* This is the twentieth installment of my essay series, “Problematica.” (Cue the party horn!) It is also Part 3 of a three-part essay. In Part 1 Max discussed the amphibious geology of Charles Lyell, focusing on the character of Lyell’s “amphibious being.” Part 2 turned its attention to Eduard Suess, again focusing on a fictional geologist— this time an extraterrestrial. Now, in Part 3, Max asks how we should understand the relationship between Lyell and Suess, and what this reveals about the development of geology during the nineteenth century. The question, I argue, is no mere antiquarian indulgence. Instead, it has real implications for the ways geologists narrate the history of their field and for the lessons they draw from this history…
The science of geology traced a remarkable arc during the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the period, most of the geologists in Europe and North America were amateurs. By the end, they were professionals— government employees and university professors, mostly, but also some industry men. The growth of geological surveys imparted to technical work a new comprehensiveness and efficiency. International congresses began to make headway on problems of standardization, especially in stratigraphic nomenclature. And through it all knowledge grew, facilitated by an expanding roster of colonial possessions on the part of leading scientific nations.
Geological thinking progressed too, along the parallel roads of high theory and local interpretation. At the beginning of the century ideas about faunal succession rubbed elbows with theories of elevation craters and diluvian currents. By 1900 the focus had shifted to theories of global contraction and models of metamorphism associated with crustal movement. All these changes were complicated and bound up with the developments described above. But coherence demands coordinating themes. How then should we describe the transformation of geological science during the busy nineteenth century?
The “parallel roads” of Glen Roy, famously interpreted as marine terraces by Darwin (who thought they provided evidence for Lyell’s theory of oscillating continents), and subsequently reinterpreted as traces of a lake impounded by glaciers (Agassiz, Buckland). This is just one of many cases where reinterpretation enriched geological understanding of a body of evidence during the nineteenth century
In the first part of this essay I asked a different question: what can we learn about nineteenth century geology by examining the “world views” of its most successful practitioners? To make the question tractable (and fun), I concentrated on two geologists, Charles Lyell and Eduard Suess. These were the heavyweight champions of the period, at least in the domain of general theory. But historiographical opinion divides on the question of how Suess’s geology relates to Lyell’s. Were Lyell and Suess antagonists engaged in an intergenerational struggle for the soul of geology? Or was Suess’s geology fundamentally Lyellian despite some obvious (but in the last analysis superficial) differences? The question has broad implications for our understanding of geological thought and practice, and for gauging the influence of Lyell on his immediate successors. But it also holds the promise of illuminating something of the course that geological science traveled during the nineteenth century, and thus of providing our sought-after coordinating theme.
The rest of this essay has three parts. First, I will consider historical appraisals of Lyell’s influence and do a bit of myth-busting. (This work has been done before, but myths have a frustrating tendency to become un-busted, especially when they take the form of compelling stories.) Then I will explore the question or whether Suess was a Lyellian, or whether Lyell and Suess are better regarded as intergenerational antagonists. Finally, I will return to the subject of coordinating themes, and put one forward for your consideration: “globalization.”
Lyell in history
There is a cartoon version of the history of geology that goes like this. Once upon a time, superstition and credulity reigned. This was the late eighteenth century, the heyday of scientific “catastrophism” (a word William Whewell coined to contrast with “uniformitarianism”). The philosophy of catastrophism “was frankly supernatural” (Eiseley 1958, 114). “The world was not regarded as [having] always [been] shaped by the forces of today.” Instead, it was said to have been repeatedly convulsed by paroxysms of divine authorship: these are the “catastrophes” of its name. After each catastrophe, new forms of life were created to repopulate the globe. So mammals replaced the great secondary reptiles, and man the stranger elements of the tertiary fauna. The whole pageant had an air of mystery to it, as if the rule of law had been miraculously suspended at different points in the history of the planet. Anyway, geologists had yet to learn Hume’s lesson that the evidence for miracles never outweighs the evidence against them. “I should not believe such a story were it told me by Cato”— this was a sentiment that was on no one’s lips, at least until Hume’s friend, the Edinburgh geologist James Hutton, came around.
