4 Eminent Founders of Modern Geology | Founders | Geology

In this article we will discuss about the four eminent founders of modern geology with their contribution.

Founder # 1. Werner:

Abraham Gottlieb Werner was born in Upper Lusatia in 1749. The great result of his geological work was the discovery that rocks do not occur in inextricable confusion, but that they rest, the one upon the other in a definite order over considerable areas. He contended that they had all been laid down under water, but this idea has been found to be incorrect.

The investigation of rocks and crystals was what fascinated him when a boy, and when he left school he helped his father in the smelting houses connected with an iron foundry.

In 1769 he went to the Mining Academy of Freiberg and studied the art of mining, and afterwards studied law at the Leipzig University. Later on he returned to his old love, Mineralogy, and published a book on the outward forms of minerals, which was a very remarkable production.

Soon afterwards he became Inspector and Teacher of Mining and Mineralogy in his old Mining Academy, and remained there for forty years, and it was largely due to him that this local establishment for the training of Saxon miners became a great institution of world-wide fame.

Gifted with a remarkable personal charm he worked hard for his students, and his stimulating lectures incited them to pursue their studies with enthusiasm. He arranged the rocks of the earth in a series of formations which, he taught, were recognizable all over the world in the same order and with the same characters.

When he produced this system he had never been out of the neighborhood of Saxony, and as but little was then known about the geology of the earth he could not have gained much information on the subject by reading the writings of others.

He adopted the idea that the whole earth had once been covered by an ocean at least as deep as the highest moun­tain, and he believed that the solid rocks, which now form most of the dry land, had been dissolved in that ocean and gradually precipitated from its waters. His oldest, or “primitive,” rocks were, he said, entirely formed in this way, and these included the very oldest, which was granite, then rocks called gneiss, slate, basalt, and syenite, which, he said, was the youngest.

Then came his “transition” rocks, which consisted chiefly of chemical precipitates, such as limestone, but also included the earliest mechanical deposits, that is to say, those formed by the wearing away, or denudation, of the older primitives. These marked a lowering of the ocean-level.

Then came rocks which occupied a still lower level consisting in part of chemical precipitates, but in the main of mechanically formed material, and included limestones, sandstones, gypsum, rock-salt, coal, etc., while latest of all came an Alluvial series made up of clays, sands, gravel, and peat.

The Wernerian theory of a primeval universal ocean which rose above the mountains of to-day led to his followers being dubbed Neptunists.

Werner tried to prove the truth of his theory by stating:

(1) That he found the older beds at the hilltops and the younger ones appearing at lower and lower levels, and

(2) That the highest mountains were of rocks formed entirely of chemical precipitates, while the mechanical sediments were formed later on, and became more frequent down to the present time.

Both these statements have been shown to be unjustifiable when made about the whole earth, though they may be true in part of some particular locality. One great difficulty in the way of accepting the theory of a vast primeval ocean was the finding out of where it had gone. This difficulty was never satisfactorily solved.

Some attempted to explain its disappearance by saying that it had been attracted to other celestial bodies, while others assumed the existence of vast subterranean caverns into which it had retired.

Later on when it was found that certain rocks, which were declared to be chemical precipitates, occurred out of their due order, and much higher above sea-level than the earlier Wernerians had supposed, the later disciples had to recall the vanished ocean, raise it again over the hills from which it had once receded, and allow it once more to vanish into space or to slink back again to its lair.

Another difficulty arose when the chemical side of the theory was considered. Wernerians held that the globe and its surrounding waters were never at a high temperature and, even if the latter were boiling, they could not have held in solution the so-called chemically precipitated rocks.

Werner, of course, had to fit modern volcanoes and molten lavas into his theory of the universe. There was no room in his theory for a hot interior, so he adopted the old idea that volcanoes were due to subterranean combustion of beds of coal.

Soon after his appointment at Freiberg he visited a famous hill capped by a rock called Basalt, now known to be an ancient lava. He declared that he could find no trace of its volcanic origin, and went on to assert that all basalts could not be of volcanic origin, and later that all basalts were of aqueous origin.

