Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
selection and evolution, and in reaching this conclusion he was not
alone amongst geological colleagues. It suited Darwin nicely that the
Earth was old: this meant that there was plenty of time available for
natural selection and evolution to take place. For committed religious
men of science this just could not be right. As a result of the adverse
reaction that his chronological calculation provoked, Darwin reacted
by reducing the significance of the passage in the second edition of
Origin of Species and by the third edition, published in 1861, it had
disappeared altogether.
Less than three months after his London address Phillips was
in Cambridge where he delivered the annual Rede Lecture at the
invitation of the Vice-Chancellor. This series had been established
in 1524 using an endowment provided by the estate of Henry VIII's
Lord Chief Justice Sir Robert Rede (d. 1519), and was considered to
be one of the major events on the University calendar. Spurred into
further thoughts following the London meeting Phillips took part of
his 1860 presidential address and expanded it. Further augmentation
of the text followed and Phillips published it as Life on the Earth: its
Origin and Succession, a slim but important volume of 224 pages
published by Macmillan of Cambridge and London. In a letter
addressed to Charles Lyell dated 18 May, Darwin told him that the
Reverend John Stephens Henslow (1796-1861), his great friend and
teacher, had informed him of Phillips' Rede lecture and remarked
that he (Phillips) had treated Origin of Species fairly. Of Life on the
Earth, Darwin was not complimentary: responding in January 1861
to a letter that he had received from Joseph Dalton Hooker
(1817-1911), a major ally and later Director of the Botanic Gardens
at Kew, he sardonically agreed that Phillips' book was 'unreadably
dull'.
In Life on the Earth, Phillips recognised that 'the Geological
Scale of Time is founded on the series of strata deposited in the ancient
sea.' He gave the results of his denudation calculations, and reported
that the sedimentary pile that comprised the Cambrian and later
sediments had begun to form anything between 38 and 96 million
