* This is Part 1 of a three-part installment of “Problematica.” Here are links to Part 2 and Part 3. Problematica is written by Max Dresow…
In 1856, the past and future of geological science struck up a correspondence. The past was represented by Sir Charles Lyell: not yet sixty but already a Knight Bachelor, his broad face adorned with a pair of shaggy white sideburns. His correspondent, barely twenty-five, with close-set eyes and a trim beard, was Eduard Suess.
Left: Charles Lyell (1797–1875), photographed in 1855. Right: Eduard Suess (1831–1914), photographed around 1860
Suess was born a year after the publication of Lyell’s Principles of Geology (Volume 1). By 1856 the book had gone through nine editions and checked in at >800 pages. Suess was an admirer. He even considered translating the new edition into German, notwithstanding that a good translation of the sixth edition was already available (Sengor 2014). The translation was never attempted, but Suess continued to admire the older man. For Seuss, Principles was, if not the last word in geology, certainly the first. In its wide scope and philosophical register, it was the best introduction to the field ever written, and an important contribution to geological science besides.
Suess would not publish his own master-work until seven years after Lyell’s death. Called Das Antlitz der Erde (“The Face of the Earth”), it presents a fascinating contrast with the elegantly persuasive Principles. Like Lyell’s book, Das Antlitz occupied three volumes, each a model of patient erudition. Yet unlike Principles, whose presentation has so often been compared to a legal brief, Suess’s book is organized as a series of inferences from local evidence. This makes it a tough meal to digest. (As the geologist-historian Celal Sengor observes, “One needs a very comprehensive atlas at hand while reading it.”) The scale of the work is also overwhelming. Das Antlitz took thirty years to complete and runs to nearly 2,800 pages in the German original. Now recall that these are 2,800 pages stuffed with dense regional description and you will begin to appreciate the labor involved in reading it.
Title page of Eduard Suess’s Das Antlitz Der Erde (“The Face of the Earth”). The massive book was published in three quarto volumes (but actually occupied five volumes in the German original, numbered Ia, Ib, II, III/1, and III/2, plus an index volume). The first appeared in 1883; the last in 1909
The thick deposits of information contained in Das Antlitz can give the wrong impression, though. Suess’s book was not an attempt to catalog everything then known about structural geology. Instead, it was an attempt to explain the major features of earth’s surface from a particular standpoint. The book quite literally aimed to give readers a world view. Something similar can be said about Lyell’s book, whose world view was an updated version of Huttonian geotheory. But how did Lyell’s perspective compare to the one offered up by Suess? And— what is perhaps the more important question— what does the comparison teach us about the path geological science traveled during the second half of the nineteenth century?
Among people who have considered these questions a striking difference of opinion exists. According to one tradition, Suess and Lyell were adversaries engaged in an intergenerational struggle for the soul of geology. So, Mott Greene writes that Das Antlitz “support[ed] generalizations that cut philosophically and substantively against the [Lyellian] position and… pave[d] the way for the demise of Lyellian geology in late-nineteenth-century Europe” (Greene 1982, 191). The interpretation is challenged by those who see significant continuities between the two works and nothing resembling a decline in “Lyellian geology” during Suess’s lifetime. First among the challengers is Celal Sengor, an admirer of Suess with a plausible claim to know more about the history of geology than anyone in the world. In his view, Greene’s claim is “entirely untrue” and based on a misunderstanding of Das Antlitz (Sengor 2014, 29). But the misunderstanding is a curiously elementary one. So what gives?
I think I know, and I’ll try to settle the disagreement in Part 3 of this essay. Before coming to this, however, I want to explore the world-views articulated by Lyell and Suess. I’ll do this by introducing two fictional geologists, one from the pages of Principles and the other from Das Antlitz. Call the former “Lyell’s amphibious being” and the latter “Suess’s extraterrestrial observer.” My claim is that you can learn a surprising amount about these world-views by asking why each man chose the ideal observer he did. You can even begin to understand their divergence, and a shift in one of the major currents of geological thought during the second half of the nineteenth century.
In the present essay I will discuss Lyell’s amphibious geology. Then, in Part 2, I will turn my attention to Eduard Suess’s global tectonics.