“The Deluge,” an oil painting by Extinct fave John Martin (1834). Allegedly, the arch “catastrophist” Georges Cuvier viewed this painting in Martin’s studio while touring England
Hutton was an early light in the predawn of geology, a prophet of natural law. But his candle was almost snuffed out before Charles Lyell blew it into a conflagration. With Lyell, geology finally became a science.* “A generation before Darwin he took a world of cataclysms, supernatural violence, and mystery, and made of it something plain, expected, and natural” (Eiseley 1959, 98). Through him, the rule of law overthrew the caprice of divine meddling. “If today we look upon our planet as familiar even when its bowels shake and its volcanoes grumble, it is because Lyell taught us long ago the simple powers in the earth.” Slow, steady, simple: after Lyell, uniformitarianism was the order of the day. Even the validation of continental drift played by its rules, since it was delayed by several decades until a vera causa of continental movement had been discovered in seafloor spreading.
[* There are many variants of this claim in circulation. Here’s one from Richard Fortey, in a glossy television interview with Brian Cox: “Charles Lyell… transformed the scientific credibility of geology… [by giving it] a real scientific basis, the method of how we can understand the earth and its history.” Fortey also says that before Lyell, “nobody…had begun to think… in scientific terms, about how mountain ranges could be formed”— a fiction made more egregious by the fact that Lyell had relatively little to say about chains of mountains.]
Jump forward two decades from the discovery of seafloor spreading. Uniformitarianism still reigned, but it was beginning to wobble. Neo-catastrophism was abroad and Lyell had became a liability, at least in certain circles (Huggett 1988; Ager 1993). Catastrophic mass extinctions, giant floods, continental infernos— all of these were back on the menu, especially after the Alvarez hypothesis crash landed in 1980 (Sepkoski 2020). Evidently, uniformitarian strictures needed to be relaxed in certain cases; there was more to the historical behavior of the earth than the working-out of its “simple powers.” Lyell’s regulative principles had become straight jackets, dogmas. To continue to adhere by them would be to stand in the way of geological progress. This was the refrain that issued from several quarters during the 1980s.
Artist’s rendition of the bolide impact that ended the Cretaceous Period
The refrain neatly packaged two mutually reinforcing claims. The first was that the Lyellian revolution in geology was a complete victory for the forces of uniformitarianism, at least in the domain of methodological prescription. This is a straightforward extension of idea that Lyell turned geology into a science: for if Lyell’s project was to make geology scientific and he succeeded, then of course his victory was a total one. Second, Lyellian uniformitarianism was imagined to have retained the whip hand for a hundred years or more. Why else would the neo-catastrophists of the 1980s blame Lyell for the failure of their discipline to grapple with the evidence of catastrophes in the past? This only makes sense if uniformitarian prescriptions were a constant feature of geological practice since Lyell; that is, if Lyell’s victory was both total and enduring.
The above history should not be taken too seriously, despite the fact that a curious number of people seem to believe it. As historians have shown, nearly every bit of it is wrong or in need of serious qualification. Geology in the late eighteenth century was not beholden to superstition. Nor was catastrophism “supernatural in essence.” (It is a serious question whether any coherent tradition can be made to answer to the name “catastrophism.”) Hutton’s importance is exaggerated, as is Lyell’s. Both were major figures— that is true (Sengor 2020). But simple stories of heroic genius conquering ecclesiastical authority are the stuff of homily rather than history. Real comprehension demands that we do better.
