The Coming of Evolution Part 2

There was a singular parallel between the early careers of these two men. Both were the sons of parents of ample means, and were thus freed from the distractions of a business or profession, while throughout life they alike remained exempt from family cares. Each of them received the ordinary education of the English upper cla.s.ses--Scrope at Harrow, and Lyell at Salisbury, in a school conducted by a Winchester master on public-school lines. In due course, the two young men proceeded to the University--Scrope to Cambridge, to come under the influence of the sagacious and eloquent Sedgwick, and Lyell to Oxford, to catch inspiration from the enthusiastic but eccentric Buckland. On the opening up of the continent, by the termination of the French wars, each of the young men accompanied his family in a carriage-tour (as was the fashion of the time) through France, Switzerland and Italy; and both utilised the opportunities thus afforded them, to make long walking excursions for geological study. They both returned again and again to the continent for the purpose of geological research, and in the year 1825, at the age of 28, found themselves a.s.sociated as joint-secretaries of the Geological Society. By this time they had arrived at similar convictions concerning the causes of geological phenomena--convictions which were in direct opposition to the views of their early teachers, and equally obnoxious to all the leaders of geological thought in the infant society which they had joined.

[Ill.u.s.tration: G Poulett Scrope]

It is interesting to note that each of these two young geologists arrived independently, _as the result of their own studies and observations_, at their conclusions concerning the futility of the prevailing catastrophic doctrines. This I am able to affirm, not only from their published and unpublished letters, but from frequent conversations I had with them in their later years.

Scrope, who was slightly the elder of the two friends, spent a considerable time in that wonderful district of France--the Auvergne--in the year 1821, and though he had not seen the map and later memoirs of Desmarest, he pourtrayed the structure of the country in a series of very striking panoramic views, and was led, independently of the great French observer, to the same conclusions as his concerning the volcanic origin of the basalts and the formation of the valleys by river-action.

Scrope was at that time equally ignorant of the views propounded both by Generelli and by Hutton.

By April 6th, 1822, Scrope had completed his masterly work _The Geology and Extinct Volcanoes of Central France_, and had despatched it to England. It would be idle to speculate now as to what might have been the effect of that work--so full of the results of accurate observation, and so suggestive in its reasoning--had it been published at that time.

It is quite possible that much of the credit now justly a.s.signed to Lyell, would have belonged to his friend. Unfortunately, however, Scrope, instead of seeing his work through the press, determined first to make another tour in Italy. He arrived at Naples just in time to witness and describe the grandest eruption of Vesuvius in modern times, that of October 1822. What he witnessed then--the blowing away of the whole upper part of the mountain and the formation of a vast crater 1000 feet deep--made a profound impression on Scrope's mind. His interest thus strongly aroused concerning igneous phenomena, Scrope continued his travels and observations on the volcanic rocks of the peninsula of Italy and its islands, and was thus led to a number of important conclusions in theoretical geology, which he embodied in a work, published in 1825, ent.i.tled _Considerations on Volcanos: the probable causes of their phenomena, the laws which determine their march, the disposition of their products, and their connexion with the present state and past history of the globe; leading to the establishment of a New Theory of the Earth_.

It is only right to point out that, in calling this book a _new_ 'Theory of the Earth,' Scrope had no intention of comparing it with Hutton's great work, with which he was at that time altogether unacquainted.

Nevertheless, his conclusions, though independently arrived at, were almost identical with those of the great Scotch philosopher. But Scrope made the same mistake as Hutton had done before him. He allowed his theoretical conclusions to precede, instead of following upon an account of the observations on which they were based. Scrope's book is certainly one of the most original and suggestive contributions ever made to geological science; but the very speculative character of a large portion of the work led to the neglect of the really valuable hypotheses and acute observations which it contained. In the preface, however, the author gives a most striking and complete summary of the doctrine of Evolution as opposed to Catastrophism, in the inorganic world, as will be shown by the following extracts:--

Geology has for its business a knowledge of the processes which are in continual or occasional operation within the limits of our planet, and the application of these laws to explain the appearances discovered by our Geognostical researches, so as from these materials to deduce conclusions as to the past history of the globe.

The surface of the globe exposes to the eye of the Geognost abundant evidence of a variety of changes which appear to have succeeded one another during an incalculable lapse of time.

