The constancy of the laws of nature, and of effects and causes, is the foundation of all human knowledge; and if, without any previous observable symptoms or indications of a change, we can infer that a change will take place, we may as well make any assertion whatever, and think it as unreasonable to be contradicted in affirming that the moon will come in contact with the earth to-morrow, as in saying that the sun will rise at its expected time.
Thomas Robert Malthus—An Essay on the Principle of Population, 7th ed., 1872, p. 268.
This is an investigation of original sources in geology and biology and additional material relevant to the history of those fields. The significant lack is an explicit history of either. The order is chronological by event or publication of the original material. Recommendations are always appreciated.
From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of a Science, 1650-1830 by Rachel Laudan might be a place to start for a history—especially since it argues for a Continental rather than English origin to geology as a science.
This collection of readings and that in physical sciences demonstrate just how recent the notion of science as a rigorous discipline is. Before 1800 its then designation as natural philosophy was, in most ways, a truer description than calling it what we now understand to be science. And true rigor with carefully defined and controlled experiments did not come until 1900. Thus it might be said that science as a discipline is little more than a century old.
Uncounted shipwrecks and other disasters resulting from lack of knowledge of longitude prompted the English parliament to establish the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and offer a prize of £20,000 in 1714 for a method for a sailor (it was easy for someone on land) to determine longitude. They expected the solution to be astronomical, but a humble clockmaker made a chronometer that solved the problem. John Harrison worked for much of his adult life on this one problem, which even Newton had been unable to solve.
The conference Sobel reported on for The New York Times, resulting later in her book. This brings together twenty experts in various fields to explain the problem, various expected solutions, and the real solution, used right up to the creation of GPS, which is really only a sophisticated refinement of Harrison's chronometer.
The early history of biological names and how Carolus Linneaus (Carl Linné) incrementally developed the genus-species naming system we currently use. He developed it first, and incompletely, for animals and then applied it, somewhat artificially, to plants in a more developed form, but still not quite rigorously. His original classification was Systema Naturae (1735), followed by the plant classification of Species Plantarum (1753).
I was given the impression that Charles Darwin's grandfather had set him on his (r)evolutionary path with this book. If so I couldn't find a hint of it and never finished it, as it dealt with very out-of-date medicine.
Published in a small edition of perhaps 400-500 and not widely read at the time. His theory is better known through the more readable account given by Playfair, below. The third volume was from an incomplete manuscript found in the library of the Geological Society of London, Burlington House. This manuscript and probably much more was available to Playfair.
Vol. I covers the creation of strata at the bottom of the ocean, its consolidation there by heat, and its subsequent uplift into its present location. Vol. II covers the wasting of the land to form both the current topography and the material for the strata which will be raised later to form new mountains to waste away—all in the service of creating soil so plants can grow and animals subsist on the plants (teleological argument). Vol. III recounts several trips of his and reports from other people showing evidence of intrusion of underlying unstratified layers into superincumbent strata and disruption of those strata, bolstering the notion of uplift. This is the first explanation of the uniformitarian idea of geology (catastrophism was the accepted idea). It also argued against the Werner theory of mineral precipitation for creation of indurated strata (Neptunism). In the first two volumes Hutton quotes extensively from de Saussure and other writers whose geological opinions differ from his, but whose observations he trusts. The difficulty here is that not only must you contend with eighteenth century English, but also with eighteenth century French; I confess to having skipped most of each of the longer French passages.
Malthus was right. He shows quite convincingly that if war, externally caused famine, and disease don't limit the population, then social norms (late marriage, etc.), emigration (19th century Ireland), or local famine (China in the 60's) will. The fact that the world population has not stabilized is merely a reflection of our ability to expand the agricultural base. But the population can expand only as fast as we can expand agricultural production. Any population biologist (The Population Bomb, though it apparently makes some unwarranted extrapolations) will tell you the same thing.
I've read that two flies with unchecked reproduction for 100 generations would produce a mass of flies greater than that of the earth.
