The Status of the Geological Sciences Circa 1800

Abstract

In her 1852 volume Outlines of Geology for Families and Schools, Rosina Zornlin explains that “Geology consists of an inquiry into the structure of the earth, and the nature and arrangement of the materials of which it is composed” (Zornlin 1852: 1). Such a definition would not seem out of place in a similar volume today, with the caveat that it does not mention the processes that shape the earth. However, it is important to note that geology as a science had undergone an, at times, particularly difficult and painful birthing process between1780 and 1830, one rife with tensions between science and religion as well as sometimes vociferous political debates between different theoretical schools (Laudan 1987). It is also important to understand that the fundamental vocabulary by which geology and other sciences are described today was not universally agreed upon in the first half of the nineteenth century. For example, before 1900 the term natural history roughly covered what today would include the biological and geological sciences, while natural philosophy encompassed the topics of physics and chemistry. It is also essential to recognize that not only was geological knowledge limited at the turn of the nineteenth century, but also the general understanding of chemistry and physics. For example, less than 40 chemical elements had been observed in nature by 1800. Dalton’s atomic theory of matter debuted in the first decade of that century, but Maxwell’s unified theory of electromagnetism would have to wait another five decades to be codified, and radioactivity only entered the scientific imagination in the last decade of the nineteenth century.