Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
navy, but nothing particularly warlike to do with it, the gov-
ernment looked for new uses for old sailors and their ships.
Scientific exploration became one solution, and it was on a
naval ship, hms
Beagle
, that the young Charles Darwin set sail
from Plymouth on his five-year voyage of natural history explo-
ration in December 1831. Other expeditions transported and
backed by the Admiralty included Ross, Parry and Franklin's
searches for the North-West Passage between the Atlantic and
the Pacific Oceans in the 1820s to 1840s, and James Clark Ross's
expedition to the Antarctic, from 1839 to 1845.
An early result of Darwin's
Beagle
voyage was the publication
in 1844 of his topic
Volcanic Islands
.¹¹ 'I am quite charmed with
Geology,' he wrote from the Falkland Islands in 1834, 'but, like
the wise animal between two bundles of hay, I do not know
which to like best; the old crystalline group of rocks, or the softer
more fossiliferous beds.'¹² Covering the volcanic islands that
Darwin visited, from the Cape Verde archipelago off West
Africa, to Tahiti, the Galápagos and New Zealand, the topic is
one of a clutch of important works that put volcanoes at the
centre of the scientific and literary stage. Two of these topics
brought geology into the modern world, while a third made a
drama out of a crisis.
In the late eighteenth century, two theories of the origin of
the earth were under vigorous debate: Neptunism and Plutonism.
The former held the view that the earth is cold, and covered by
sea, from which mountains were formed by precipitation and
sedimentation. This view, propounded by the German mineralo-
gist Abraham Werner (1750-1817), echoed the topic of Genesis,
and further suggested that volcanoes were merely burning coal
deposits. Plutonism, on the other hand, put forward by James
Hutton (1726-1797), urged that the earth had a molten core
under high pressure, which volcanoes and earthquakes relieve.
George Poulett Scrope's
Considerations on Volcanoes
, first published
in 1825 when he was only 28 years old, favoured Plutonism.
Scrope's topic was the result of youthful research in the volcanic
areas of France, Germany and Italy, during which Vesuvius made
a timely eruption in 1822. Scrope put forward the theory that