Lyell’s amphibious geology
What is left to say about Principles of Geology? It is the most analyzed (some would say overanalyzed) book in the history of the field, largely owing to its effect on Darwin (the most overanalyzed scientist). Darwin remarked that the great merit of Principles was that it “altered the whole tone of one’s mind,” and by a strange compulsion forced one to see “partially through [Lyell’s] eyes.” Which is just to say what I’ve already said: that Principles contains within it an entire world view.
Title page of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, Volume 1 (1830). In the frontispiece, a man contemplates the pillars of the “Temple of Serapis,” perhaps puzzling over the belt of mollusk borings on each pillar
The world view is not quite original. No world view ever is. But in Lyell’s case the lines of influence are relatively clear; and the clearest influence comes from his countryman, the do-everything intellectual and entrepreneur James Hutton.
In a wonderful coincidence, Lyell was born in Forfarshire not eight months after Hutton died in Edinburgh. Everyone reading this will know who Hutton is; still, it is useful to recall that he spent many years of his life as a gentleman farmer deeply involved in the project of agricultural improvement. Perhaps inevitably, he became interested in the philosophical aspects of farming, including what Stephen Jay Gould calls the paradox of the soil (Gould 1987). The “paradox” concerns the seemingly endless supply of soil derived from an ostensibly finite volume of rock. A boon for farming, to be sure. But why doesn’t it run out?
Hutton reasons as follows. Soil is the foundation of agriculture, and thus of human civilization. But soil is “a wasting asset, continually being washed away by rain and exhausted by the growth of plants” (Rudwick 2005, 161). New soil is produced by the breakdown of rock, which is necessary for the maintenance of life on land. Yet over time the process will run down as mountains are worn into plains and soil is washed into the sea. That is, unless something works to restore the continents and replenish the depleted soil. Happily, this is just what we find. Soil once swept out to sea is deposited on the seafloor, only to be consolidated and thrust up by subterranean heat. Eventually the beds are raised above water, as elsewhere continents founder and become ocean basins. With new topography comes new erosion and a fresh supply of life-sustaining soil. The “constitution of this living world” is thus ensured, and to God be the glory for designing so wise and balanced a system.
Balance is the key word. Uplift and erosion work together as yin and yang, the principle of creativity and the principle of destruction. Things could hardly have been otherwise in a world designed to cycle on indefinitely. Mechanical analogies suggest themselves.* Continents rise and fall like the pistons of a great steam engine; cogs and flywheels mesh to maintain habitable conditions at the surface. But unlike a steam engine, the earth is a self-renewing and self-repairing system. It is, in Hutton’s words, “a machine of peculiar construction… adapted to a certain end”— “the growth and habitation of of a great diversity of plants and animals… [especially] man” (Hutton 1788, 209, 294).
[* Hutton made use of organic analogies too. In 1749, he submitted a medical dissertation on the circulation of the blood (Donovan and Prentiss 1980). Four decades later the theme of circulation had apparently not left his mind. To give a single example: in the beginning of his “Theory of the earth,” Hutton refers to “the purpose of [the oceans]” as providing “the force of growth and circulation to the organized bodies of this earth” (Hutton 1788, 211). In the same breath he describes the atmosphere as “vital fluid“ and “the proper means of circulation for the matter of this world” (212). Thus, on the earth, “soft and hard parts variously combine, to form a medium consistence adapted to the use of plants and animals; [and] wet and dry are properly mixed for nutrition, or the support of those growing bodies” (210).]
