Novel Science

FICTION and the INVENTION of NINETEENTH-CENTURY GEOLOGY

By Adelene Buckland

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-07968-4

Contents

INTRODUCTION. Formations……………………………………………1PART ONE Stories in Science…………………………………………ONE. Fictions of a Former World……………………………………..31TWO. The Story Undone………………………………………………56THREE. Lyell’s Mock Epic……………………………………………95FOUR. Maps and Legends……………………………………………..131PART TWO Science in Stories………………………………………..FIVE. Kingsley’s Cataclysmic Method………………………………….179SIX. Eliot’s Whispering Stones………………………………………221SEVEN. Dickens and the Geological City……………………………….247CONCLUSION. Losing the Plot…………………………………………274ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………277APPENDIX. “Lines on Staffa,” by Charles Lyell…………………………281NOTES…………………………………………………………….283BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………327INDEX…………………………………………………………….365

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Fictions of a Former World

On 14 June 1837, less than a week before Victoria’s accession to thethrone, the young anatomist Richard Owen attended his first meetingof the prestigious Geological Society of London. Entering SomersetHouse on the Strand, the neoclassical palace in which the Society’sapartments were housed, Owen had reason to feel excited. Geologywas the most controversial and the most celebrated of all the new sciences,and its Society combined these qualities in equal measure. Theonly major scientific society in Britain to permit discussion after the readingof papers, it was well-known for the liveliness of its debates. And on the nightin question, passions were running high over the classification of the oldestfossil-bearing rocks. “We had a grand battle at the Geological Society lastnight,” wrote one member the next morning, “in which I bore the brunt on ourside; but, though well banged, I was not beaten.” Watching the most eminentmen of science of the day battle, bang, and beat one another as they revolutionizedunderstandings of the structure and history of the earth, Owen musthave felt he had ringside seats to the best show in town.

And yet, in later years it was not the “grand battles” of Society meetingsthat he would recall. Rather, his memory settled on events that occurredmuch later in the evening. “After supper,” his wife Caroline wrote in her journal,at the London rooms of Lord Cole, Owen witnessed a coterie of leadinggeologists “play ‘high jinks,’ as immortalised by Sir Walter Scott in ‘RobRoy.'” Caroline muddled her Scott novels: “high jinks” is played by a groupof lawyers in the Edinburgh of the 1780s in Guy Mannering, not Rob Roy.But the rules of the game as Scott had set them out were adhered to precisely.Following the throwing of dice, “those upon whom the lot fell were obliged toassume and maintain, for a time, a certain fictitious character, or to repeat acertain number of fescennine [obscene] verses in a particular order.” In GuyMannering we have a description of one such “fictitious character” impersonatedby the players of the game: “a monarch, in an elbow-chair, placedon the dining-table, his scratch wig on one side, his head crowned with abottle-slider, his eye leering with an expression betwixt fun and the effects ofwine.” The “fescennine verses” there included “such crambo scraps of verseas these: ‘Where is Gerunto now? and what’s become of him / Gerunto’sdrowned because he could not swim, etc. etc.'” Though we can fairly assumethat the verse got a little bawdier than that within the boozy all-male confinesof Cole’s rooms, Scott’s crapulous monarch enthroned on a dining table wasfaithfully impersonated by the geologists. In this case the prominent naturalphilosopher George Stokes apparently “took the chair as king, and was excellentas the arbitrary monarch.” In both Scott’s 1815 description and its imitationhere over twenty years later, falling out of character or failure to recallthe verses in question “incurred forfeits”: drinking or paying a fine. And justas the Edinburgh lawyers are forced to drink or cough up if they slip intothe language of the law, for their geological imitators “all kind of scientificdiscourse was prohibited on pain of forfeit.”

