Hutton is undoubtedly a sharp-eyed, very talkative person and a pleasant partner. His understanding of the mysterious and slow formation of the earth is unparalleled. It's a pity that he won't write down his views in a form that everyone can basically understand. A biographer sighed that he "knows almost nothing about how to use language". People almost want to sleep when they read every line he writes. In his 1795 masterpiece Earth Theory and Evidence and Interpretation, he discussed ... Oh, a question:
The world we live in is not made up of the material that constituted the direct predecessor of the earth at that time, but the material that we think is the third generation of the earth. Before the earth appeared on land, our present land was still under the sea.
However, he is almost a man. He wisely initiated geology and changed our understanding of the earth. Hutton 1726 was born in a wealthy Scottish family and enjoyed comfortable material conditions, so he was able to spend most of his life in a relaxed way and improve his knowledge in an all-round way. He studied medicine, but found that he didn't like medicine, so he changed to agriculture. He has been farming in a leisurely and scientific way on his own farm in Beric County. 1768 Tired of land and sheep, he moved to Edinburgh. He established a very successful enterprise, producing ammonium chloride from ash, and was busy with various scientific research. At that time, Edinburgh was the active center of intellectuals, and Hutton was at home in this hopeful environment. He became a leading member of a club called the Oyster Club. He spent many nights there with others, including economist Adam Smith, chemist joseph black and philosopher david hume, and occasionally with Benjamin Franklin and james watt.
According to the tradition of that era, Hutton was interested in almost everything, from minerals to metaphysics. Among them, he carried out chemical experiments, investigated the methods of mining coal mines and building canals, investigated salt mines, speculated on genetic mechanism, collected fossils, and put forward a theory about the composition and movement law of rain and air. However, he is most interested in geology.
In that era of reading, among many interesting questions, one has long puzzled people-that is why marine fossils such as ancient clam shells are often found on the top of the mountain. How on earth did they get there? Many people think they have found the answer. They are divided into two opposing camps. Hydraulics believe that everything on the earth, including seashells on high places, can be explained by the rise and fall of sea level. They believe that mountains, hills and other landforms are as old as the earth itself, but some changes have taken place in the process of being washed away by water during the global flood.
The opposite is chaebol. They believe that there are many dynamic motives, among which volcanoes and earthquakes are constantly changing the surface of the planet, but obviously they have nothing to do with the distant sea. Prudentism also poses a difficult problem: when there is no flood, where does the water flow? If sometimes there is enough water to flood the Alps, then excuse me, after cooling down, for example, now, where has all this water gone? In their view, the earth is subjected to forces from deep inside and forces from the surface. However, they can't convincingly explain how the clam shell reached the top of the mountain.
It was in the process of considering these problems that Hutton put forward a series of unusual opinions. When he looked at his farmland, he saw that rocks had been corroded and turned into soil, and soil particles were washed away by streams and rivers and taken to other places for deposition. He realized that if this process continued until the earth died naturally, the earth would eventually be polished very smoothly. However, he is surrounded by mountains. Obviously, there must be other processes, some form of renewal and uplift, creating new hills and new mountains, and so on. He believes that the marine fossils on the top of the mountain were not deposited during the flood, but rose with the mountain itself. He also speculated that the geothermal energy inside the earth created new rocks and continents and pushed up new mountains. To put it mildly, geologists are not willing to understand the full meaning of this view until 200 years later. At this time, they finally adopted the theory of plate tectonics. In particular, Hutton's theory suggests that the formation of the earth takes a long time, much longer than anyone imagined. There are many profound insights in it, which are enough to completely change our understanding of this planet.
1785, Hutton wrote a long paper on his own views and read it out at several meetings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. It hardly attracted everyone's attention. The reason is not difficult to find. To some extent, this is the way he read the paper to the audience:
In one case, the forming force is inside an independent object. This is because, after the object is activated by heat, it is through the reaction of the unique substance of the object that the cracks that form the vein are formed. In another case, again, the cause is an external object that forms a vein. The most violent fracture and tear has occurred; But that reason is still working hard; It does not appear in the context, because it is not in every crack and fault of solid objects on our earth, where specific substances of minerals or veins can be found.
