Dead on Arrival - Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences - page 66

Dead on Arrival
The Time of Copernicus
Wegener's 1912 paper drew little notice from English-speaking geologists, which
was no surprise since neither had Taylor's 1910 article, and his had appeared in the
Bulletin of the Geological Society of America . Unlike Wegener, Taylor had sup-
plied a mechanism to support his theory of crustal sliding: the Earth's capture of
a passing comet. But given the unlikelihood of such an event, Taylor might have
been better off to have left well enough alone.
World War I prevented English speakers from reading either of the first two edi-
tions of Wegener's The Origin of Continents and Oceans . The third edition ap-
peared in German in 1922 and in 1924 in an English translation with an introduc-
tion by the president of the Geological Society of London, J. W. Evans. But alert
British and American geologists could have learned of Wegener's theory in 1922
from two articles in English.
Thefirstwasanunsignedreviewofthe1922Germanthirdeditionin Nature ,the
most widely read British scientific journal. The review opened, “The topic makes
an immediate appeal to physicists, but is meeting with strong opposition from a
good many geologists. This opposition is to be expected, for the author replaces
the whole theory of sunken continents, land bridges, and great changes of earth
temperature by a displacement theory.” It ended with a statement that would have
sounded the tocsin for geologists everywhere: “The revolution in thought, if the
theory is substantiated, may be expected to resemble the change in astronomical
ideas at the time of Copernicus.” 1 How geologists must have chafed at the notion
that their science required a Copernican-scale revolution, much less one launched
by an unknown German meteorologist.
One who likely read the review was the Yale professor Charles Schuchert
(1858-1942). One of the most prominent American geologists of the new century,
Schuchert's textbook, Historical Geology , written with Carl Dunbar, his colleague
at Yale and director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, became the stand-
ard work for several decades. “Historical geology” refers not to the history of the
science but to the history of the Earth, particularly to the past configuration of land
and sea, the location and ages of mountain ranges, the fossil evidence for evolu-
tion, and so on. The fundamental premise of every historical geology textbook be-