What significance can we attach to the playing of such a game, by such men,in such circumstances? To what extent is the literary culture of nineteenth-centurymen of science—the books they read, the jokes and stories they told,the characters they admired or impersonated—worth considering as a categorythrough which they created new knowledge? Should our understandingof scientific exchange in the nineteenth century be confined solely to spaces,such as Somerset House, deliberately designated “scientific”? In this instanceit seems obvious that the geologists themselves would have answered with a resoundingyes. The rules of high jinks marked a boundary between science andsaturnalia “on pain of forfeit, and geological expressions” were banned “onpain of fighting the champion (Lord Cole’s brother) with hammers.” Indeed,Scott’s recording of the game encoded this division between professionallife and fiction: the drunken monarch of Guy Mannering, Mr. Pleydell, is onweekdays “a lively, sharp-looking gentleman, with a professional shrewdness inhis eye, and … a professional formality in his manners.” But on Saturdays hecasts off his lawyer’s wig and coat to carouse with his colleagues until the earlyhours of the morning. The conditions of the game itself, with its element ofperformance and its ban on professional discourse, signal its separation fromordinary working life.

And yet, both for Mr. Pleydell and for the geologists, high jinks had itsserious side. Guy Mannering is initially bewildered to stumble upon such ascrewy Pleydell outside office hours, but his timing actually turns out to havebeen quite fortuitous. As Pleydell admits, it is his policy to “always speak truthof a Saturday night.” “‘And sometimes through the week I should think,’ saidMannering.” “Why yes!” replies the honest Pleydell, “as far as my vocation willpermit.” The irony is obvious. It is only in play, only in fiction, only when heis drunk on a Saturday night, that Pleydell the lawyer can really tell the truth.Even more importantly, for the geologists, high jinks was an odd game to playin 1837, given that, in Scott’s account, “the custom of mixing wine and revelrywith serious business” was, by the 1780s, already “considered as old-fashioned,”and had been “forgotten” entirely by the time he penned the novel in 1815. Inimitating this extinct Scottish drinking game, we can therefore presume thatthe London geologists were precisely imitating the mode of social interactionthat Scott revived and represented for them: a rabble-rousing, all-male, collegiateidentity in which business and revelry were nominally separated butnonetheless remained closely linked. They were, after all, playing only withother geologists. In Owen’s account, the very same members of the Societywho had “banged” and “beaten” one another in debate just a few hours beforehandwere to be found celebrating together at Cole’s rooms, paying their finesinto the same coffers and knocking back the same tipple. Suddenly the prohibitionon shop talk acquires an added charge. For if the Geological Society wasunique in allowing the odd “battle” to be fought at its meetings, it would rarelyallow scientific disagreement to develop into all-out warfare. To do so wouldundermine geology’s reputation as both a gentlemanly and an empirical science,built on indisputable fact. In banning discussion of science after meetingsand replacing it with activities promoting friendship and fellowship, and withthe performance of fictional identities far removed from the real-life clashesperformed in the debating chambers, “high jinks” helped ensure that the gentlemanlyculture on which geological science depended remained intact.

Earthly Forms

In their reenactment of the eighteenth-century world of Guy Mannering, theLondon geologists claimed affinity with the prestigious intellectual enterpriseof the Scottish Enlightenment. But in doing so, they deliberately overlookedperhaps the most famous episode in the history of geology, whichhad taken place in Edinburgh at the very same time that Scott had writtenGuy Mannering. For between the convivial Edinburgh of the 1780s and itsmirthful reenactment in the 1830s, there had occurred a famously indecorousgeological controversy, which had convulsed the Edinburgh literati andthreatened to turn earth science into a public joke. Indeed, it was specificallyin order to overcome this ungentlemanly episode that the Geological Societyof London had first been formed. Articulating the power, prestige, and gentlemanlyrespectability of geology at a time when science was still marred by”social insecurity,” as Richard Yeo has put it, the gentlemen of the GeologicalSociety committed themselves to rescuing a science from the tatters in whichit lay on Edinburgh’s newly built boulevards.

