Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Llanberis, I am grateful to Michael Roberts whose comments on the episode I read
online.
The most comprehensive treatment of Edmond Halley and his life and work
is that by Alan Cook, Edmond Halley: Charting the Heavens and the Seas (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998). Halley's paper outlining his interesting scheme on the
increasing salinity of closed lakes was published in the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society 29, number 344 (1715), 296-300. Halley's paper
and its ideas were forgotten until 1910 when they were brought to light by the
American geochronologer G. F. Becker, 'Halley on the age of the ocean', Science 31
(1910), 459-461.
For Maillet see Chapter 6 in Albritton's wonderful book The Abyss of Time
(1986); the earlier volume by Francis C. Haber, The Age of the World: Moses to
Darwin (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1959), and Ezio Vaccari,
'European views on terrestrial chronology from Descartes to the mid-eighteenth
century', in Lewis and Knell, The Age of the Earth (2001), pp. 25-37. A modern
edition of de Maillet's Telliamed edited by Albert V. Carozzi (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1968) is closer to the manuscript version in that the alterations
incorporated by le Mascrier in the first published edition of 1748 have been
highlighted.
Chapter 5. Thinking in layers: early ideas in stratigraphy
The earliest English translation of Nicolaus Steno's Prodromus appeared in 1671, but
that by John Garrett Winter published in 1916 by The Macmillan Company, New
York remains second to none - this volume also contains a useful biography of Steno
and various explanatory notes on his text. For two good biographies of Steno see:
Harald Moe Nicolaus Steno: An Illustrated Biography. His Tireless Pursuit of
Knowledge, His Genius, His Quest for the Absolute (Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1994),
and Erik Kennet P Ëšlsson Niels Stensen: Scientist and Saint (Dublin: Veritas, 1988).
A recent biography aimed at the popular market is that by Alan Cutler The Seashell
on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who
Discovered a NewHistory of the Earth (London: Heinemann, 2003). The quotation of
the lines on the plaque at Steno's tomb is taken from the translation given in James J.
Walsh, Catholic Churchmen in Science (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1968, a
reprint of the 1908 edition), p. 160-161.
For some analysis of Steno's geological work see Gordon L. Herries Davies,
'The Stenoian Revolution', pp. 44-49, in Gaetano Giglia, Carlo Maccagni and
Nicoletta Morello (eds.) Rocks, Fossils and History (Firenze: Festina Lente,
1995); Charles Hepworth Holland, The Idea of Time (Chichester: J. Wiley & Sons,