But the similarity of basalt to some of the modern lavas was too obvious to escape his practised eye, so he declared that the modern lavas were due to the fusion of some old deposits of basalt by the heat of the burning mountain. Again he, like other geologists, had noticed that the earth’s surface was frequently cracked, and that one side of the crack had moved in a more or less vertical direction.

Not recognising that there is an enormous amount of energy stored up in the earth’s interior, he explained these facts by saying that the rocks formed by precipitation had at first been moist and as they dried fissures formed and were thus superficial phenomena, and were often filled up by mineral matter deposited from water which had dis­solved it and made its way in from above. Hence he drew no distinction between veins of minerals which were filled by precipitation from water and veins of molten rocks squeezed up from below.

As we look back now at the immense superstructure of theory based on little or no evidence of fact we may marvel how it was that the name of Werner was such a one to conjure with in days gone by. Even in his lifetime his theories were widely disputed, and they began to be overthrown by the patient work in the field of French and English geologists.

His great achievement was the point­ing out of a definite sequence amongst the rocks, and his personal enthusiasm and power of creating it in others did much to further a knowledge of the subject which he loved so well. He died in 1817, and geology owes much to him, but one of his greatest pupils confessed that his death greatly contributed to the progress of geology.

Founder # 2. Hutton:

James Hutton was born in Edinburgh in 1726, there he went to the High School when a boy, and to the University afterwards, studying at first mathematics and then chemistry-

Later he was articled to a Writer to the Signet, but law proving distasteful, he was found trying to teach his fellow- clerks chemistry, so it is not to be wondered at that he forsook the office and studied medicine. Afterwards he abandoned medicine and interested himself in agriculture, and in 1752 went to live with a farmer in Norfolk who acted as his landlord and instructor.

During his many tramps through various parts of England he seems to have poked about in pits and cliffs, studying the different soils.

He took a farm in Berwickshire and led the life of a country farmer till 1768, but during tours in Ross and Caithness and on journeys to Aberdeen and elsewhere he steadily accumulated facts about the rocks and soils with true Scotch thoroughness.

On retiring from his farm he went to live in Edinburgh, where he entered the scientific society of that city and began the work which will be always connected with his name, the book entitled the Theory of the Earth.

On his country rambles he had occupied himself largely in trying to find out how the changes which have occurred on the earth’s surface had come about, and his belief grew that the causes acting now to change that surface had also acted in the far distant past, and that river-action and sea- action had produced in times long gone by just such accumulations of gravel, sand, and mud as they are pro­ducing now.

This was a view which was not acceptable to many, for geologists of those days tried to explain much by assuming that sudden convulsions had occurred, and so people got to look at past times as times of marvels and to imagine the conditions of the past as having been very different from those of the present. Hutton died in 1797, and his work stands for all time as a monument of what can be done by careful observation and logical reasoning.

According to the Huttonian theory of the earth, the internal heat of the globe has in the past caused the in­trusion of molten material amongst the rocks which have been formed by the ordinary processes of nature which we can see now in action. He found plenty of evidence Of such intrusions in the region round Edinburgh, and thought that the large masses of a rock called Granite, which he saw in other regions, had also been squeezed up from below in a molten condition. Here he was in direct opposition to Werner, who regarded granites as chemical precipitates from an ocean.

Hutton sought to confirm his theory about the origin of granite by going on many an expedition to various parts of Scotland, and on his visit to the Galloway hills he must have been delighted to find splendid examples of intrusion, for round the great granite masses of that area one can see large and small veins of granite running off from the main mass and worming their way through the neighbouring sedimentary rocks.

Another fundamental assumption by Hutton was that beneath his “secondary” beds of rock there was an older land surface. This he noted at several places, but it was particularly obvious in the Lammermuir hills, where a coarse beach-deposit of Old Red Sandstone lay irregularly on almost vertical older beds.

On account of the igneous origin which Hutton and his school claimed for granites and other rocks they were called Vulcanists, to distinguish them from the Wernerian Neptunists.

Hutton’s method was very different from that employed by his predecessors in this path of knowledge. They began by an explanation of the origin of things and on a founda­tion of theory erected a building of speculation. He thought it best first to see what evidence there is in the earth which will enable us to understand her history, so he collected facts and then arranged them so that they told their own story.