Charles Lyell and his companion with their guides at Degolliado di Cedro, Teneriffe, 1854. Lyell’s advice to geologists was “Travel, travel, travel” and he cultivated an image of himself as the ultimate peripatetic geologist: the perfect hybrid of the cosmopolitan gentleman and the manly adventurer. All this was part of a broader effort to remake the public image of geology. (Watercolor by Georg Hartung)
Consider Lyell. Principles did have the aim of turning geology into a proper (read: Newtonian) science, a science of causes. But we must be careful in unpacking what this means. Lyell was dissatisfied by what he regarded as geology’s addiction to unbridled speculation. When a geologist saw a block of crumpled strata he thought up a cause adequate to crumple it— never mind if anyone had actually observed the cause operating at the postulated intensity. Lyell’s radicalism took the form of a restriction: Do not postulate causes of a sort that have not been reliably observed, or known causes operating at hitherto unobserved intensities. This was radical in its suggestion that no causes have ever operated but those now operating, and at the same rates. But it was not radical in advocating that geologists seek naturalistic explanations, or for suggesting that actual (observable) causes are preferable to non-actual ones, all else being equal. Both these commitments were widely held before Lyell put pen to paper (Rudwick 2005, 2008).
This matters because the most common version of the Lyell myth suggests that his accomplishment was to infuse geology with naturalism: basically, to expel God from geological explanation and replace Him with the rule of law. But to the extent that Lyell was trying to do this, he was pushing at an open door. Very few serious geologists were satisfied with accounts that invoked God’s direct action to explain happenings in the world. (The obvious exception was the species problem, but here even Lyell’s naturalism began to waver.) Naturalistic explanations only encountered serious resistance in the public sphere, where “the Bible structured the narrative history of the world in everyday experience [at least in Great Britain]” (Secord 2014, 156). Yet the resistance had to do with the authority of geology in public debate, not about the mechanics of geological reasoning.* So, while Principles made the public case that geology was a science, it had relatively little to do with the spread of naturalism within geology.
[* The stakes might have been clearer had Lyell not confused things by treating clerical geologists like William Buckland as little better than biblical literalists. In fact, people like Buckland were just as committed to finding causal explanations of geohistorical events as Lyell, even if they regarded these causes as, ultimately, instruments in the hand of a providential God.]
The Rev. Dr. William Buckland lecturing at Oxford University, February 15, 1823 (Nathaniel Whittock, 1823–30). It is common to see writers with only a passing acquaintance with the history of geology refer to Buckland as a theologian, as if this were his primary vocation. Even Buckland's Wikipedia page calls him "a theologian who... was also a geologist and paleontologist.") But this gets things backwards. On the eve of the publication of Lyell's Principles, Buckland was Britain's most eminent geologist and a comparative anatomist of great acclaim. He was also a (natural) theologian
Lyell’s more significant reformist aim was bound up with his understanding of science as a search for actual causes: causes that could be shown to produce certain effects. Lyell was convinced that the explanatory power of actual causes had been underestimated. In particular, he was convinced that observable causes operating at observable intensities could explain much more of the geological record than experts supposed, in part because knowledge of these causes was scattered and fragmentary. This is why so much of Principles is devoted to an exhaustive review of rivers, tides, currents, earthquakes, volcanoes, and all other agencies known to shape the face of the earth and the fate of its inhabitants. His efforts in this direction were widely celebrated, even by his critics. These critics were not celebrating the restriction of admissible causes to “actual causes” in Lyell’s sense. Their resistance to this restriction is what made them critics. Instead, they praised Lyell for assembling the finest toolkit for geohistorical explanation yet compiled, and for showing that the efficacy of actual causes had in many cases been severely underestimated.
What then was the nature of Lyell’s accomplishment? Restricting ourselves to the internal practice of geology (and therefore bracketing discussion of his work’s broader impact), it was to build out massively the set of resources that could be used to explain geological evidence. In addition, it was to show— as Lyell did in Volume 3 of Principles— “how much of [geohistory]… could be explained in causal terms by applying the actualistic method more thoroughly than ever before, thereby integrating history and causation in a way that has remained definitive for earth scientists ever since” (Rudwick 2008, 560). These were major accomplishments, and more than sufficed to establish Lyell as the most influential geologist of his generation. But they did not establish him as the “founder” of modern geology or the great dragon slayer of supernaturalism. Most geologists were actualists before Lyell came on the scene. Lyell just upped the ante.
Was Suess a Lyellian?