Needless to say, almost no audience can understand what he is saying. Friends encouraged him to expand his theory, hoping that he could explain it clearly in a larger space. This is very touching. Hutton spent the next 10 years preparing his masterpiece and published two volumes in 1795.
These two books add up to nearly 1000 pages, which is worse than what his most pessimistic friend feared. It's incredible. In addition, nearly half of the contents of this work are quoted from French materials and still appear in French. The third volume was very unattractive, and it was not published until 1899, which was more than a century after Hutton's death. The fourth and final volume was not published at all. Hutton's On Earth is well qualified to be elected as the most important scientific work with the least readers (if there are not many other such books, so to speak). Even Lyell Charles, the greatest geologist in the19th century who has read all the books, admits that he really can't understand this book.
Fortunately, Hutton found Po Swell in John Fair. Playfair is a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and a close friend of Hutton. Not only did he write beautiful articles, but also because of his years around Hutton, he knew what Hutton actually wanted to say in most cases. 1802, five years after Hutton's death, playfair published a simplified version of Hutton's Principles, entitled "Notes on Hutton's Earth Theory". This book is welcomed by people who are interested in geology. 1802 There are only a few such people. However, things are about to change. So, how has the situation changed?
1in the winter of 807, London 13 like-minded people got together at the * * * Club Hotel in Langak Street, Covent Garden Square, and set up a catering club, which was later named Geological Society. Learn to meet once a month and exchange views on geology while drinking a glass or two of Madeira white wine and having a social meal. The price of this meal is deliberately set at an expensive 15 shilling, which makes those who only have brains flinch. However, it soon became clear that a suitable organization and a permanent headquarters were needed, where people could share and discuss new discoveries. In less than 10 years, the membership has grown to 400-all gentlemen, of course-and the Geological Society seems to dwarf the Royal Society and become the leading scientific society in the country.
From 165438+ 10 to June of the following year, the members met twice a month, because by this time, almost all the people had gone out and were doing field work all summer. You know, these people are not out looking for ore to make money, and in most cases they are not even scholars. Just a hobby that a gentleman who has both money and time is engaged in on a more professional level. By 1830, it has grown to 745 members, and that will never happen again in the world.
This situation is unimaginable now, but geology has activated people in the19th century-completely attracted their attention-which is unprecedented in any science and may not happen in the future. 1839, Roderick murchison published Silurian, a heavy book, which studied a kind of rock called miscellaneous sandstone. It immediately became a best seller and soon came out in four editions. Although a book costs eight guineas, it has a real Hutton style, that is, it is difficult to read. (Even Murchison's supporters admit that it has "no literary charm". ) When the great Lyell Charles 184 1 went to Boston to give a series of lectures, every time 3,000 listeners crowded into Lovel College and listened quietly to him describe the vibration caused by marine zeolite and Campania earthquake.
Throughout the modern ideological circle, especially in Britain, learned people will go to the countryside to do what they call "knocking on stones". This work is still quite serious. They often dress up very charming: wearing hats and black suits. Only the Reverend william baker Lan of Oxford University is an exception. He is used to wearing a doctor's uniform to do field work.
The wild attracts many excellent people, especially murchison mentioned above. In the first half of his life, he spent about 30 years riding a horse to chase foxes, and used a shotgun to turn birds flying in the air into clusters of flying feathers. He showed no signs of thinking except reading The Times and playing a good hand of cards. Then, he became interested in rocks and became a giant in the field of geological thought at an alarming rate.