These changes are chiefly,

I. Variations of level between different const.i.tuent parts of the solid surface of the globe.

II. The destruction of former rocks, and their reproduction under another form.

III. The production of rocks _de novo_ upon the earth's surface.

Geologists have usually had recourse for the explanation of these changes to the supposition of sundry violent and extraordinary catastrophes, cataclysms, or general revolutions having occurred in the physical state of the earth's surface.

As the idea imparted by the term Cataclysm, Catastrophe, or Revolution, is extremely vague, and may comprehend any thing you choose to imagine, it answers for the time very well as an explanation; that is, it stops further inquiry. But it has also the disadvantage of effectually stopping the advance of science, by involving it in obscurity and confusion.

If, however, in lieu of forming guesses as to what may have been the possible causes and nature of these changes, we pursue that, which I conceive the only legitimate path of geological inquiry, and begin by examining the laws of nature which are actually in force, we cannot but perceive that numerous physical phenomena are going on at this moment on the surface of the globe, by which various changes are produced in its const.i.tution and external characters; changes extremely a.n.a.logous to those of earlier date, whose nature is the main object of geological inquiry.

These processes are princ.i.p.ally,

I. The Atmospheric phenomena.

II. The laws of the circulation and residence of Water on the exterior of the globe.

III. The action of Volcanos and Earthquakes.

The changes effected before our eyes, by the operation of these causes, in the const.i.tution of the crust of the earth are chiefly--

I. The Destruction of Rocks.

II. The Reproduction of others.

III. Changes of Level.

IV. The Production of New Rocks from the interior of the globe upon its surface.

Changes which in their general characters bear so strong an a.n.a.logy to those which are suspected to have occurred in the earlier ages of the world's history, that, until the processes which give rise to them have been maturely studied under every shape, and then applied with strict impartiality to explain the appearances in question; and until, after a long investigation, and with the most liberal allowances for all possible variations, and an unlimited series of ages, they have been found wholly inadequate to the purpose, it would be the height of absurdity to have recourse to any gratuitous and unexampled hypothesis for the solution of these a.n.a.logous facts[29].

It was not till 1826, four years after the completion of the work, that Scrope managed to publish his book on the Auvergne, and to tear himself away from the speculative questions by which he had become obsessed. No one could be more candid than he was in acknowledging the causes of his failure to impress his views upon his contemporaries. Writing in 1858, he said of his _Considerations on Volcanos_:--

'In that work unfortunately were included some speculations on theoretic cosmogony, which the public mind was not at that time prepared to entertain. Nor was this my first attempt at authorship, sufficiently well composed, arranged or even printed, to secure a fair appreciation for the really sound and, I believe, original views on many points of geological interest which it contained. I ought, no doubt, to have begun with a description of the striking facts which I was prepared to produce from the volcanic regions of Central France and Italy, in order to pave the way for a favourable reception, or even a fair hearing, of the theoretical views I had been led from these observations to form[30].'

He adds that 'this obvious error was pointed out in a very friendly manner' in a notice of the memoir on _The Geology of Central France_, which was contributed by Lyell to the _Quarterly Review_ in 1827[31].

Scrope's geological career however--though one of so much promise--was brought to a somewhat abrupt termination. In 1821 he had married the last representative and heiress of the Scropes, the old Earls of Wiltshire, and soon afterwards he settled down at the family seat of Castle Combe, eventually devoting his attention almost exclusively to social and political questions. From 1833 to 1868, when he retired from Parliament, he was member for Stroud; and though he seldom took part in the debates, he became famous as a writer of political tracts, thus acquiring the sobriquet of 'Pamphlet Scrope.' He himself used to relate an amusing incident at his own expense. His great friend Lord Palmerston, on being greeted with the question, 'Have you read my last pamphlet?' replied mischievously, 'Well Scrope, I hope I have!'

It is sad to relate that, owing to a carriage accident, Scrope's wife became a confirmed invalid and he had no child to succeed to the estate.