It is hardly surprising that such geological pugnacity should have emergedin the Scottish capital. Edinburgh is perhaps the most geologically dramaticof any city in Europe: its buildings nestle in the crevices and shadows of theSalisbury Crags, Calton Hill, and Castle Rock, which looms over Prince’sStreet. And the geological dimensions of the landscape were inseparable fromthe city’s intellectual culture, as they were often used as evidence in its theoreticalbattles over the formation of the earth. In Guy Mannering, the protagonistis introduced to such Enlightenment luminaries as Adam Smith,Henry Home, and David Hume, but also to James Hutton, the author of acontroversial Theory of the Earth, which would come to dominate the geologicalfray that emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century. Hutton’s “theory,”like other Enlightenment cosmologies, considered the earth as a complex butordered whole whose past, present, and future could be fully explained by referenceto eternal law. Hutton’s world had no beginning or end. Continentswere perpetually wasted to the depths of the ocean floor, where they weremelted by the earth’s internal fires and fused into new rock masses. Poweredby heat, these new rocks were then thrust above sea level, forming new continents,which, in turn, were eroded back whence they came. The cycle wasdesigned to ensure the ongoing habitability of the earth: the decay of the rocksproduced life-sustaining soils, and their renovation ensured that the supplynever ran out (fig. 1.1). The earth’s eternal habitability in turn ensured the preservationof mankind and the ongoing development of his reasoning powers,of which Hutton’s text itself was evidence.

Hutton’s theory that all rocks were created by melting and fusion in thebowels of the earth had relied upon some controversial interpretations of therock record. The most problematic of these was his interpretation of granite.In the eighteenth century, “following well-established precedent,” the famousGerman mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner had argued that the earth hadbegun as a vast primordial ocean constituted by a thick mix of minerals andwater. Most layers of rock had been deposited, one atop the other, out of thisfluid, and could be classified with reference to the order of their deposition.The harder, relatively insoluble “Primary” or “primitive” rocks, such as graniteand marble, were often found at the bottom of the rock pile, out of all predictablesequence, and rarely contained fossils. These were usually interpretedas the oldest rocks. They were followed by a series of softer, often fossiliferous”Secondary” or “Flötz” rocks, such as limestone, which lay above them inmore obviously sequenced layers. This classification had been very successful:Werner had built upon largely consensual evidence from mineral chemistryto coin the concept of “rock formations,” each viewed as a historical entity,formed at a unique historical moment, rather than as a static “natural kind.”This concept gave geologists a powerful new research program by which theycould map those formations in space, interpreting rocks in broadly historicalsequence. In this scheme, Primary rocks were generally considered to be olderthan the Secondaries, and granite was the oldest rock of all. Granite was thebeginning. In Hutton’s cyclical scheme, of course, beginnings could not exist.In the Highlands, in Galloway, and on the Isle of Arran off the west coast ofScotland, Hutton found evidence to suggest that granite had not been depositedby water as the first in a long sequence of depositions. It had beensquirted upward in molten form through preexisting rock formations, as allother rocks before it had been, and as all newly formed rocks would be inthe future. Granite, he speculated, was not the oldest rock in the world. InHutton’s system, there was no such thing as the oldest rock at all.

Hutton first published his theory in 1788, in an eighty-page paper which attemptedto reproduce, in its literary form, the cyclical structures of the systemhe had described. After proselytizing that the entire globe was a machine or organism,Hutton considered, in isolation, several of the processes that made uphis system. He gave chemical proofs that heat and pressure could consolidateloose sands and gravels into molten substances, and he used cabinet specimensto show that these molten substances could penetrate already formed rocksfrom below (fig. 1.2). Though he concluded by explaining the cyclical systemof “decay and renovation” that sustained the earth, he never quite joined thedots between his arguments about specific processes within the cycle, he barelydiscussed the “decay” that constituted one-half of his system, and he never fullyreturned to his opening sense of the global comprehensiveness that his theoryclaimed. What’s more, when he published a longer version of the theory in1795, Hutton did not provide any additional proofs that the earth was in perpetualdecay, but merely strengthened his emphasis on the ferocious, activepower of fire, unbalancing the text even further. Adding hundreds of pages ofappendices in defense of his principles, Hutton rendered a system premised onthe elegant design of the earth in prolix and ungainly prose. The form of thetext and the form of the world it described were out of kilter. By the turn of thecentury, Hutton was dead and the theory was fading from memory.