John Clerk’s engraving of the unconformity at Jedburgh, and one of the most famous images in the history of geology (Plate III in Hutton 1795). The image shows a series of vertical strata, implying past uplift and tilting, “broken and washed by moving waters” and overlain by a mass of “puddingstone” (Hutton 1795, I, 449). Above the puddingstone are more strata, deposited underwater and subsequently uplifted to support an agricultural field. Thus, the image shows two cycles of uplift and erosion with an episode of deposition in between
Lyell’s world-view is not a duplicate of Hutton’s. For one thing it wears its teleology more lightly, in glancing nods to providentialist natural theology (Rudwick 2008) For another, it is all together more historical in orientation (and here it is well to mention that Lyell knew Hutton mostly through John Playfair’s Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth). Still, similarities abound. In Lyell’s geology, the surface of the planet is shaped by two kinds of causes. On the one hand are “destroying causes,” which devour the earth, as when “dry land [wastes]... by the action of rain, rivers, and torrents” or undersea beds are excavated by currents. On the other are “renovating causes,” which raise up and restore what erosion has brought low. Lyell is at pains to emphasize that both kinds of cause are “unceasingly at work” throughout the world (Lyell 1830, 473). So, water erodes rock, but the same processes deliver sediments to basins where they form new strata. Uplift creates topography, but elsewhere depression effaces it, creating basins where there was once elevation. So things come out in the wash. On Lyell’s dynamic earth, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Even more than Hutton, then, Lyell was the prophet of balance. Hutton was mostly concerned to establish a grand cyclicity in the workings of the earth. Lyell took things further. In an exhaustive review of geological processes— divided, following the German geologist Von Hoff into aqueous and igneous— he argues that both aqueous and igneous causes “are instruments of decay as well as reproduction” (Lyell 1830, 167), or as Martin Rudwick puts it, that “each [kind of cause] contributes to both sides of the balance of forces that maintains the earth in a steady-state” (Rudwick 1970, 15). The contrast with Hutton is most obvious in the case of igneous phenomena. For Hutton, earthquakes and vulcanism are exclusively agents of uplift. (This is because of molten matter beneath the crust tends to expand, pushing overlying sediments upwards.) For Lyell, they are agents of uplift and depression, just as likely to elevate bits of crust as to lower them. Anyway, the point is that Lyell did not see the earth as a single grand cycle, as regular as clockwork. Instead he saw it as a composite of many cycles, operating on many spatial and temporal scales, and all disposed to maintain the countenance of the whole.
Which brings us to Lyell’s amphibious being. Why did Lyell write, in the first volume of Principles, that “an amphibious being” possessed of our faculties “would… more easily arrive at sound theoretical principles in geology”? What advantage does an amphibious nature grant over a terrestrial one in the formulation of an adequate geotheory?
Unlikely fan art of Lyell’s amphibious being, created by printmaker and marine geophysicist Ele Willoughby. In a nice touch, the background is adapted from the ideal section that provides the frontispiece of Lyell’s Elements of Geology. You can find the print here
In answering this question, it is useful to note that Principles does not begin, like Hutton’s Theory of the Earth, with a frank statement of purpose. Instead, it begins with an opinionated romp through the history of geological thought (Chapters 2–4), which leads into a “Review of the causes which have retarded the progress of geology” (Chapter 5). Much has been written about the merits and strategy of these chapters; a concise summary would describe them as “influential” and “misleading.” But this really says too little, since it is the particular way they are misleading that accounts for their great influence (Rudwick 1970; Porter 1979). Lyell wrote history with an agenda. The point was not just to inform but to rally support to a cause. We have allowed the expression “Whig history” to go pale from overuse but here it can be applied quite literally, since Lyell was a Whig liberal. Anyway, Lyell’s is Whig history at its most opportunistic, and designed to support a particular diagnosis of geology’s problems.
These problems find their epitome in the figure of the diluvial geologist. By this I mean an advocate of the diluvial hypothesis, which postulates a sudden and drastic event in recent earth history to account for widespread surficial deposits not associated with rivers and streams. The diluvial hypothesis was a serious bit of geological reasoning, endorsed by no less an authority than Lyell’s teacher William Buckland (Rudwick 2008). Certainly it was not the sort of thing that could be dismissed out of hand, and Lyell doesn’t do this. Instead, he implies that any geologist who would sign on to such a hypothesis is guilty of shoddy reasoning.* He approaches the point via analogy:
How fatal every error as to the quantity of time must prove to the introduction of rational views concerning the state of things in former ages, may be conceived by supposing that the annals of the civil and military transactions of a great nation were perused under the impression that they occurred in a period of one hundred instead of two thousand years. Such a portion of history would immediately assume the air of a romance; the events would seem devoid of credibility, and inconsistent with the present course of human affairs. A crowd of incidents would follow each other in thick succession. Armies and fleets would appear to be assembled only to be destroyed, and cities built merely to fall into ruins. There would be the most violent transitions from foreign or intestine [domestic] war to periods of profound peace, and the works effected during years of order and tranquility would alike be superhuman in magnitude. (Lyell 1830, 79)
In case the point is not clear, Lyell proceeds to spell it out: “He who should study the monuments of the natural world under the influence of a similar infatuation, must draw a no less exaggerated picture of the energy and violence of causes, and must experience the same insurmountable difficulty in reconciling the former and present state of nature” (Lyell 1830, 79). In other words, a tendency to underestimate the quantity of time available for geological change has given rise to a corresponding tendency to overestimate the energy and violence of past geological causes, and this in turn has created the impression that past changes must have exceeded present causes in their violence. Not just diluvialism but a whole family of geological hypotheses partake of this mistake.