This great idea that the past can be explained by the present is so familiar to us now that we are apt to forget what we owe to the remarkable insight of the man who first grasped it.

His constant investigations of quarries and cliffs showed him that everywhere the earth’s surface was not in the past as it is now. Usually he noticed a parallel arrange­ment of the various beds of rock. These varied in their nature, but agreed in the main in being formed of materials which had been derived from older rocks.

He noticed how similar these rocks often were to deposits now being formed beneath the sea, and the occurrence of these beds over vast areas led him to look to the sea as the only large extent of water beneath which they could have been deposited.

Hence his conclusion that the beds of rock which make up the great bulk of the earth’s crust were sediments derived from former masses of land. He, like Werner, recognised a primary series of rocks, but he thought them not chemical precipitates, but compacted and altered sedi­ments of an early age. On these rested his secondary strata partly formed from the primary ones by denudation.

The compacting of these originally soft deposits he put down to the earth’s internal heat, as in his time nothing was known of the hardening of a rock by pressure or by the soaking into it of water containing a mineral called Silica in solution and the deposition of that silica which can thus bind the particles of a soft rock into a hard mass.

Again, his personal observation showed him that in many cases the beds of rock were tipped up, even at times into a vertical position. The Wernerian idea of deposition by precipitation in these cases was absurd, and Hutton’s view was that earth movements had taken place and resulted in places in the crumpling of the originally hori­zontal strata.

These conclusions being proved, as he considered, by the facts that he had observed, he was led to speculate on their cause and believed it to be the earth’s heat.

His view of volcanoes was, not that they were burning mountains, but that they communicated with a hot interior and were to be regarded as safety valves which prevented land elevation and earthquakes. The earth’s central portion might, he thought, be a fluid molten mass.

Hence he was led to the theory of the injection of granite from below, and regarded it as newer than the rocks over­lying it, while the Wernerians looked on it as the oldest or primitive rock.

Like Werner, he made no distinction between mineral veins and veins of granite and other molten rocks. Werner regarded them both as veins caused by the deposition of matter from solution in water, Hutton as veins of molten rock squeezed in from below. We now believe the mineral veins to have been produced by deposition from aqueous solution, while the granite veins we regard as true veins of intrusion of molten material.

But Hutton looked forwards as well as backwards. His expeditions brought him everywhere in contact with the results of denudation, and he saw that every rock was being worn away, even the very hardest, and, while the whole visible surface is being attacked, that it is along the lines of running water that the waste reaches a maximum.

In this way he arrived at a theory of valley formation. No sudden convulsion had split one side of a valley away from the other, but the patient sawing action of a river carry­ing stones along its bed had gradually, during the progress of perhaps thousands of years, produced the marvellous results now to be seen in our mountain and hill regions.

The school which owed its existence to his genius has been called the Uniformitarian school, for it regards the forces of nature as having acted uniformly from the earliest times of which we have any knowledge down to the present day. Consequently it argues that by observing the effects produced by those forces now we are able to get information about the effects which were produced in days gone by and which will be produced in years to come.

Founder # 3. William Smith:

“The father of English geology,” as William Smith has been called, was born in Oxfordshire in 1769. His great contribution to the science of geology was a map of England on which he represented the different kinds of rock that lay below the surface soil. Such a map is called a Geological Map, and no one before he did it had made one. He was a firm believer in the idea that the rocks occurred in a definite order, one over the other, and tried to prove this by noting the succession of the rocks seen in various places.

As a boy he was intensely keen on collecting fossils in the quarries near his home. On growing up he started his career as surveyor to an engineer, and assisted in making a survey of the parish in Oxfordshire in which he lived. Afterwards he travelled across Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Warwickshire, and became acquainted with the clay, limestone, and sandstone of those counties.

In 1793 he was surveying for a canal, and what he had seen of the rocks before led him to think that the upper beds through which the canal had to go were not horizontal but were all inclined at a small angle to the east.

This supposition was tested by leveling in two parallel valleys and found to be correct, for the red sandstone below, the “Lias” clay in the middle, and the limestone on the top all sloped down from the west towards the east.