Though cut off by other duties from the geological world, Scrope maintained his correspondence with his old friend Lyell, and, as we shall see in the sequel, was able to render him splendid service by the luminous though discriminating reviews of the _Principles of Geology_ in the _Quarterly Review_. Throughout his life, however, Scrope preserved a love of geology, and occasionally contributed to the literature of the science; and in his closing years, when unable to travel himself, he gave to others the means of carrying on the researches in which he had from the first been so deeply interested.

Fortunately for science, Lyell's devotion to geological study was not, like Scrope's, interrupted by the claims made upon him by social and political questions. Feeling though he did, with his friend, the deepest sympathy in all liberal movements, and being especially interested in the reform of educational methods, his geological work always had the first claim on his time and attention, and nothing was allowed to interfere with his scientific labours.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cha Lyell]

Charles Lyell was the eldest son of a Scottish laird, whose forbears, after making a fortune in India, had purchased the estate of Kinnordy in Strathmore, on the borders of the Highlands. Lyell's father was a man of culture, a good cla.s.sical scholar, a translator and commentator on Dante, and a cryptogamic botanist of some reputation.

Lyell's mother, an Englishwoman from Yorkshire, was a person of great force of character; this she showed when, on coming to Kinnordy, she found drunkenness so prevalent among the lairds of this part of Scotland, as to cause a fear on her part, that her husband might be drawn into the dangerous society: she therefore induced him, when their son Charles was only three months old, to abandon their Scottish home, and settle in the New Forest of Hampshire. Thus it came about that the future geologist, though born in Scotland, became, by education, habits and a.s.sociation, English.

Charles Lyell's attention was first drawn to geology by seeing the quartz-crystals and chalcedony exposed in the broken chalk-flints, which he, as a boy of ten, used to roll down, in company with his school-fellows, from the walls of Old Sarum. Like Charles Darwin, too, he became an ardent and enthusiastic collector of insects, and grew to be a tall and active young fellow, a keen sportsman, with only one drawback--a weakness of the eyes which troubled him through all his after life.

It was when at the age of seventeen he went to Oxford and came under the influence of Dr Buckland that Lyell first became deeply engrossed in geology.

Lyell used to tell many amusing stories of the oddities of his old teacher and friend Buckland. In his lectures, both in the University and on public platforms, Buckland would keep his audience in roars of laughter, as he imitated what he thought to be the movements of the iguanodon or megatherium, or, seizing the ends of his long clerical coat-tails, would leap about to show how the pterodactyle flew. Lyell became greatly attached to Buckland, who used to take him privately on geological expeditions. On one of these occasions, they were dining at an inn, where a gentleman at another table became greatly scandalised by Buckland's conversation and manners. The professor, seeing this, became more outrageous than ever, and on parting with Lyell for the night took the candle and placed it between his teeth, so as to illuminate the mouth-cavity exclaiming, 'There Lyell, practise this long enough and you will be able to do it as well as I do.' When Buckland had retired, the stranger revealed himself to Lyell as an old friend of his father's, adding 'I hope you will never be seen in the company of that buffoon again.' 'Oh! Sir,' said the startled undergraduate, 'that is my professor at Oxford!' But Buckland did not always originate the fun, for Lyell told me that, when the professor visited Kinnordy in his company, he led him a long tramp under promise of showing him 'diluvium intersected by whin d.y.k.es,' and, in the end, pointed to fields in a boulder-clay country separated by gorse ('whin') hedges ('d.y.k.es').

Buckland, as shown by his _Vindiciae Geologicae_ (1820) and his _Bridgewater Treatise_ (1836), was the most uncompromising of the advocates for making all geological teaching subordinate to the literal interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis; and in his _Reliquiae Diluvianae_ (1823) he stoutly maintained the view that all the superficial deposits of the globe were the result of the Noachian deluge! He was indeed the great leader of the Catastrophists, and it is not surprising to find Lyell, while still under his influence, scoffing at 'the Huttonians[32].'

That Buckland greatly influenced Lyell in his youth, especially by inoculating him with his splendid enthusiasm for geology, there can be no doubt; and Lyell, far as he departed in after life from the views of his teacher, never forgot his indebtedness to the Oxford professor. Even in 1832, in publishing the second edition of the first volume of his _Principles_, he dedicated it to Buckland, as one 'who first instructed me in the elements of geology, and by whose energy and talents the cultivation of science in the country has been so eminently promoted[33].'