An altogether more readable and organized account of Hutton's ideas. The first three sections lay out Hutton in a simple and clear manner, about 150 pages. The rest of the 500+ pages are notes which address various details, opposing theories, and complications. Section 1 covers stratified rocks—their deposition and subsequent uplift. Section 2 treats of unstratified rocks and their intrusive nature into strata and other unstratified rocks. Section 3 explains the wasting of both kinds to create first the soil and then its transport to the sea to create new strata. It argues throughout that though some rocks may be designated primary and others secondary (terminology since abandoned), the former are not primitive in the sense of always having existed and not being the result of the cycle of intrusion, erosion, stratification, and uplift.
Turn of the century England was caught in an enthusiasm for science that spawned “salons”, local gatherings sometimes in unlikely places where people presented demonstrations of the magic effects of electricity or the latest mechanical marvel. This fervour for science lead one man to look more closely at clouds. Like plant and animal names before Linneaus, cloud names were unsystematic and different from country to country. Luke Howard decided to use Latin-based names for universality and devised a classification which, after early modifications, comes to us nearly unchanged from his lecture at London's Askesian Society in 1802.
A modern account of William Smith, hydrologist and canal builder, who created the first stratigraphic map. Working as a surveyor, he was hired to build a coal barge canal near Bath. Local miners knew the rock layers to be the same from mine to mine; Smith realized knowledge of all the layers would help build a leak-free canal. He also was simply curious about the relation of fossils to strata and soon realized that certain fossils were found only in certain strata. He first drew a map of the Bath area (c. 1805) and then, as a life obsession, mapped all of England, Wales, and southern Scotland. Smith didn't publish anything of significance besides the map. (The book title, of course, is hyperbole.)
The creation of the Metric system. French savants seized on the revolution as an opportunity to create a “rational” measuring system and eliminate the multitude of measures that varied from trade to trade and from market town to market town. This lack of uniformity was as true in England and the German and Italian states as in France. Uniformity would simplify trade internationally as well as nationally. The meter was to be 1 ten-millionth of the quarter circumference of the globe. To determine this required a careful survey of part of a meridian—chosen to be the one from Dunkerque to Barcelona through Paris for various legitimate reasons as well as nationalistic. Part of the story of the error was an unanticipated discovery while the author was researching what was expected to be a less troubled topic. The other part was known at the time (though hidden from the Academy) and participated in rethinking the meaning of error in science—it became an accepted part of scientific observation, rather than something to be shunned. I.e., neither the earth nor man's observations of it can ever be perfect.
Ultimately, it was discovered that the Earth is neither a perfect sphere nor ellipsoid and the meter was set to be slightly too small. (Also see note on the pendulum.) As the century progressed, scientists came to realize that it didn't matter what the standard was; merely that there was a standard that everyone agreed to and followed. All countries have accepted the Metric system as their commercial standard as well as their scientific standard except the United States, Liberia, and Burma. A NASA contractor used English measures instead of Metric in building a Mars mission component, causing the spacecraft to bury itself at high speed.
History rather than geodesy, this examines the forces at the time of the American Revolution which created a uniform system of weights and measures within the U.S., with issues similar to those addressed simultaneously in France as described in Alder, above. It addresses the square grid so evident across most of the country from the air and its conflict with converging meridians, the origins of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and why the Metric system became co-equal with the American Customary System of Weights and Measures in 1866, but has never entered popular use.
Two men, Colonel William Lambton and Sir George Everest, devoted their lives to The Survey of India, a governmental entity that they willed into existence and sustained. The motivation was twofold—the public one of accurately surveying India and the private one, like the French, to determine the size of the earth. Lambton started in the south of India at Chenai (Madras) and surveyed west to the opposite coast, then choosing the meridian that intersected the southern tip, surveyed south then north. He is buried in the middle of India where Everest, a long-time assistant, took over and completed that central meridian. Since then many meridians and parallels have also been surveyed. For the northern part of the survey Everest found a house above Dehra Dun in the foothills of the Himalayas and made that his home and headquarters until size forced him to move The Survey into Dehra Dun. To this day The Survey is there, with only administrative functions housed with the rest of the government.