[* Lyell is not subtle about how he sees the field of geological opinion. As he writes in Chapter 3, discussing an early version of the diluvial hypothesis: “A sketch of the progress of Geology is the history of a constant and violent struggle between new opinions and ancient doctrines, sanctioned by the implicit faith of many generations, and supposed to rest on scriptural authority” (Lyell 1830, 30, emphasis added). Stephen Jay Gould aptly describes this as a “Manichaean” view of history, with the forces of enlightenment arrayed against the forces of darkness (Gould 1987). Roy Porter refines the diagnosis, placing Lyell in the tradition of “the brash, rationalist, philosophical conjectural history of the Enlightenment, with its pose of superior detachment, its psychological reductionism, its sardonic contempt for the Middle Ages” (Porter 1979, 96).]
Lithograph of the coastal cliffs of east Devon from William Buckland’s “On the Excavation of Valleys by Diluvial Action” (1822). The image shows valleys carved out by a sudden “diluvial current”: just the sort of hypothesis to which Lyell was most implacably opposed
Alas, prejudices about the duration of time are not the only impediments to proper understanding in geology. Of similar importance are “prejudices arising from our peculiar position as inhabitants of land,” as later editions of Principles call them. These dispose us to underestimate “the magnitude of changes now in progress,” which feeds into the tendency to overestimate the energy and violence of past changes (Lyell 1830, 81). “We inhabit about a fourth part of the [earth’s] surface,” Lyell observes, “and that portion is almost exclusively the theatre of decay and not of reproduction.”
We know, indeed, that new deposits are annually formed in seas and lakes, and that every year some new igneous rocks are produced in the bowels of the earth, but we cannot watch the progress of their formation; and, as they are only present to our minds by aid of reflection, it requires an effort both of the reason and the imagination to appreciate duly their importance. It is, therefore, not surprising that we imperfectly estimate the result of operation invisible to us; and that, when analogous results of some former epoch are presented to our inspection, we cannot recognize the analogy. (Lyell 1830, 81)
Again, Lyell provides an analogy. “He who has observed the quarrying of stone from a rock, and has seen it shipped for some distant port, and then endeavours to conceive what kind of edifice will be raised by the materials, is in the same position as the geologist, who, while he is confined to the land, sees the decomposition of rocks, and the transportation of matter by rivers to the sea, and then endeavours to picture to himself the new strata which Nature is building beneath the waters.” Bummer.
We should not mistake the part for the whole, or even for an unbiased sample of the whole. Our direct experience is limited to a theater of change where processes of decay predominate. But “If we were inhabitants of another element— if the great ocean were our domain, instead of the narrow limits of the land, our difficulties [in arriving at sound opinions] would be considerably lessened” (Lyell 1830, 82). Now meet the amphibious being:
[…] there can be little doubt, although the reader may, perhaps, smile at the bare suggestion of such an idea, that an amphibious being, who should possess our faculties, would still more easily arrive at sound theoretical opinions in geology, since he might behold, on the one hand, the decomposition of rocks in the atmosphere, and the transportation of matter by running water; and, on the other, examine the deposition of sediment in the sea, and the imbedding of animal remain in new strata. He might ascertain, by direct observation, the action of a mountain torrent, as well as of a marine current; might compare the products of volcanos on land with those poured out beneath the waters; and might mark, on the one hand, the growth of the forest, and on the other that of the coral reef. (Lyell 1830, 82, emphasis added)
Basically, an amphibious being would more easily comprehend the balance of force that obtains among geological processes, and especially among the agencies of destruction and repair. Such a being would better appreciate the planet’s capacity for self-renewal, and would regard claims of directional change as a landlubber’s fantasy. The earth is not a theater of decay shaped by occasion spasms of violence. It is a stable system whose operations are measured out in dynamic cycles. Indeed, Lyell is reluctant to admit that the earth suffers any abrupt transitions or directional changes— this is the radical thesis at the heart of Principles, and the key to understanding its sprawling argument (Rudwick 1970).