In 1794 a canal bill was passed by Parliament, and Smith with two members of a committee of management made an extensive tour of investigation through England and Wales. Smith was intent on discovering whether the eastward slope of the beds he had proved in one locality held good over a larger tract of country.

He found that the beds of rock seen at Bath and Bristol stretched for hundreds of miles into the north of England, and they always were found in the same order of succession and had a general easterly slope, or dip as the geologist now calls it.

So far he had not paid much attention to careful fossil- collecting, but now, engaged on the works of the Somerset­shire Coal Canal, he found certain fossils in the Lias clay and certain others in the overlying limestone, while the red sandy beds below the Lias clay yielded him no fossils at all.

Hence he concluded that each stratum (or layer) had been successively the bed of the sea, and that each stratum could be recognised by an examination of its fossils. Numbers of people before and during his time had made collections of fossils just because they were beautiful things to look at.

Smith was the first to pay attention to the fact that they were arranged in order by nature in definite strata. Like Hutton, he was extremely averse to assuming convulsive changes in order to explain the present appear­ance of the earth’s surface. Unlike Hutton, he never published an important book, but what he did try to make was a map of England and Wales on which he represented the different kinds of rock by different colors.

He made such a map of the neighborhood of Bath, where he came to live in 1798. There, too, he became acquainted with a clergyman of the name of Richardson, who had done much fossil-collecting round that town.

Richardson agreed that his fossils could be arranged in the order of the strata in which they occurred, though the connection between fossils and strata was new to his mind, and he would not at first accept the further conclusion, to which Smith had arrived, that the same strata were always found in the same order of superposition and contained the same peculiar fossils. But extended investigation proved the truth of this wide generalisation.

Smith’s geological map was published in 1815, a date also connected with another great British achievement else­where.

The remainder of his life was lived under very adverse financial conditions, but nothing could damp his geological ardor, and he made many an expedition to the midland counties and to the north of England.

In 1831 the Geological Society of London awarded him the first Wollaston medal, and in its resolution of January 11, 1831, we read, ” That the first Wollaston medal be given to Mr. William Smith, in consideration of his being a great original discoverer in English geology; and especially for his being the first, in this country, to discover and to teach the identification of strata and to determine their succession by means of their imbedded fossils.”

In 1839 he was on his way to the meeting of the British Association at Birmingham, and was tracing out the boundaries of some of the divisions of the oolite rocks, when he contracted an illness which soon ended in his death.

Founder # 4. Sir Charles Lyell:

The claim of Lyell to be considered as one of the founders of geology lies in the fact that he wrote a book, for his Principles of Geology was an epoch- making work. In it he followed Hutton in trying to explain former changes by observing those now in progress, but he went farther than Hutton in not only investigating Scotland in order to support the theory, but in ransacking Europe and America for his evidence.

In his extensive travels he continually came across geological facts of great significance, and gave accounts of them, either in his book or to the Geological Society in London.

Lyell was born in Forfarshire in 1797, but lived from boyhood in England. At the early age of ten he showed a remarkable taste for natural history, especially for ento­mology, while later on, when he went up to Oxford, his attendance at Dr. Buckland’s lectures on geology seems to have given him a bent towards the science to which he afterwards devoted his life.

In 1818 he made a tour in France and Switzerland. On his passage through Paris he saw a collection of fossils belonging to the great French naturalist, Cuvier (1769-1832), which must have had a marked effect on his mind, and on his journey to Switzerland he was particularly struck with the Jura mountains.

Later on he saw glaciers, witnessed avalanches falling, and investigated the results of a great flood which had occurred in the previous summer.

The actual sight of changes now proceeding on a far grander scale than could be observed in Britain widened his views, and he became a supporter of Hutton’s ideas and averse to joining the school of geologists who sought to explain alterations on the earth’s surface by sudden convulsions.

After some communications to the Geological Society about the geology of Forfarshire and Sussex, he was elected in 1823 to be one of its secretaries. A few years later we find him reading an important paper on some elephant bones which had been found near Salisbury, in which he wrote about frost, rain, and running water as the excavators of valleys.

