Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
It was said that it was not unknown for him to grab his case of surgical
instruments in the middle of a lecture and head towards the
Zoological Gardens on hearing of the death of a hippopotamus or
another large mammal. He is fondly remembered by some for having
devised a humane method of hanging: he calculated the length of drop
required to effect the instantaneous death of the condemned. Prior to
this many criminals simply suffered slow strangulation.
In 1865, Haughton in the first edition of his Manual of Geology
wrote that the Earth was 2,298 million years old, a calculation that he
based on the same global cooling principles of those of William
Thomson (whose exploits are discussed in the
next chapter
). In the
context of the sediment accumulation method of age determination,
Haughton is remembered for his 1878 principle that 'the proper rela-
tive measure of geological periods is the maximum thickness of the
strata formed during these periods': this of course necessitated a global
estimate of sedimentary sequences. In 1871 in the third edition of his
Manual of Geology, he published a date of 1,526 million years, based
on denudation rates; and this date was revised by him seven years later
to 200million years in a paper published inNature inwhich he tried to
prove that past climatic changes were not due to alterations in the
position of the Poles - still a topical subject today. Much later in 1947
Arthur Holmes argued that the uniformity of sedimentation rates
assumed by Haughton was incorrect and that his principle would be
better stated as: 'the time elapsed since the end of any geological
period is a function of the sum of the maximum thicknesses accumu-
lated during all the subsequent periods.'
In the 1890s, the methodology was revisited by several authors
in the United States, including Charles DoolittleWalcott (1850-1927).
In 1893 he presented a paper at a meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science at Madison, Wisconsin, in which he
gave a timespan of 60 to 70 million years for post-Archean time (the
Archean was the time prior to the first appearance of shelly fossils).
His work was based on accurately measured sections in North
American sedimentary basins (Figure
10.4
). He was fortunate, as