Then Dr. james Parkinson, an early socialist, wrote many inspiring pamphlets, such as No Bleeding Revolution. 1794 has a plot that sounds a little crazy, called "Toy Air Gun Project". Someone planned to shoot King George III in the neck with a poisonous dart when he was watching a play in the theater box. Parkinson was involved in this matter and was taken to the Privy Council for interrogation. He was almost handcuffed and sent to Australia. However, the charges against him were later dropped. He gradually adopted a more conservative attitude towards life and became interested in geology. Eventually, he became one of the founders of the Geological Society and the author of an important geological work, The Last Organic Relics. This book has been in print for half a century. He never got into any trouble again. However, we remember him today because of his epoch-making research on a disease. This disease was called "Parkinson's disease" at that time, but it has been called Parkinson's syndrome ever since. (Parkinson's disease is also slightly famous on the other hand. 1785, he probably became a unique person in history and won a natural history museum in a prize-winning sales activity. This museum is located in Leicester Square in London. It was originally established by Ashton River, but River collected natural treasures without restraint and finally lost everything. Parkinson kept the museum until 1805, and when it could no longer be maintained, he sold the collection. )
There was a man who was not as eye-catching as Parkinson's, but his influence was greater than that of all the people in the geological world at that time combined. This man is Lyell Charles. Lyle was born in the year of Hutton's death, only 1 13 kilometers away from Hutton's home in Kinuodi village. His parents are Scottish, but he grew up in New Forest in Hampshire, far south England, because his mother thought Scots were lazy and loved to drink. Generally speaking, he is exactly the same as a gentleman scientist in the19th century, and he also comes from a rich and active family. His father, also known as Charles, is a famous man. He is the main authority on the study of poets Dante and Moss (Lyle Moss, the name of most people who have been to the English countryside). Influenced by his father, Lyle became interested in natural history. However, it was under the influence of Oxford University and William Baekeland that buckland Lyle, dressed in elegant robes, began to devote his life to geology.
Buckland is more or less a charming eccentric. He has made some real achievements, but people remember him at least largely because of his eccentric personality. He is especially famous for raising a group of wild animals, some of which are big and some are dangerous. Those wild animals can walk freely in his house and garden. He is also famous for eating every animal that has existed since ancient times. He will entertain guests at home with roasted guinea pigs, batter mice, roasted hedgehogs or sea cucumbers boiled in Southeast Asia, depending on his impulse and availability. Buckland thinks they all taste good, except the common mole in the garden. He claimed that the smell of this animal was disgusting. He is almost destined to be an authority on fecal fossils, and there is a table at home that is almost entirely collected with such specimens.
Even when he is engaged in serious scientific activities, his ways are usually strange. Once, buckland woke up his wife excitedly in the middle of the night and shouted, "God, I think the footprints on the fossils must be tortoise's." The couple hurried to the kitchen in their pajamas. Mrs. buckland mixed the dough and spread it on that table, and Pastor buckland brought the turtle raised at home. They threw the tortoise on the dough and drove it forward. They are very happy to find that its footprints are exactly the same as those on the fossils that buckland has been studying. Charles Darwin thought buckland was a clown-that's what he said-but Lyle seemed to find him inspiring and liked him very much, and went to Scotland with him in 1824. It was after that trip to Scotland that Lyle decided to give up his lawyer career and devote all his time to geology.
