Hutton first published his theories in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788, followed by the two-volume Theory of the Earth in 1795, ‘the earliest treatise which can be considered a geological synthesis rather than an imaginative exercise’.30 One of Hutton’s important premises was that the origin of fossils had been fully settled (‘fossils’ originally meant anything dug up). They were recognised by Nicholas Steno and John Woodward in the seventeenth century as the residue of living creatures, many of which were now extinct.31 But it was also understood that the presence of fossils on the tops of mountains was accounted for by Noah’s Flood. At the time Hutton’s book appeared, the historical reality of the Flood was beyond question. ‘When the history of the earth was considered geologically, it was simply assumed that a universal deluge must have wrought vast changes and that it had been a primary agent in forming the present surface of the globe. Its occurrence was evidence that the Lord was a governor as well as a creator.’ Just as the Flood was undisputed, so the biblical narrative of the creation of the world, as revealed in Genesis, was also beyond question. On this account, the length of time since creation was still believed to be about six thousand years, and though some people were beginning to wonder whether this was long enough, no one thought the earth very much older. A separate question was whether the animals had been created earlier than mankind, but even this did not, of itself, greatly add to the antiquity of man.32
There was no question but that Hutton’s Vulcanism fitted many of the facts better than Werner’s Neptunism. Many critics resisted it, however, because Vulcanism implied vast tracts of geological time, ‘inconceivable ages that went far beyond what anyone had envisaged before’.33 As Werner and others had observed, volcanic and earthquake activity today actually produce only ‘trivial’ effects on the surface of the earth. If this has always been the case, then not only must the earth be of very great antiquity, for great mountains, say, to have been raised to such heights, but Hutton’s ideas also posited a ‘steady state’ for the earth. This compared badly with the idea that the earth was once much hotter than it is now, when geological events – Flood or no Flood – were much grander. This at least implied a development of the earth. There was also something unromantic about Hutton’s theory because it argued that the earth as we know it had been formed by a succession of ‘infinitesimally small events’, rather than by dramatic catastrophes, such as floods. It further required a number of nimble intellectual tricks to reconcile Hutton’s vulcanism with the Bible. One effort had it that there was once a ‘great evaporation’ (which would explain how all the flood waters had disappeared). Nevertheless, as Charles Gillispie has shown, there were many eminent men of science in the nineteenth century who, despite Hutton’s theories, still subscribed to Neptunism: Sir Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy and James Watt, not to mention W. Hyde Wollaston, secretary of the Royal Society.34 Hutton’s theory did not really begin to catch on until John Playfair published a popular version in 1802 (see Chapter 35, below, for the crucial role of popularisers in the nineteenth century, and their part in the decline of faith).
But Hutton (a deist) was not alone in believing that the observation of processes still going on would triumph. In 1815, William Smith, a canal builder often called the ‘father’ of British geology, pointed out that similar forms of rock, scattered across the globe, contained similar fossils. Many of these species no longer existed. This, in itself, implied that species came into existence, flourished, and then became extinct, over the vast periods of time that it took the rocks to be laid down and harden. This was significant in two ways. In the first place, it supported the idea that successive layers of rock were formed, not all at once but over time. And second, it reinforced the notion that there had been separate and numerous creations and extinctions, quite at variance with what it said in the Bible.35
Objections to the biblical account were growing. Nevertheless, it was still the case that hardly anyone at the beginning of the nineteenth century questioned the Flood. Neptunism, the biblical account, was still the most popular version. Peter Bowler says that at this time geological texts sometimes outsold popular novels, but that science ‘was respectable only so long as it did not appear to disturb religious and social conventions of the day’.36 Neptunism did, however, receive a significant twist in 1811 when the Frenchman Georges Cuvier published his Recherches sur les ossements fossiles (Researches on Fossil Bones). Going through four editions in ten years, this showed that a new, updated Neptunism was what people most wanted. Cuvier, a curator at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, formed from the pre-1789 Jardin du Roi, argued that there had been not one but several cataclysms – including floods – in the history of the earth. Looking about him, in the Huttonian manner, he concluded that, because entire mammoths and other sizeable vertebrates had been ‘encased whole’ in the ice in mountain regions, these cataclysms must have been very sudden indeed. He also argued that if whole mountains had been lifted high above the seas, these cataclysms could only have been – by definition – unimaginably violent, so violent that entire species had been exterminated and, conceivably, earlier forms of humanity.37 Excavations in the Paris basin further showed an alternation of deposits between salt and fresh water, suggesting ‘a series of major changes in the relative position of land and sea’.38 But Cuvier’s researches weren’t entirely consistent with the biblical account. He also observed, and this was important, that in the rocks the deeper fossils were more different from life forms in existence today and that, moreover, fossils occur in a consistent order everywhere in the world. This order was: fish, amphibia, reptilia, mammalia. He therefore concluded that the older the strata of rock the higher was the proportion of extinct species. Since, at that time, no human fossils had turned up anywhere, he concluded that ‘. . . mankind must have been created at some time between the last catastrophe and the one preceding it’.39 He also observed that the expedition to Egypt had brought back mummified animals thousands of years old, which were identical to those now living, which confirmed the stability of species. Fossil species must therefore have lived for a long time too, before dying out.40 This was, in a sense, a half-way version of the biblical story. Man had been created since the Flood, but not the animals, which were much older.