SummaryThis article surveys recent scholarship on the early history of British geology. It finds that many of the developments called for a decade ago by Dr Eyles and Dr Rappaport have not yet been realized. However, there has been progress in the broader understanding of geological ideas in their historical context, and a start has been made on the social history of the science. Some suggestions are offered as to a field of problems for the future, and a selective bibliography (...) of secondary materials, thematically arranged, is appended. (shrink)

Beginning the nineteenth-century and continuing down to the present, many authors writing on the history of geology and paleontology have attributed the theory that fossils were inorganic formations produced within the earth, rather than by the deposition of living organisms, to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Some have even gone so far as to claim this was the consensus view in the classical period up through the Middle Ages. In fact, such a notion was entirely foreign to ancient and medieval (...) thought and only appeared within the manifold of ‘Renaissance episteme,’ the characteristics of which have often been projected backwards by some historians onto earlier periods. This paper endeavors to correct this error, explain the development of the Renaissance view, describe certain ancient precedents thereof, and trace the history of the misinterpretation in the literature. -/- . (shrink)

In his discussion of Robert Hooke's geological ideas, David R. Oldroyd has suggested that ‘Hooke's daring cyclic earth theory may have seemed absurd to his contemporaries’. Following Oldroyd's suggestion, A. J. Turner has claimed that it is entirely understandable that Hooke's geological theories had no followers, ‘for, however plausible in themselves, they were quite implausible in the context of seventeenth century knowledge’. Gordon L. Davies has asserted that Hooke was too advanced for his time and that his geological ‘ideas made (...) no impact on his contemporaries’, and Rhoda Rappaport has said that ‘Hooke's geological work made virtually no impression on the writings of his British contemporaries’. (shrink)

Early in 1826, at the age of 28, Charles Lyell began writing the first of a series of articles for J. G. Lockhart, the new editor of theQuarterly review. These articles gave him his first opportunity to express to the educated public his views on the state of science in general, and of geology in particular, in English society. According to the convention of theQuarterly, each article was nominally a review of one or more recently published works, but like other (...) reviewers Lyell clearly chose them as ‘pegs’ on which to hang his own arguments. In content, the articles form a kind of ‘gradualistic’ series, rather like his own later interpretations of geological phenomena. At one end of the series (though published third) was an essay on the place of science in general in English university education. Another article (the first to appear in print) focused on some of the English institutions specifically devoted to science. Here there was a hint that the need for reform in the place of science in English society was not unrelated to a similar need for reform in Lyell's chosen branch of science. The next article enlarged on this hint by examining the publications of the Geological Society of London, on which Lyell had recently served as Secretary. This essay expressed for the first time in a general context Lyell's characteristic emphasis on the need for actualistic comparison between present and past. Finally, what he needed to complete the series was an article in which he could show in detail the positive explanatory advantages of following this method in geology. The ‘peg’ which he chose for this purpose was a single work, George Poulett Scrope'sMemoir on the geology of central France. (shrink)