Lyle was so nearsighted that he squinted painfully for most of his life, so he showed a sad face. Finally, he was completely blind. ) He is a little strange, too. When he is lost in thought, he will pose unimaginably on the furniture-either crossing two chairs or (in the words of his friend Darwin) "leaning his head on the surface of the chair and standing straight". Once lost in thought, he often slides down from the chair slowly, and his hips almost touch the floor. Lyle's only job in his life was to be a professor of geology at King's College London from 183 1 833. It was during this period that he wrote Principles of Geology, which was published in three volumes from 1830 to 1833. In many ways, this book consolidates and expounds the ideas first put forward by Hutton a generation ago. Although Lyle has never read Hutton's original works, he has studied the adaptation of playfair with great interest. )
Between Hutton's era and Lyle's era, there was a new debate in the field of geology. To a great extent, this has replaced the dispute between Shuicheng theory and chaebol theory in the past, but they are often mixed together. The new battle has become a dispute between catastrophe theory and equilibrium theory. It seems a bit tasteless to give such a name to an important and protracted debate. Catastrophists-as the name implies-believe that the earth was formed by sudden catastrophic events-mainly floods. This is why people often confuse catastrophe theory with water theory. Catastrophic theory caters to the psychology of priests like buckland, so that they can bring the flood of Noah's time in the Bible into serious scientific discussion. Uniformists, on the other hand, believe that changes on the earth are gradually formed, and almost all geological changes are slow and take a long time. It was not so much Lyle as Hutton who first put forward this view, but most people have read Lyle's works, so in most people's minds, he became the father of modern geology at that time and now.
Lyle believes that the change of the earth is consistent and slow-everything that happened in the past can be explained by what is still happening today. Lyle and his followers not only looked down on catastrophe theory, but also hated it. Catastrophists believe that extinction is an indispensable part of a series of processes, in which animals are constantly extinct and replaced by new animals-naturalist T.H. Huxley ironically compares this view to "a series of victories in Whistler's card game". Finally, the player overturns the table and asks for a new deck of cards. It's too labor-saving to explain the unknown like this. I have never seen such a dogma that deliberately encourages laziness and weakens people's curiosity. "Lyle sneers.
Lyle made many mistakes. He did not convincingly explain how mountains were formed, nor did he see that glaciers were a medium of change. He didn't want to accept Agassiz's view about the ice age-he rashly called it "earth cooling"-and firmly believed that mammals would be found in the oldest fossil layers. He refused to accept the idea that animals and plants died suddenly, and thought that all major animal groups-mammals, reptiles, fish and so on. -it has existed since ancient times. On these issues, it turns out that he is completely wrong.
However, it is hard to exaggerate Lyle's influence. Principles of Geology was published in 12 years before his death. Until the 20th century, some ideas contained in the book were still regarded as the standard by geologists. Darwin also took a copy of Principles of Geology with him when he sailed around the world on the Hound, which is the 1 version of this book. He later wrote: "the greatest advantage of principle is that it changes a person's whole mental state;" Therefore, when you see something Lyle has never seen before, you see it from his eyes to some extent. " In a word, he almost regarded Lyle as a god, just like many people of his generation. In the 1980s, when geologists had to give up some of his theories to adapt to the theory of the impact of extinction, they were very miserable. This fully shows Lyle's great influence. However, that is another story.
At the same time, there is a lot of classification work to be done in geology, which is not always smooth. From the beginning, geologists wanted to classify rocks according to the time when they were formed, but there has been a fierce debate on how to divide the time-and it is a protracted debate, which was later called the "Devonian debate". Pastor Adam sedgwick of Cambridge University asserted that there was a layer of rock that was CAMBRIAN, but Roderick murchison thought it belonged to Silurian completely, so there was an argument. The argument lasted for many years and became more and more fierce. "Baxter is a dirty rascal." Murchison said angrily in a letter to a friend.
In the Devonian debate, Martin J.S. Rudick described the debate wonderfully and somewhat depressed. As long as you look at the titles of each chapter of this book, you can see the intensity of the above feelings a little. The titles of the previous chapters are mild, such as "The Debate Stage of Gentlemen" and "Decoding the Mystery of Miscellaneous Sandstone", but then there are defending and attacking miscellaneous sandstone, accusing and refuting, spreading malicious rumors, Weaver withdrawing heresy, killing the arrogance of the country people (lest you doubt that this is not a war) and murchison launching the Rhineland campaign. The dispute was settled in 1879, and the method was simple, adding a period between CAMBRIAN and SILURIAN: Ordovician.