So was Suess a Lyellian or wasn’t he? As I've indicated, historical opinion divides on this question. According to one interpretation, Suess was an opponent of Lyell who oversaw the decline of Lyellian geology in late nineteenth century Europe. According to the other, Suess was a Lyellian, despite some superficial disagreements with Lyell. Mott Greene defends the former position, Celal Sengor the latter. Who is right?
The answer is both— sort of. Begin with Greene. Early in Das Antlitz, Suess criticized “[the] enthusiasm with which the little polyp building up the coral reef, and the raindrop hollowing out the stone, have been contemplated” (Suess 1904, 17). This, he said, “introduced into the consideration of important questions concerning the history of the earth a certain element of geological quietism— derived from the peaceable commonplaces of everyday life— an element which by no means contributes to a just contemplation of those phenomena which have been, and still are, of the first consequence in fashioning the present face of the earth.” By “geological quietism” Suess had in mind uniformitarianism, or at least that strain of uniformitarianism that emphasized the cumulative power of mundane processes. (Lyell to some extent escapes this criticism. While he was much concerned to show the cumulative effects of everyday processes, he was also keen to highlight the great power and violence of actual causes whenever he could: the better to support his claim that actual causes operating at observable intensities could render the whole of the geological record.) Lyell was to be praised for showing how “Nature may attain striking results by trifling means.” Yet as Mott Greene writes (channeling Suess), “The standard for grade and small, for long and brief, in the evaluation of geological change had been obtained by an illicit and erroneous anthropomorphic reduction” (Greene 1982, 163). Suess again:
We often measure mountains in feet, and we distinguish long and short periods of time according to the average length of human life… and in a like manner we unconsciously borrow the standard for the terms ‘violent’ and ‘less violent’ from the sphere of our own experience… We are prone to forget that the planet may be measured by man, but not according to man. (Suess 1904, 17)
Top: a coral atoll and its architect, the coral polyp; bottom: Darwin’s model of atoll formation by land subsidence (from Slafford-Deitsch 1991)
Coral polyps and raindrops; these examples were meant to call to mind Darwin's account of the origin of coral reefs and Lyell’s “explanation of the irregularities of surface relief and the mechanism of geological change” (Greene 1982, 164). But whatever the merits of these explanations (and Suess was violently opposed to Lyell’s “yo-yo” tectonics), they should not be treated as “the measure of the whole.” The following passage, Greene argues, gives “Suess’s position in a nutshell.”
The convulsions which have affected certain parts of the earth's crust, with a frequency far greater than till quite recently supposed, show clearly enough how one-sided this [uniformitarian] point of view is. The earthquakes of the present day are certainly but faint reminiscences of those telluric movements to which the structure of almost every mountain range bears witness. Numerous examples of great mountain chains suggest by their structures the possibility, and in certain cases even the probability of the occasional intervention in the course of great geological processes [e.g., sedimentation and erosion] of episodic disturbances, of such indescribable and overpowering violence, but the imagination refuses to follow the understanding and to complete the picture of which the outlines are furnished by observations of fact. (Suess 1904, 18)
All this smacks of old fashioned catastrophism, and indeed Sengor alleges that Greene’s Suess was a Cuvierian catastrophist. (Perhaps he has this passage in mind: “It is small wonder that the French geologist and historian Louis De Launay identified Suess with a return to a more cataclysmic geology” (Greene 1982, 178).) But this is a misrepresentation. Suess was “no catastrophist of the old school,” Greene flatly declares (165). Instead, he was a critic of both dogmatic uniformitarianism and Cuverian catastrophism. Uniformitarianism first:
[Suess] did not denigrate the efficacy or even the predominance of the secular work of erosion and sedimentation [the workhorses of uniformitarian geology]… The one-sidedness of uniformitarianism, as he characterized it, was a philosophical predisposition to explain away, or ignore, observational evidence of violent, catastrophic disturbance of the crust. (Greene 1982, 164)
As a prime example of this “limitation of perspective,” consider how little Lyell had to say about the origin of the great mountain chains (previously discussed on this very weblog). This nonchalance was purchased at the price of ignoring crucial evidence:
If we agree to look at mountains like the Alps as they stand, the overwhelming first impression is the work preformed by erosion and weathering. The peaks are etched by frost, and the arrangement of peaks and valleys in systems is conditioned by the way way water has flowed away from the peaks. But a deeper look at, for example, the dislocations along fault lines shows a different set of phenomena at work— episodically, but no less dramatically in its effects. (Greene 1982, 165)
Famous cross-sections of the Swiss Alps from the generation after Suess. The drawings come from Albert Heim’s Geologie der Schweiz (1916) and show just the sort of structural details that classical uniformitarianism was ill-equipped to explain
A complete and adequate geology is one that remedies these limitations of perspective. For instance, in von Buch’s catastrophist geology “erosion does not even exist, and all relief was the expression of ‘great telluric movements’” (Greene 1982, 165). “Lyell conversely seemed to ignore the evidence of greater movements in favor of the continuous action of small causes. Neither position adequately describes what we see when we look more carefully.” The Lyellian picture is “true most of the time, but episodic disturbances have a role much greater than might be inferred from their rarity and what we have seen of them.” Suess was “not a catastrophist of the old school,” but neither was he an unreconstructed Lyellian. His aim was rather “to enlarge the meaning of uniform change to include phenomena not presently observable”: things like massive flooding, catastrophic sedimentation, and large-scale movements of the crust (166).
Sengor agrees with most of this. As he observes, by the time Suess rose to prominence, the initial battles between uniformitarians (Lyell and his followers) and catastrophists (everyone else) had largely abated. At the same time, the concept of “violent” geological action had changed its meaning:
For [Suess] a catastrophe is an event that changes the landscape and may lead to local upset in the fauna and the flora of a region. But he thinks such catastrophes are commonplace. [Others] are very rare. Some are so rare that mankind has not witnessed their kind. This does not mean he was a catastrophist in Cuvier’s sense or that he had given up Lyellian actualism. Had Sir Charles himself not admitted that a sudden discharge of the waters of the Great Lakes in North America may catastrophically inundate much of the continent and that such an event would be perfectly acceptable within his theory that the past causes were no different from the present-day (he wrote “actual”) causes? (Sengor 2014, 33)
Sengor offers this as a criticism of Greene (as well as the “silly and incompetent” Emil Tietze, who allegedly inspired Greene’s position). But it is no criticism, since Greene’s Suess was no old-school catastrophist. According to Greene, “Catastrophism and uniformitarianism for Suess were the extreme ends results of extrapolation from two different sets of phenomena,” and thus equally mistaken in their extreme forms (Greene 1982, 165). This is somewhat different from Sengor’s view; but the point for now is that his criticism of Greene is based on a misreading, or perhaps a too-ardent desire to assimilate Greene and Tietze.
* * *
So, Greene and Sengor agree that Suess was not an old-school catastrophist. But was he a Lyellian? Greene says no, at least in the sense that 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). Sengor says yes: “There is [no] reason whatever to think that Suess was not a Lyellian in his tectonic thinking” (Sengor 2014, 33). What gives?
Mott Greene (left) and A. M. Celal Sengor (right)
Here there is a substantive disagreement between the two authors. But it is not a disagreement about the aims of Suessian geology. It is rather a disagreement about the nature of Lyellian geology and indeed, at a deeper level, the “essence of science.”
Start with the former. According to Sengor, the thrust of Lyellian geology was methodological: “All Hutton and Lyell were trying to do was to show that the geological processes active today and what we knew of the geological record then did not necessarily require the incidence of instant world-wide catastrophes in the past” (Sengor 2014, 35). This is an exceedingly thin account of what Hutton and Lyell were up to. Hutton and Lyell had no theories to offer, or at least no theories that they were terribly invested in. Rather, they were trying to show that “the geological processes active today and what we knew of the geological record then did not necessarily require the incidence of instant world-wide catastrophes in the past.” Sengor sees no value in the various “uniformitarianisms” identified by historians; but this is because, for him, the only kind of uniformitarianism worth talking about is methodological uniformitarianism (or “actualism”). He even questions whether Hutton was a sincere deist, preferring to see him as a “closet atheist” (Sengor 2009). Still, Sengor assures us that Hutton was “a proper scientist despite his deistic statements”— as if one could not be a sincere deist and a proper scientist at the same time.
