IV THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN GEOLOGY A History of Science | ||
LYELL AND UNIFORMITARIANISM
If molten matter exists beneath the crust of the earth, it must contract in cooling, and in so doing it
In support of this very startling contention Lyell gathered a mass of evidence of the recent changes in level of continental areas. He corroborated by personal inspection the claim which had been made by Playfair in 1802, and by Von Buch in 1807, that the coast-line of Sweden is rising at the rate of from a few inches to several feet in a century. He cited Darwin's observations going to prove that Patagonia is similarly rising, and Pingel's claim that Greenland is slowly sinking. Proof as to sudden changes of level of several feet, over
It became clear that the supposedly stable-land surfaces are in reality much more variable than the surface of the “shifting sea”; that continental masses, seemingly so fixed, are really rising and falling in billows thousands of feet in height, ages instead of moments being consumed in the sweep between crest and hollow.
These slow oscillations of land surfaces being understood, many geological enigmas were made clear— such as the alternation of marine and fresh-water formations in a vertical series, which Cuvier and Brongniart had observed near Paris; or the sandwiching of layers of coal, of subaerial formation, between layers of subaqueous clay or sandstone, which may be observed everywhere in the coal measures. In particular, the extreme thickness of the sedimentary strata as a whole, many times exceeding the depth of the deepest known sea, was for the first time explicable when it was understood that such strata had formed in slowly sinking ocean-beds.
All doubt as to the mode of origin of stratified rocks being thus removed, the way was opened for a more favorable consideration of that other Huttonian doc-
A LANDSCAPE AND TERRESTRIAL REPTILE OF THE MESOZOIC TIME
[Description: Image of A LANDSCAPE AND TERRESTRIAL REPTILE OF THE MESOZOIC TIME]But that this herculean labor of land-sculpturing could have been accomplished by the slow action of wind and frost and shower was an idea few men could grasp within the first half-century after Hutton propounded it; nor did it begin to gain general currency until Lyell's crusade against catastrophism, begun about 1830, had for a quarter of a century accustomed geologists to the thought of slow, continuous changes producing final results of colossal proportions. And even long after that it was combated by such men as Murchison, Director-General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, then accounted the foremost field-geologist of his time, who continued to believe that the existing valleys owe their main features to subterranean forces of upheaval. Even Murchison, however, made some recession from the belief of the Continental authorities, Élie de Beaumont and Leo-
IV THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN GEOLOGY A History of Science | ||