In the early days of this subject, English people were the most active, so English names accounted for the vast majority of geological words. Devonian (German) naturally originated in Devon, England. Cambrian comes from the Roman name of Wales, while Ordovician and Silurian remind people of the ancient Welsh tribes: Ordovician and Silurian. However, with the rise of geology in other places, names from all over the world have gradually appeared. Jurassic is related to Jura Mountain on the border between France and Switzerland. Permian reminds people of Perm in Russian Urals, while Cretaceous (from Latin chalk) was named by a Belgian geologist, who also had a beautiful name, J.J. de Omalimas de Holloy.
At first, geological history was divided into four periods: the first period, the second period, the third period and the Quaternary period. This system is too simple, so its life is not too long. Geologists soon replaced this division with a new one. The Eogene and Eogene are completely out of use, and some people stopped using them in the Quaternary, but some people still use them. Today, only the third level is still widely used, although it doesn't mean anything in the third level.
In principle, Lyle used a new unit called "Stone" or "Duan" to cover the era after dinosaurs, including Pleistocene ("recent"), Pliocene ("recent"), Miocene ("quite recent") and Oligocene ("somewhat recent").
Generally speaking, the geological age is divided into four blocks called "generation": Precambrian, Paleozoic (from Greek, meaning "ancient life"), Mesozoic ("intermediate life") and Cenozoic ("new life"). These four generations are divided into 12-20 parts, which are usually called "disciplines" and sometimes called "systems". Most of them are familiar to everyone: Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Silurian and so on.
Then there is Lyle's so-called "world"-Pleistocene, Miocene and so on. -these names are only used to refer to the recent (but very active paleontological research) 65 million years; Finally, there are many finer classifications called "periods" or "generations". Most of them are named after place names, and almost all of them are difficult to read: Illinois period, Des Moines period, Croix period, Key Meric period, etc. , all have the same characteristics. According to John mcphee, there are always as many as "hundreds" of such names. Fortunately, unless you major in geology, you will never hear these names again.
What is even more puzzling is that the word "period" or "generation" in North America is different from that in Europe, and the time often only roughly crosses. So the Cincinnati period in North America is largely equivalent to the Ashe gillian period in Europe, plus the Ruddock period earlier.
And different textbooks and different people have different names for all this, so some authorities put forward seven generations, while others are satisfied with four generations. In some books, you will also find that the tertiary system and the quaternary system are not used, but systems with different lengths are used instead, which are called the lower tertiary system and the upper tertiary system respectively. Some people also divide the Precambrian into two generations, namely, the very old Archean and the more recent Proterozoic. Sometimes you can see the word "Phanerozoic", which is used to cover Cenozoic, Mesozoic and Paleozoic.
Moreover, all this is just as a unit of time. There is another set of rock units called series, segments and periods. And there are differences between morning and evening (referring to time) and up and down (referring to rock strata). For people who are not experts, this is simply a pot of porridge; But for geologists, this may be emotional. "I saw adults blush for a millisecond in the history of life." Richard Si Shi of Britain wrote this when he talked about the long-standing debate about the boundary between Cambrian and Ordovician in the 20th century.
Today, we can at least use some advanced technologies to determine age. For most of the19th century, geologists can only rely on speculation. They can arrange all kinds of rocks and fossils according to the times, but they have no idea about the length of these ages, which is very frustrating. When Dambach Lan speculates on the antiquity of a ichthyosaur skeleton, he can only think that it lived about "10000 or 10000 times 10000" years ago.
Although there is no reliable method to determine age, many people are willing to try. 1650, James Arthur, Archbishop of the Irish Church, made his most famous attempt in his early years. He carefully studied the Bible and other historical materials, and finally came to the conclusion in a masterpiece called Chronicles of the Old Testament that the earth was created at noon on June 23, 65438 BC/KLOC-0. Later historians and textbook writers have always regarded this date as a joke.