The “Old Man of Hoy”: a monument to the forces of decay from Lyell’s native Scotland
Curiously, Lyell does cease imagining fictional geologists here. Instead, he observes that even the amphibious being is not quite an ideal observer, since they would be prone to “fall into the greatest errors when endeavouring to reason on rocks of subterranean origin” (Lyell 1830, 82). But let us imagine “a being entirely confined to the nether world— some ‘dusky melancholy sprite', like Umbriel, who could ‘flit on pinions to the central earth’.” What kind of geology would this creature invent? Lyell thinks: one “exactly the converse of [that] usually adopted by human philosophers.”
He might infer that the stratified rocks, containing shells and other organic remains, were the oldest of created things, belonging to some original and nascent state of the planet. “Of those masses,” he might say, “whether they consist of loose incoherent sand, soft clay, or solid rock, none have been found in modern times. Every year some part of them are broken and shattered by earthquakes, or melted up by volcanic fire; and, when they cool down slowly from a state of fusion, they assume a crystalline form, perfectly distinct from those inexplicable rocks which are so regularly bedded [lol], and which contain stones full of curious impressions and fantastic markings. (Lyell 1830, 82)
This process of crystallization “cannot have been carried on for an infinite time,” the sprite reasons, “for in that case all the stratified rocks would long ere this have been fused and crystalized” (Lyell 1830, 82–83). It follows that the planet began as cold and fully stratified, and only recently started to heat up. Eventually, the whole earth will be cooked to “a state of fluidity and incandescence”— a new sun, perhaps. The joke would not have been lost on Lyell's contemporaries, many of whom subscribed to the idea that the earth was gradually cooling from an incandescent state. To this process of refrigeration they ascribed “all the varied evidence that the deep past had been much hotter than it is now” (Rudwick 2014, 151). But for Lyell, the account arose from “the continual contemplation of one class of phenomena to the exclusion of another” (Lyell 1830, 83). In simpler terms, it was prejudice.
* * *
In the reminder of the chapter, Lyell presses the point home. “It is only by becoming sensible of our natural disadvantages that we shall be roused to exertion, and prompted to seek out opportunities of discovering the operations now in progress, such as do not present themselves readily to view” (Lyell 1830, 83). Comparing the task of the geologist with that of the astronomer, he urges the former to “invent means for overcoming the limited range of our vision”; one can hardly imagine the triumph of a Newton without the technology of the telescope. Again, he uses analogy to make his case. Had twelfth century Europeans “discovered… some ancient manuscripts filled with astronomical observations relating to a period of three thousand years, and made by some ancient geometers who possessed optical instruments as perfect as any in modern Europe, they would probably, on consulting these memorials, have come to the conclusion that there had been a great revolution in the solar and sidereal systems [since many stars recorded in the manuscripts would no longer have been observable].” If, moreover, these Europeans had eschewed the task of “bringing to light new facts,” and instead held fast to their prejudices, “they would [have been] engaged in the indolent employment of framing imaginary theories concerning catastrophes and mighty revolutions in the system of the universe.” Such, Lyell implies, is the posture of his geological adversaries.
