, its footprints matched the fossil footprints. Charles Darwin thought Buckland was a clown, but Lyell seemed to like him and went on a trip to Scotland with him. After that trip, Lyell decided to quit his job as a lawyer and devote himself to geology.
Lyell was really nearsighted and squinted a lot. He also had this weird habit of contorting himself into crazy positions on furniture when he was thinking. He only had one real job in his life, as a geology professor at King's College London. And that's when he wrote "Principles of Geology," which, like, solidified and expanded on Hutton's ideas. (Lyell never actually read Hutton's original work, but he studied Playfair's rewrite.)
Between Hutton's time and Lyell's time, there was a new debate in geology. It was, like, a replacement for the Neptunists versus Plutonists thing, but it often got mixed up with it. This new battle was between catastrophism and uniformitarianism. Catastrophists thought the Earth was shaped by sudden, catastrophic events, mostly floods. That's why they often got confused with the Neptunists. It appealed to guys like Buckland, who could bring the biblical flood into scientific discussion. Uniformitarians, on the other hand, thought the Earth changed gradually, with slow geological processes taking place over long periods of time. Hutton came up with the idea, but Lyell wrote about it, so he's the one who's remembered as the father of modern geology.
Lyell thought the Earth changed constantly and slowly. He didn't just disagree with catastrophism, he hated it. Catastrophists thought extinction was part of a process where animals died out and were replaced by new ones. Lyell thought that was just a lazy way to explain things.
Lyell wasn't perfect. He didn't really explain how mountains were formed, didn't see glaciers as a force of change. He didn't want to believe in an ice age. He refused to accept the idea of sudden animal and plant deaths and thought all the major animal groups had always existed at the same time. He was wrong about all of that.
But, you know, Lyell's influence was huge. "Principles of Geology" went through twelve editions in his lifetime. Darwin took a copy of it with him on the Beagle voyage. He wrote, "The 'Principles' altered the whole tone of one's mind."
Meanwhile, there was a lot of work to do in geology. Geologists wanted to classify rocks by the time they were formed. But they argued about how to divide the time periods. There was this big fight called "The Great Devonian Controversy." Adam Sedgwick said one layer of rock was Cambrian, while Roderick Murchison thought it was all Silurian. It went on for years and got really nasty.
The dispute was settled by simply adding a period in between the Cambrian and Silurian: the Ordovician.
The British were the most active in geology early on, so a lot of geological terms come from British names. The Devonian comes from Devonshire in England. Cambrian comes from the Roman name for Wales. Ordovician and Silurian are named after ancient Welsh tribes. But as geology grew in other places, names from around the world started popping up. Jurassic comes from the Jura Mountains in France and Switzerland. Permian is named after Perm in the Ural Mountains of Russia. And Cretaceous comes from a Belgian geologist.
Originally, geological history was divided into four periods: Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, and Quaternary. That system was too simple, so it didn't last long. Geologists came up with new ways to divide things. Primary and Secondary are gone. Some people still use Quaternary, but others don't. Today, Tertiary is still widely used, even though it doesn't really mean anything anymore.
Lyell used new units in "Principles," called "epochs" or "stages," to cover the time after the dinosaurs. There was the Pleistocene ("most recent"), Pliocene ("more recent"), Miocene ("moderately recent"), and the Oligocene ("slightly recent").
Now, generally, geological time is divided into four chunks called "eras": Precambrian, Paleozoic ("ancient life"), Mesozoic ("middle life"), and Cenozoic ("new life"). These eras are divided into twelve to twenty "periods" or "systems." Most of them are familiar: Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Silurian, etc. The periods are further divided into the "epochs" that Lyell described, and finally into a bunch of smaller divisions called "ages" or "stages." Most of them are named after places.
To make it even more confusing, the North American ages and stages don't line up with the European ones. So the Cincinnatian stage in North America is roughly equivalent to the Ashgillian stage in Europe.
And, yeah, it's all called different things by different textbooks and people, so some authorities say there are seven eras, while others settle for four. In some books, you'll find the Lower and Upper Tertiary Systems being used instead of the Tertiary and Quaternary periods. And you might also see the term "Phanerozoic," which covers the Cenozoic, Mesozoic, and Paleozoic eras.
And that's all just for units of time. There's a whole other set of units for rocks, called systems, series, and stages. And there's early and late and upper and lower. It's a mess for non-experts, but geologists get really into it.
Today, we can at least use some fancy technology to figure out dates. But for most of the nineteenth century, geologists could only guess. They could arrange rocks and fossils in order, but they didn't know how long those time periods were.
People still tried to figure out the age of the earth. In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher did a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded that the Earth was created on October 23, 4004 BC, at noon. Historians and textbook writers have been making fun of that date ever since.
There's this myth that Ussher's view dominated the scientific world until well into the nineteenth century, until Lyell came along. But that's not true. Geologists didn't limit themselves to a literal interpretation of Genesis.
Even Buckland, a very religious guy, thought that the Bible didn't say that God created the heavens and the earth on the first day, just "in the beginning." He thought that beginning might have lasted for millions of years.
People just wanted to know: How old is old?
One of the earlier efforts came from Edmund Halley. In 1715, he suggested that if you divided the total amount of salt in the world's oceans by the amount added each year, you could figure out how long the oceans had existed, and thus roughly estimate the age of the Earth. The idea was interesting, but nobody knew how much salt was in the oceans, or how much was being added each year, making the experiment unworkable.
The first somewhat scientific attempt was made by Comte de Buffon in the 1770s. It had long been known that the Earth released a considerable amount of heat. Buffon heated spheres to white heat, then used his hands to estimate the rate of heat loss as they cooled. According to this experiment, he estimated the age of the Earth to be between 75,000 and 168,000 years. This was of course a vast underestimation, but it was a radical idea. Buffon realized he was in danger of being excommunicated if he published the idea. Ever practical, he quickly apologized for his thoughtless heresy, and then happily repeated it in subsequent works.
By the mid-nineteenth century, most scholars thought the Earth was at least a few million years old, or perhaps even tens of millions, but probably not much more than that. When in 1859 Charles Darwin declared in "On the Origin of Species" that his calculations suggested that the geological processes that had created the Weald area – an area in the south of England – had taken 306,662,400 years to complete. People were astonished.
The problem was this attracted attention to Lord Kelvin. Kelvin was one of the greatest figures of the nineteenth – and for that matter any – century. He wrote a method that would later lead directly to the invention of refrigeration. Designed the absolute temperature scale. Invented the pressurized device that made it possible to send telegraphs across the ocean.
With the passing of time Kelvin conclusions became more and more sure, and also less correct. He kept reducing his estimated number. Kelvin insisted that the sun and its planets had to be young. The problem was that, fossils proved and contradicted his conclusion. In the 19th century a large amount of fossils were discovered.