On leaving Oxford in 1819, at the age of twenty-two, Lyell joined the Geological Society. What were the dominant opinions at that time on geological theory among the distinguished men, who were there laying the foundations of stratigraphical geology, we have already seen. Lyell, in his frequent visits to the continent, became a friend of the ill.u.s.trious Cuvier, whose strong bias for Catastrophism was so forcibly shown in his writings and conversation.

What then, we may ask, were the causes which led Lyell to abandon the views in which he had been instructed, and to become the great champion of Evolutionism?

It has often been a.s.sumed that Lyell was led by the study of Hutton's works to adopt the Uniformitarian' doctrines. But there is ample evidence that such was not the case. As late as the year 1839, Lyell wrote of Hutton, 'Though I tried, I doubt whether I fairly read half his writings, and skimmed the rest[34]'; and he emphatically a.s.sured Scrope 'Von Hoff has a.s.sisted me most[35].'

The fact is certain that Lyell, quite independently, arrived at the same conclusions as Hutton, _but by totally different lines of reasoning_.

As early as 1817, when Lyell was only twenty years of age, he visited the Norfolk coast and was greatly impressed by the evidence of the waste of the cliffs about Cromer, Aldborough, and Dunwich; and three years later we find him studying the opposite kind of action of the sea in the formation of new land at Dungeness and Romney Marsh. All through his life there may be seen the results of these early studies in a tendency which he showed to _overrate marine action_; the chief defect in his early views consisting in not fully realising the importance of that subaerial denudation--of which Hutton was so great an exponent. But it was in his native county of Forfarshire that Lyell found the most complete antidote to the Catastrophic teachings. Buckland had taught him that the 'till' of the country had been thrown down, just 4170 years before, by the Noachian deluge: while Cuvier had a.s.serted that the study of freshwater limestones proved them to differ from any recent deposit by their crystalline character, the absence of sh.e.l.ls and the presence of plant-remains, as well as by the occasional occurrence in them of bands of flint. As the result of this, Cuvier and Brongniart had declared that _the freshwater of the ancient world possessed properties which are not observed in that of modern lakes_[36]. Lyell visited Kinnordy from time to time between 1817 and 1824, and found on his father's estate and other localities in Strathmore a number of small lakes, lying in hollows of the boulder clay. These were being drained and their deposits quarried for the purpose of 'marling' the land; the excavations thus made showed that, under peat containing a boat hollowed out of the trunk of a tree, there were calcareous deposits, sometimes 16 to 20 feet in thickness, which pa.s.sed into a rock, solid and crystalline in character as the materials of the older geological formations and containing the stems and fruits of the freshwater plant _Chara_ (Stone wort).

With the help of Robert Brown the botanist, and of a.n.a.lyses made by Daubeny, with the advice of his life-long friend, Faraday, Lyell was able to demonstrate that from the waters of the Forfarshire lakes, containing the most minute proportions of calcareous salts, a limestone, identical in all respects with those of the older rocks of the globe, had been deposited, with excessive slowness, by the action of plant-life[37]. He was thus enabled to supply a complete refutation of the views put forward by Buckland and Cuvier.

Thus while Hutton had been led to his conclusion concerning evolution in the inorganic world, by studying the waste going on in the weathered crags and the flooded rivers of his native land, Lyell's conversion to the same views was mainly brought about by the study of changes due to the action of the sea along the English coasts, and by studying the evidence of constant, though slow, deposition of limestone-rocks, by the seemingly most insignificant of agencies.

Lyell however did not by any means neglect the study of the action of rain and rivers. During his visits to Forfarshire, he had his initials and the date cut by a mason on many portions of the rocky river-beds about his home. Fifty years afterwards (in 1874) I visited with him the several localities, to ascertain what amount of waste had resulted from the constant flow of water over these hard rocks. It was in most cases singularly small, the inscriptions being still visible, though deprived of their sharpness; even the sandy detritus carried along by the streams, being buoyed up by the water, had not been able in half a century to wear away a thickness of half-an-inch of the hard rock. The most singular result we noticed was, that the leaden small shot fired by sportsmen, in the Highland tracts, whence these streams flowed, had collected in great numbers in hollows formed by the young geologist's inscriptions.