But in 1802 John Playfair, professor of natural history at the Universityof Edinburgh, rewrote Hutton’s theory. Aged fifty-four, Playfair was a distinguishedmathematician, a fashionable bachelor known for championing femaleintellectual equality, and a lively essayist on the verge of a seventeen-yearcareer reviewing for the prestigious Edinburgh Review. Three years later hewould fight to ensure that university posts in Edinburgh could remain secular,and he used both his gregarious personality and his journalistic powersto bemoan the state of mathematics at Cambridge and to promote the studyof continental algebra. This broad intellectual span was integral to Playfair’srewriting of Hutton’s theory in a new, more secular guise as Illustrations of theHuttonian Theory of the Earth, and his widely admired literary talents enabledhim to integrate argument and proof more fully than his predecessor hadmanaged. Playfair removed Hutton’s deistic metaphysics from the text, “offeringthe new century a bowdlerised version that reduced it to a purely mechanicalsystem of physical processes interacting in dynamic equilibrium,” aligningit with the prestigious mechanical system of Newton’s physics. The earlychapters of Playfair’s volume established evidence for the widespread decay ofrocks, which Hutton had glossed over, and synthesized Wernerian interpretationsof the strata with a more fully fleshed-out elaboration of Hutton’s cycle.Proving through prose the “originality, grandeur, and simplicity” of Hutton’stheory, Playfair made it newly elegant and readable.

In Playfair’s reformulation, Hutton’s theory had not met “the general approbation”not because it lacked evidence or proof, but because the humanimagination was naturally resistant to conceiving of the world in such vastterms. “The greatness of the objects which it sets before us, alarms the imagination,”he wrote:

the powers which it supposes to be lodged in the subterraneous regions; aheat which has subdued the most refractory rocks, and has melted beds ofmarble and quartz; and expansive force, which has folded up, or broken thestrata, and raised whole continents from the bottom of the sea; these arethings with which, however certainly they may be proved, the mind cannotsoon be familiarised.

“The greatness of the objects which it sets before us, alarms the imagination.”The first part of Playfair’s sentence sets the pattern for the rest, dividing acomplex subject, the “greatness” of the theory’s matter and forces, from itsverb and object, “alarms” and “imagination.” In this case the phrase is interruptedby a modifying clause, the action of Hutton’s theory which “sets” thatgreatness “before us.” The effect is to attribute agency to Hutton himself, ifnot for creating the “greatness of the objects of the earth,” then for bringingthose subterraneous “powers” into existence for the human imagination. Theearth is forceful and formidable, partly because Hutton has made it so. Theinversion into the passive voice at the end of the sentence further accentuatesthe sense of Hutton’s imaginative audacity: the heat and rocks and forces ofhis vision are “things with which … the mind cannot soon be familiarised.”Syntactically at least, disbelief in Hutton’s theory is a failure not of the theoryitself but of the imagination.

As the sentence swells, a litany of clauses massed between semicolons,Playfair presents his reader with a grand vision of the earth that moves beyondthe level of the individual imagination. The modifying clauses are dropped,and the emphasis on Hutton’s reimagining of the earth is dissolved in itssublime, self-perpetuating “heat” and “expansive force.” A new world comesinto being, free even from the creative mind of the philosopher, and Playfairoverwhelms us with its power. The abstract nouns with which Playfair beginseach new clause pile atop one another, each performing grander and more extendedactions than the last: while the “powers” are passively “lodged” in theearth’s bowels, the “heat” has actively “subdued” and “melted” rocks, and the”expansive force” has violently “folded up,” “broken,” and “raised” strata andcontinents. Playfair lingers long on the bewildering amplitude of Hutton’searth before bringing the sentence into order. Raising Hutton’s theory intograndeur by transforming particular rocks and continents into the objects ofvast and abstract “powers” and “forces,” accumulating those forces beyond thebounds of syntactic coherence before bringing them into grammatical relation,Playfair enacts both the capaciousness of Hutton’s theory of the earthand its power as a single, general law that makes comprehensive sense of seeminglydisparate phenomena.

Such dramatic prose enables Playfair to make provocative claims about scientificmethod. “The change and movement also,” he continues,

which this theory ascribes to all that the senses declare to be most unalterable,raise up against it the same prejudices which formerly opposed thebelief in the true system of the world; and it affords a curious proof, howlittle such prejudices are subject to vary, that as Aristarchus, an ancient followerof that system, was charged with impiety for moving the everlastingVESTA from her place, so Dr Hutton, nearly on the same ground, has beensubjected to the very same accusation.
(Continues…)Excerpted from Novel Science by Adelene Buckland. Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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