By the way, there is an immortal myth-mentioned in many serious books-that Arthur's views dominated the scientific community until the19th century. Lyle corrected all this. As a typical example, Stephen Jay Gould quoted a sentence from a very popular book in 1980s in Arrow of Time: "Before Lyle published his book, most thinkers accepted the view that the earth was still young." That was not the case. As Martin J.S. Ruddick said, "Geologists in any country will not advocate limiting the time scale to the literal interpretation of Genesis if his works are taken seriously by other geologists". Even Reverend buckland, a devout man in the19th century, thinks that the Bible does not mention that God created heaven and earth on the first day, but only "the beginning". He thinks it may have lasted for "hundreds of millions of years" at first. Everyone thinks the earth is very old. The only question is: how old is it?
There was a reasonable view in the early days on the issue of determining the age of this planet. It was put forward by edmund halley, who is always reliable. 17 15 years, he suggested that if you divide the total salinity of the world's oceans by the annual increase, you will get the number of years that the oceans exist, so that you can roughly know the age of the earth. This truth is very attractive, but unfortunately, no one knows how much salt there is in the ocean or how much it increases every year, which makes this experiment impossible to put into practice.
The first scientific attempt was made by george louis leclerc, Count of Buffon, in the 1970s. For a long time, people have known that the earth will release considerable heat-everyone who has been to coal mines knows this-but there is no way to estimate the escape rate. Buffon first heated the sphere to incandescence during the experiment, and then estimated the heat loss rate by touching it (maybe gently at the beginning) during the cooling process of the sphere. According to this experiment, he speculated that the age of the earth was between 75000 and 168000. This is of course greatly underestimated; However, this is a very radical view. Buffon found that if he expressed this view, he was in danger of being expelled from the church. He is a pragmatic man. He quickly apologizes for his thoughtless heresy, and then repeats his views happily in his subsequent works.
By the middle of the19th century, most scholars believed that the age of the earth was at least several million years, even tens of millions, but it was probably not that big. Therefore, when Charles Darwin announced in his book Origin of Species in 1859, according to his calculation, it would take 306,662,400 years to complete the geological process of creating Wilder Region, which is located in the south of England, including Kent, Surrey and Sussex. This conclusion is unusual, partly because he said it so accurately, but more because he openly ignored the accepted view on the age of the earth. The result caused a fierce controversy, and Darwin retracted his views in the third edition of the book. However, the problem actually still exists. Darwin and his geological friends hoped that the earth was very old, but no one could figure out a way.
This problem caught Lord Kelvin's attention (he must be a great man, but he was promoted to the nobility in 1892, when he was 68 years old and close to the end of his life, but I still use this name retroactively here according to the convention), which is very unfortunate for Darwin and progress. Kelvin is one of the most outstanding figures in19th century-and any century. German scientist hermann von helmholtz, himself a master of science, wrote that Kelvin was the most "keen, insightful and positive" person he had ever met. "In front of him, I sometimes feel like a wooden head." He said with some frustration.
This mentality is understandable, because Kelvin was indeed a Victorian superman. He was born in Belfast on 1824. His father was a professor of mathematics at the Royal College, and soon he was transferred to Glasgow. Kelvin proved himself to be a child prodigy and was admitted to Glasgow University at an early age (10). In his early twenties, he studied in universities in London and Paris, graduated from Cambridge University (won the highest prize in rowing and mathematics, and found time to set up a music club), was elected as a researcher at Peter College, and wrote more than 65,438+00 papers on pure mathematics and applied mathematics (in English and French). These works are so original that he has to publish them anonymously so as not to embarrass his elders. He returned to Glasgow at the age of 22 and became a professor of natural philosophy. He remained in this position for the next 53 years.
During his long career (he lived to 1907, at the age of 83), he wrote 66 1 papers and won 69 patents (so he became very rich), enjoying a high reputation in almost every subject of physics. Among them, he proposed a method, which later directly led to the invention of refrigeration technology; Designed an absolute temperature scale, which is still named after him; Invented the booster device, making it possible to generate electricity across the ocean; Many changes have taken place in shipping and navigation.