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tectonics with acute perception (and beautiful prose). But as he relied upon
standard histories for the first revolution, he has given the Huttonian myth its
most literate retelling since Geikie's invention.
McPhee sets Hutton and his opponents as precursors of a modern tension in
geology (a dichotomy with long tendrils, for it also evokes such basic
contrasts as romantic and mechanical approaches, or holistic and analytic
procedures)—the flashiness of complex laboratory equipment, often operated
by people with strong mathematical skills but little knowledge of rocks,
versus "old-fashioned" field observation. Abraham Gottlob Werner, Hutton's
chief opponent in the debate about granite, becomes a prototype for the threat
of soulless laboratories, with a boost from Geikie himself:
Some contemporary geologists discern in Werner the lineal antecedence of
what has come to be known as black-box geology—people in white coats
spending summer days in basements watching million-dollar consoles that
flash like northern lights—for Werner's "first sketch of a classification of
rocks shows by its meagerness how slender at that time was his practical
acquaintance with rocks in the field." The words are Sir Archibald
Geikie's . . . an accomplished geologist who seems to have dipped in ink the
sharp end of his hammer. (94)
(I find this analogy particularly revealing because so inapt. Werner was a
lecturer and mining engineer, not a lab man in an age that, in any case,
boasted little in the way of fancy equipment. This false comparison can only
record the desire of some geologists to equate what they don't like today with
something scorned from the past.)
Hutton, by contrast, fashions modern geology by observing nature patiently
and directly. The cyclical theory of the world machine is slowly
"discerned" (as McPhee writes) in the rocks:
Wherever he had been, he had found himself drawn to riverbeds and
cutbanks, ditches and borrow pits, coastal outcrops and upland cliffs; and if
he saw black shining cherts in the white
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