Colored woodcut of the Greek astronomer Hipparchus observing the night sky from Alexandria (ca. 140 BE). (Hermann Göll, 1876)
After so many brilliant analogies, we might be inclined to regard this as just one more, and in a sense it is. But let us pause here for a moment. At least since Hutton’s “Theory of the earth” (1788) geologists had compared themselves to astronomers. Hutton suggested a direct comparison between himself and Newton: “For having, in the natural history of this earth, seen a succession of worlds, we may from this conclude that there is a system in nature; in like manner as, from seeing revolutions of the planets, it is concluded, that there is a system by which they are intended to continue those revolutions” (Hutton 1788, 304). Georges Cuvier described the challenge facing his “new species of antiquary” as “burst[ing] the limits of time,” just as earlier philosophers had “burst the limits of space” (Rudwick 2005). And Lyell closed an important section of Principles with a passage that combined astronomical analogy with echoes of the amphibious being:
Thus, although we are mere sojourners on the surface of the planet, chained to a mere point in space, enduring but for a moment in time, the human mind is not only enabled to number worlds beyond the unassisted ken of mortal eye, but to trace the events of indefinite ages before the creation of our race, and is not even withheld from penetrating the dark secrets of the ocean, or the interior of the solid globe; free, like the spirit which the poet described as animating the universe, “pervades all things, earth and sea’s expanse and heaven’s depth.” (Lyell 1830, 166)
The passages I have just quoted differ in several respects. Yet what they have in common is that they picture the geologist in the position of the astronomer, starring into the abyss of time as the astronomer gazes into the heavens. This highlights the epistemological challenge facing the geologist— to discover a “system” in the succession of worlds glimpsed in the rocks (Hutton) or to trace the contingent history of the planet before the creation of man (Cuvier, Lyell). Leave it to Eduard Suess to turn the image around, and to picture the observer starring down at earth from outer space.
Appendix: Historian of Time’s Cycle?
The purpose of this essay is to resolve a historiographical conflict about Lyell and Suess. But there is another disagreement I might have addressed but didn't. This one concerns the nature of Lyellian geology and the purpose of Principles.
Earlier I wrote that the key to understanding Principles resides in the claim that the earth does not undergo “any abrupt transitions or directional changes”; on Lyell’s earth, the more things change the more they stay the same. This is an old idea. As Martin Rudwick argued back in 1970, Principles is best interpreted as an argument for a steady state geotheory. “One long argument,” as Darwin later said of his own book. Unfortunately, Lyell is not so forthcoming. Rudwick’s interpretation owes much to a famous letter to Murchison, in which Lyell says that he intends to establish the “principle of reasoning” in geology, indicating that this will “[strengthen] the system necessarily arising out of [it].” But it is the system that forms the summum bonum of the work; says Rudwick: “the most fundamental object of the [Principles] was to establish… a non-directional, steady-state theory of earth, in opposition to theories involving directional changes either in the earth itself or in the forms of life on earth” (Rudwick 1970, 8). In support of this contention, Rudwick gives an elaborate analysis of the “strategy” of the text, showing the subtle interweaving of prescriptive rules for reasoning with substantive commitments derived from Lyellian geotheory.*
[* Stephen Jay Gould supports this interpretation. In Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, he calls Principles “a brief for a world view— time’s stately [and non-directional] cycle as the incarnation of rationality” (Gould 1987, 143). “We can… recover Lyell’s vision by grasping the Principles as an argument… dedicated to defending this vision [a steady state geotheory] in the face of a geological record that requires close interpretation… to yield its secret.”]
Lyell’s maps of continental configurations that would produce extremes of heat and cold (first included in the third edition of Principles). No horizontal continental movements are implied; in Lyellian geology, all continental configurations are produced by the raising and foundering of bits of crust. (So, the resemblance of these hypothetical continents to our current ones carries no connotations of “drift.”) For Lyell, these maps were an elaborate thought experiment, and were not intended to represent actual past or future configurations of land and sea (although something resembling them may conceivably have existed). In any event, Lyell regarded the ability of the earth to produce both warmer and cooler climates based on the disposition of continents and ocean currents as an argument against directional views of geohistory, which infer a inexorably cooling earth from evidence that past climates were warmer than present ones
Others sound a note of caution. Yes, Lyell was interested in resisting “some of the best-supported generalizations of contemporary geology,” James Secord writes. But for all his provocations, “the substantive claims in the Principles were models of philosophical caution” (Secord 2014, 149). The point needs to be stressed, because Lyell’s imaginative statements “about the pattern of earth history are often taken out of context, interpreted in terms of private letters and journals so that their function as thought-experiments about the past is obscured” (150). Interpretations like Rudwick’s threaten to “make the Principles into a cosmological book, which points towards the construction of a connected narrative history of the world.” (Think of a narrative that begins with a swirling nebula and ends with the creation of Homo sapiens.)