[* Here, Sengor seems to be on shaky ground. He reasons that if Hutton were a sincere deist, he would’ve asked “what mechanism did the wise and benevloent God put in place to prevent soil from wasting?” (Sengor 2009, 122). But, like, why? Why couldn’t a deist have asked the question Hutton actually asked: namely, “what mechanism did God put in place to restore the soil that is constantly wasting away?”]
Greene has a different view of Lyellian geology. Like most historians, Greene sees Lyell as more than a purveyor of actualistic methods (or, what comes to the same thing for Sengor, an opponent of catastrophism). In addition, Lyell was a scientist with substantive ideas about how the earth works, most notably: (1) a model of tectonics based on continental oscillation, (2) a theory of elevation by igneous intrusion, and (3) an overall steady state or non-directional geotheory. Regarded this way, Suess was obviously an opponent of Lyellian geology. Sengor himself writes that Das Antlitz is “one long argument” against the hypothesis of continental uplift— one half of Lyellian tectonics. Again: “Suess was vehemently against any primary vertical uplift of the lithosphere and this opposition made him blind even to the very obvious secular, ongoing, rising of Scandinavia” (Sengor 2014, 8). Suess would also have opposed any suggestion that earth’s history lacked an overall direction, although this was no longer at issue when he began to publish.*
[* Even Lyell was eventually forced to abandon his nondirectional geotheory, and in this sense it was no longer a part of “Lyellian geology” by 1875 (the year of Lyell’s death). Still, it is worth emphasizing how starkly Suess’s conception differed from this nondirectional one. According to Suess, the major features of the earth, including its high-standing continents, “are only the accidents of the collection of oceanic waters in areas of great subsidence, and these remnants will someday sink in their turn” (Greene 1982, 178). It just doesn’t get much more directional than this, regardless of whether the process can be understood in terms of an enlarged roster of “uniformitarian” causes.]
Suess, then, was an opponent of Lyell’s “yo-yo” tectonics; an opponent of non-directionalism (although this had ceased to be a going concern by 1875); an opponent of Lyell’s theory of elevation by igneous intrusion; and an opponent of Lyell’s aversion to postulating global geological events. All these considerations suggest that Suess was not a Lyellian “in his tectonic thinking.” He was nonetheless an admirer of Lyell’s Principles, an enemy of old school catastrophism (in part because of its association with models of vertical uplift), and a committed actualist, albeit not as severe an actualist as Sir Charles.
An idealized, bird’s-eye-view of Niagara Falls, from Lyell’s Travels in North America (1845). Lyell recognized that, given enough time, the falls would chew their way to Lake Erie, at which point a tremendous amount of water would be released into the area surrounding Queenston (pictured in the foreground). None of this contradicted his “uniformitarianism [actualism],” putting the lie to the notion that Lyell was a dogmatic geological “quietist.” But Suess was ready to take things much further
All this is pretty obvious, and Greene’s account reflects it. So why does Sengor call Greene’s interpretation of Suess “entirely untrue”? Part of it, I have argued, is that he misreads Greene, even going so far as to call him a “critic” of Suess. (Huh?) But another part is that Sengor is operating under the sway of some unusual historiographical ideas. In his recent book on James Hutton (2020), Sengor complains about “[a] strange new fashion in the historiography of geology… promulgated mostly by professional historians rather than geologists,” which consists in “a misinterpretation of what geology consists of by considering methods rather than theories as the essence of the science.” I’m not sure which historians he’s talking about. If anything, historians like Greene tend to place too heavy an emphasis on theory to the neglect of practical considerations. In any event, if Sengor thinks that Greene’s remarks about “the demise of Lyellian geology in late nineteenth century Europe” refer to methods (and specifically to actualism), then his criticism of Greene is explicable.*
[* Explicable, but not warranted. When Greene says that Das Antlitz paved the way for the rejection of Lyellian geology, he clearly has in mind certain explanatory strategies (like the preference for “infinitesimal and only accidentally incremental processes”) as opposed to actualism per se (Greene 1982, 189).]
