Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
matter to expand "with amazing force" (1788, 266), producing extensive
uplift and generating new continents at the sites of old oceans (while the
eroded areas of old continents become new oceans).
Each stage automatically entails the next. The weight of accumulating
sediments generates enough heat to consolidate, and then to uplift, the strata;
the steep topography of uplift must then, perforce, erode as waves and rivers
do their work. Time's cycle rules the world machine of erosion, deposition,
consolidation, and uplift; continents and oceans change places in a slow
choreography that can never end, or even age, so long as higher powers
maintain the current order of nature's laws. Deep time becomes a simple
deduction from the operation of the world machine.
The Hutton of Legend
Charles Lyell's self-serving rewrite of geology's history (see Chapter 4)
demanded a certain type of hero, and Hutton best fitted the requirements.
Simple chauvinism decreed a British character, and Hutton prevailed (even
though nearly half his
Theory of the Earth
presents long, untranslated
quotations from French sources). Hutton was never considered a major figure
by continental geologists. I don't think that he even had much influence upon
the great flowering and professionalization of British geology following the
founding of the Geological Society of London in 1807. For this first
generation devoted its attention to the very kind of historical inquiry that
Hutton eschewed (see the last section of this chapter). Hutton's paramountcy
fulfilled a later need.
Lyell's construction of history portrayed the emergence of scientific geology
as the victory of uniformitarianism over the previous torpor of fruitless
speculation based on untestable catastrophes and other fanciful proposals that
explained the past by causes no longer affecting the earth. Lyell's vision
demanded a hero as empiricist—a man willing to do his patient dog work in
the field, and to build
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