However, in his public statements during the 1830s Lyell no more advocated a steady-state, cyclical, or non-progressionist cosmology than he did progression itself. Indeed, the Principles claimed that any kind of global narrative would prove impossible to reconstruct, because too much of the record had been lost. Lyell was not [as Gould claimed] the ‘historian of time’s cycle.’ (Secord 2014, 151)
So, was Principles “a brief for a world view” or an exercise aiming to show that one should be open to the possibility that the Earth has always looked and behaved about the same way?* My sympathies lie with the first reading, not least because some parts of the text seem to function as explicit arguments for steady-stateism. The “amphibious being” section amounts to a claim that restorative and destructive forces are finely-balanced. Certainly the remarks about are not meant to suggest that balance is a mere conceptual possibility. Likewise, the “dusky sprite” is there to suggest that geologists only infer a directional geohistory because they are fixated on a subset of the total evidence. The correct view, Lyell implies, is not agnosticism, but skepticism about directionality. Hence, it is hard to interpret this part of the book as anything but an argument for the opposing position.
[* Secord is just the most recent critic of the Rudwickian interpretation. For an older and more detailed criticism, go to my fellow Minnesotan, Leonard Wilson (e g., Wilson 1980).]
The matter deserves further consideration, and it would be unwise to interpret the entire book by synecdoche with Chapter 5. Still, this important part of the text supports the view that Principles is a partisan statement on behalf of Huttonian geotheory, or at least the position we might call “non-directionalism.” As a final point, consider that Lyell's most astute and qualified readers virtually all regarded Principles as the work of a system-builder (Rudwick 2008). Whewell did (Whewell 1831), as did Adam Sedgwick, who stated in a presidential address to the Geological Society that Lyell had shown himself to be a theory man, and a “champion of a great leading doctrine of the Huttonian hypothesis” (Sedgwick 1832, 301). So while Secord is right that Lyell mistrusted all attempts to frame sweeping narrative histories of the earth (from nebula to man), this does not mean that Principles “[denied] any shape to the records of the earth’s deep past” (Secord 2014, 149).
References
Donovan, A. and Prentiss, J. 1980. James Hutton’s medical dissertation. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 70:3–57.
Greene, M. 1982. Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Gould, S.J. 1987. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Deep Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hutton, J. 1788. Theory of the earth; or an investigation of the laws observable in the composition, dissolution, and restoration of land upon the globe. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1:209–304.
Hutton, J. 1795. Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations. Edinburgh: William Creech.
Lyell, C. 1830. Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, Vol. 1. London: John Murray.
Porter, T. 1979. Charles Lyell and the principles of the history of geology. The British Journal for the History of Science 9:91–103.
Rudwick, M.J.S. 1970. The strategy of Lyell’s Principles of Geology. Isis 61:4–33.
Rudwick, M.J.S. 2005. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rudwick, M.J.S. 2008. Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rudwick, M.J.S. 2014. Earth's Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Secord, J. 2014. Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Sedgwick, A. 1832. An address delivered at the anniversary meeting of the Geological Society of London, on the 17th February 1832.
Sengor, C. 2014. Eduard Suess and global tectonics: an illustrated short guide. Austrian Journal of Earth Sciences 107:6–82.
Wilson, L.G. 1980. Geology on the eve of Charles Lyell's first visit to America, 1841. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124:168–202.
Whewell, W. 1831. Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Volume 1. British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review 9:180–206.
More resources
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about Lyell or Lyellian geology. Here are three more posts if you’re interested in digging deeper (fine geological metaphor, that):
“‘Truth also has its paleontology’, or when pragmatism met uniformitarianism” (Jan 19, 2023)
“The first philosopher of palaeontology– er, ‘palaetiology’” (Nov 7, 2023)
“The importance of background theory, or why James Hall left mountains out of his theory of mountain building” (Jan 31, 2024)
EVEN More Resources
Here is a beautiful digital scan of the first volume of Principles (1st ed.)
And here is a scan of Hutton’s “Theory of the earth”— the paper that set out the theory later expanded in Hutton (1795)
Finally, here is a paper by Alistair Sponsel (“An amphibious being: how maritime surveying reshaped Darwin’s approach to natural history”), which argues that Darwin’s Beagle experience with maritime surveying fashioned him into something resembling Lyell’s amphibious being