Sengor has other unusual ideas too. Here is one: “Social considerations may tell us why science is done or not done in a society, but they cannot tell us anything on the origin and evolution of its content. In understanding the intellectual development of geology, in fact science in general, sociological analysis seems not very helpful” (Sengor 2020). This is not directly relevant to understanding his disagreement with Greene (who must rate as an internalist by any standard). Yet it may be indirectly relevant, since Sengor does not seem to think very highly of professional historians of science. He complains, for example, about their “love of intrigue,” which prevents them from taking certain evidence, like the testimony of scientists, at face value (Sengor 2014, 28). Probably it is not worth pursuing the matter any further, although I find it strange that Sengor mistrusts the historian’s project of interpreting and contextualizing science, when he is perfectly happy to lecture historians on the finer points of historiography. (For an entertaining rejoinder to Sengor’s historical practice, see Rudwick (2009).)
Conclusion: globalization in nineteenth century geology
In the first part of this essay, I asked what the comparison between Lyell and Suess could teach us about the path geological science traveled during the second half of the nineteenth century. I have already given one answer to the question, namely, that Suess’s reformed “Lyellianism” reflected the obsolescence of older debates between “uniformitarians” and “catastrophists.” It did this by incorporating an expanded conception of the uniformity of nature: one that had room for events that were rare on human timescales but common in the fullness of time. The position was close to the one Derek Ager later called “catastrophic uniformitarianism,” a kind of Hegelian synthesis of older forms of uniformitarianism and catastrophism (Ager 1973). Greene:
Suess’s work gave new meaning to the term uniformitarianism. While his history of the Earth what's composed of secular processes proceeding in the manner at the rate specified by Lyell, it also included and was even dominated by elements almost exclusively identified in the previous fifty years with catastrophism… The final eradication of the extremes of the time scale of geological change abolished the uniformitarian-progressionist debate in its traditional form. (Greene 1982, 189)
But there is another answer worthy of your consideration, a theme of Suess’s geology that is absent or suppressed in Lyell’s. This is its emphasis on the global geological event— the event whose effects go beyond a single continent or ocean basin and spread themselves over the entirety of the planet. An example of such an event is a eustatic sea level change. This refers to a change in the level of the ocean whose effects are felt more or less simultaneously around the globe. Lyell did not believe in such events. For him, evidence of past sea level change was better explained by the uplift and subsidence of continents— it was these that went up and down rather than the oceans. For Suess, on the other hand, the collapse of the earth sometimes caused ocean bottoms to founder, bringing sea levels down worldwide. Later, baseleveling and sedimentation brought them up again, leaving a global signature in the rock record.
Emmanuel de Martonne’s depiction of Suess's Altaids (leaving out its “free ends” in North America), from Martonne (1909). Key to legend: 1. Tonalitic scar; 2. Alpine folds; 3. Pyrenean folds; 4. Dinaric folds; 5. Tauric folds; 6. Iranian arcs; 7. the Altaids proper; 8. Hercynian massifs. (Figure reproduced from Sengor and Natal'in 2007)
Suess recognized other global geological events too, the most dramatic of which was the tectonic event that raised the Altaids: a huge configuration of mountainous terranes that originated in Central Asia and whose “free ends” Suess identified with the Appalachians and Rocky Mountains, respectively (Sengor 2015). This was admittedly a rather extreme idea— again, it pictured the Appalachians and Rockies as the most distal effects of a process that originated not in Nebraska but in Central Asia! But Suess was not alone in identifying mountain-building events that crossed wide ocean basins. Marcel Bertrand traced several ancient mountain chains across the Atlantic, which he took to represent successive periods of tectonic disturbance (the Huttonian, Caledonian, Hercynian, and Alpine orogenies). It was a characteristically late nineteenth century project, the kind of thing that was made possible by geological surveys and more frequent colonial adventures. It was the kind of project that found its most loquacious example in Das Antlitz der Erde.*
[* According to Suess, the task of geology in the twentieth century will be “to group the folded ranges together in natural units of a still more comprehensive character, and to explain by means of a single, simple expression as large a part as possible of the terrestrial folding— such is the task which now awaits the geologist. The plan of the trend-lines, written by nature on the face of the Earth— this is what he has to determine” (Suess 1908, 3).]