This is the first comprehensive exposition of modern geology. It incorporates the Huttonian uniformitarianism with Smith's stratigraphy and extensive Italian work in fossils, mostly seashells, and volcanology. Unless you have some particular interest in following the gory details of earlier work, this is the only account needed of the original valid ideas of geology. Writing this several years after having read it, I cannot recall the details of the presentation. One snippet of note: he argues explicitly against the progressive nature of species creation, although he does admit that quadrimanous creatures (primates) are of more recent development. Naturally, he makes other mistakes, too, certainly not all of which I could detect.
The full title, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, adumbrates the basic argument—individuals within each species vary from one another and when that variation confers a competitive advantage, that characteristic is preserved through inheritance. Enough small variations accumulating within a species eventually produce a new species. Darwin starts by examining in some detail animal husbandry and the creation of breeds. He then examines variation in wild populations and goes on to competition for survival and natural selection. He notes that all he proposes requires a great deal of time and he depends on Lyle's geology to provide it. It is clear that Darwin was in contact with more than a hundred scientists and probably many other people as well, in all parts of the Earth. He also had many experiments running at any given moment.
Late in the century Lord Kelvin argued persuasively against any great age to the earth because its mass is too small to have retained the heat it still emits. He died before the implications of the discovery of radioactivity became clear. Wegener (below) points to radioactivity as part of the refutation of a competing theory of orogenesis.
Origin is a delight to read, but Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex is so stylistically different from Origin as to be unreadable—an opinion shared by a Ph.D. botanist cousin.
“These were the first botanical experiments in which a successful attempt was made
to ascertain statistical relations between the forms by the simple but novel method of counting
their numbers. Indeed they were the first experiments in which a problem in biology had been
sharply defined, reduced to its essentials, and attacked with a carefully designed
experiment.”
—Paul C. Mangelsdorf, Forword
Read thirty years ago and no specific recollections right now. My copy is in the basement someplace. His work was overlooked until 1900 when three other researchers essentially duplicated his discovery. Darwin never knew of it and had no idea of how inheritance might, in fact, work. Someone recently suggested that his numbers were too perfect and, therefore, faked—cf. the chapter on errors in Alder, above.
This is the first scientific proposal that the earth is a jigsaw puzzle, as many children have imagined on seeing the coasts of Africa and South America. There had been some mention of the idea before, Abraham Ortelius first proposed it in 1596, but it was never pursued in any depth. Wegener sets forth five arguments for continental drift: geodetic (perhaps the weakest), geophysical, geological, paleontological and biological, and paleoclimatic. In the end he notes two difficulties. The first is that he does not have a mechanism; but neither, he notes, do the people who propose a land bridge to explain some of the facts. Nor can he account for the extra mass comprising the mid-ocean ridges—never realizing that those ridges were the key to his missing mechanism. “It is probable, at any rate, that the complete solution of the problem of the driving forces will still be a long time coming, for it means the unraveling of a whole tangle of interdependent phenomena, where it is often hard to distinguish what is cause and what is effect.”
By this time the well-developed evidence of a biological relationship between now-separated continents rested on a fully-accepted notion of evolution.
A tongue-in-cheek look at geology at mid-century. If anyone has my copy, which was Father's, please return it.
A collection of recollective essays by the people who, over a ten year period, assembled the theory from the disparate pieces of evidence. Unlike continental drift, plate tectonics has no one seminal book presenting it as a whole theory—at least not until after it was well established. The strength of this book is that it shows the process of creating science, much as the first third of The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Its weakness is that it is a collection written long after the fact rather than a coherent narrative. If you want the full story from 1912 to 1968, look elsewhere—perhaps books by H. W. Menard, 1986, H. E. Le Grand, 1988, J. A. Stewart, 1990, or Kious and Tilling, 1997 (I haven't read them). The most interesting—and the most frustrating—essay is that by Peter Molnar on the application of plate tectonics to the dynamics of continents. Interesting because we live on continents with their fault zones and volcanoes; frustrating because of his obtuse writing style (“No drama is lost by a Greenland winter martyring drift's long-belittled champion, Alfred Wegener.”) which often requires two readings, and then still can be incomprehensible.