In 1828 he went to the district of Auvergne where there is a remarkable series of volcanoes and lava streams. These are of a comparatively recent age, but the volcanoes have not been active in historic times. In one place Lyell found a cone which had been breached on both sides by a lava stream, and the molten rock had on one side flowed down into a valley and blocked it up.

A lake had been formed behind the dam of lava, and the stream, which had issued from the lake, had evidently cut a channel through the dam, and Lyell found that he could stand on the upper surface of the old lava flow and look down the chasm to the river flowing at the bottom of the gorge it had cut.

Impressed with the idea that in order to understand dead volcanoes he must study living ones, Lyell went south through Turin to Naples. At Naples he saw a large collec­tion of fossils which an Italian geologist was arranging from the beds of rock which are called Tertiary, and which are amongst the newest rocks that are known.

When at Naples he visited the Island of Ischia and found there about thirty species of shells, some of them from beds 2000 feet above the sea, all of which, with one or two exceptions, were species now living in the Mediterranean.

He visited Vesuvius and Etna, and returning through Paris found that a French geologist was just publishing a book about the Tertiary beds of the Paris district.

It was during these years that Lyell was engaged on his great work, the Principles of Geology, and while writing the preliminary chapters on the History of Geology he was seized with the desire of visiting parts of the Continent, particularly to acquire information about the Tertiary beds. On returning to England, however, the publication of the book was again postponed while he examined the recent English deposits of East Anglia.

At last, however, in 1830, the first volume of the Principles appeared. Its influence on geologists was profound, and it will remain for all time a “storehouse of facts, a mine of information, and a model of logical argument.”

In the same year Lyell went to the south of France and to Catalonia, and in the following one to the volcanic district of the Eifel, and in 1832 published the second volume of his book.

The first one had treated mainly of the forces of nature, the second one dealt chiefly with the changes in the life which existed on the earth. In his Preface to the 9th edition he says that the Principles include “an investiga­tion of the permanent effects of causes now in action, which may serve as records to after ages of the present condition of the globe and its inhabitants.”

As the years went on edition after edition of his book was published, and as fresh facts were continually being accumulated some of his earlier conclusions had to be con­siderably modified if not abandoned. But Lyell’s mind seemed always fresh and he showed continually a remark­able candor and love of truth.

In 1833 his third volume appeared, and in it we find for the first time the Tertiary beds divided into a threefold division called Eocene (= dawn of the recent), Miocene (= less recent), and Pliocene (= more recent).

Just as in Ischia he had found fossilized shells of animals now living in the Mediterranean, so in East Anglia he found that a very large number of the fossil species were those which were still to be found alive. His view was that existing genera were to be found first in Eocene beds, that in the Miocene 17 per cent of the species were still living while the remainder had become extinct, while the Pliocene beds contained a very large proportion of living species.

This was a very important statement, for it fixed men’s minds on the view that the life of the present is descended from that of the past.

His journeys to distant lands did not cease when he had completed his monumental work. He made tours in Denmark and Sweden and wrote of the proofs of the gradual uprise of parts of the latter country. He visited America twice and published several papers on the geology which he saw while there.

He went a second time to the Auvergne and wrote of its lava streams and its Tertiary fossils, and his last paper to the Geological Society concerned itself with Madeira, where he went in 1854.

But his activity was unabated, and his principal occupa­tion seems to have been the accumulation of fresh informa­tion which he could introduce into new editions of his Principles.

One of his American journeys is of great interest for it brought him across a huge swamp in Virginia, and he con­sidered that the black peaty soil in it might, under proper conditions, give rise to coal.

Again on an excursion to North Italy he saw much evidence of the former extension of glaciers far beyond their limits of his day, and he found in some of the sections which had been cut through the deposits due to the glaciers, appearances which reminded him very forcibly of what he had seen in Forfarshire and Norfolk. He became firmly convinced that there had been, comparatively recently, a period of Arctic cold in British regions.

Still another paper was the outcome of visits to Etna, and he used all the evidence he saw on these various tours to explain things that had happened in far distant geological times.

Lyell was made a baronet as a recognition of his great work in geology and lived till 1875, in which year he died and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the appropriate anthem at his funeral being ” His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth for evermore.”