Marcel Bertrand’s 1887 map of orogenic continuities between Europe and North America across the Atlantic Ocean. Bertrand’s suggestion was that the Atlantic basin formed after the formation of the mountain chains. The mountain chains he supposed to have formed by marginal accretion of a Continent archéen or “Archean continent,” depicted in the upper left-hand corner of the figure
Hence the title of this essay, “Going Global.” Geology changed in umpteen ways during the nineteenth century, intellectual, institutional, and political. But an especially important transformation took place near the end of the century when geology went global, not only in the assembly of a standardized geological timescale but in the contemplation and theorizing of global geological processes. No one epitomized this transformation better than Eduard Suess. His extraterrestrial observer was the perfect literary device to ring in the era, and to introduce a new wide-angled project in geological theory. In Sengor’s words, “Suess [reacted] to the overly schematic, regularistic and both spatially and temporally discontinuous… tectonic theories before him and created a theory of earth behaviour that was comprehensive, chaotically fluid and both spatially and temporally continuous” (Sengor 2015, 238). If this has paled somewhat in light of plate tectonics, it remains an accomplishment to rival Lyell’s Principles: a theory whose uptake was so rapid “that a generation later the traces of the revolution were almost completely obliterated” (Greene 1982, 190). It accelerated the professionalization of the discipline, “put a new pressure on the literature of geology” and “marked the end of the age in which geology was a popular science [where] the observations of any literate amateur were gladly welcomed by a geological survey or journal.” It was the final act of nineteenth century geology.
* Thanks to anyone who read all— or even part— of this interminable essay. And thanks to everyone who has read “Problematica” over the past year and a half! More to come…
References
Ager, D.V. 1973. The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record. New York: Wiley.
Ager, D.V. 1993. The New Catastrophism: The Importance of the Rare Event in Geological History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bertrand, M. 1887. La chaîne des Alpes et la formation du continent européen. Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France, 3rd ser. 15:423–447,
Eiseley, L. 1958. Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men who Discovered it. New York: Doubleday.
Eiseley, L. 1959. Charles Lyell. Scientific American 201:98–109.
Greene, M. 1982. Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Huggett, R.J. 1988. Terrestrial catastrophism: causes and effects. Progress in Physical Geography 12:509–532.
Lyell, C. 1845. Travels in North America, Canada, and Nova Scotia, with geological observations. London: John Murray.
Martonne, E. 1909. Traité de Géographie Physique—Climat-Hydrographie-Relief du Sol-Biogéographie. Paris: Armand Colin.
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. 2009 Author’s response to Sengor’s review of Bursting the Limits of Time. Earth Sciences History 28:135–141.
Secord, J. 2014. Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Sengor, A M.C. 2009. A rankean of historical geology and its development. Earth Sciences History 28:101–141.
Sengor, A.M.C. 2014. Eduard Suess and global tectonics: an illustrated short guide. Austrian Journal of Earth Sciences 107:6–82.
Sengor, A.M.C. 2015. The founder of modern geology died 100 years ago: the scientific work and legacy of Eduard Suess. Geoscience Canada 42:181–246.
Sengor, A.M.C. 2020. Revising the Revisions: James Hutton’s Reputation among Geologists in the Late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Boulder: Geological Society of America.
Sengor, A.M.C. and Natal'in, B. 2007. Eduard Suess and the Altaids: what’s in a name? In Magmatism and Metallogeny of the Altai and Adjacent Large Igneous Provinces. With an Introductory Essay on the Altaids.
Sepkoski, D. 2020. Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Slafford-Deitsch, J. 1991. Reef: A Safari Through the Coral World. London: White Lotus Press.
Other resources
Here is a video of Celal Sengor speaking at the University of Chicago on how scientists can benefit from the history of science (and a bunch of other stuff too):