Nevertheless, Cuvier’s observations helped keep Neptunism and Catastrophism popular, especially in Britain, where acceptance of Hutton’s theories was delayed at least until the 1820s. Robert Jameson, the leading light of the Wernerian Society of Edinburgh, even managed to stop Hutton’s ideas from having much influence in his native city.41 There was in fact one other reason why many geologists – again, especially in Britain – subscribed to the great Flood theory: this was the existence of huge rocks of a completely different type from the land surrounding them. These would later be shown to have been deposited by the ice sheets during the Ice Age, but to begin with their distribution was attributed to the great Deluge. The man who insisted most on this was William Buckland, Oxford’s first professor of geology. In 1819, in a famous inaugural lecture, Vindiciae Geologicae; or, the Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained, he tried ‘to shew that the study of geology has a tendency to confirm the evidences of natural religion; and that the facts developed by it are consistent with the accounts of the creation and deluge recorded in the Mosaic writings.’42 Furthermore, before he had been at Oxford very long, some miners in 1821 stumbled upon a cave at Kirkdale in the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire, where they discovered a huge deposit of ‘assorted bones’. Buckland saw his chance. Hurrying to Yorkshire, he quickly established that while most of the bones belonged to hyenas, there were also many birds and other species, including animals no longer found in Britain – lions, tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses. Moreover, each of the bones and skulls were deformed or broken in much the same way and he concluded that what the miners had found was a den of hyenas. He wrote up the discovery, first as an academic paper, which won the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, and then followed it with a more popular account. His aim in this book was to reinforce the existence of the Flood and the recent creation of man. His thesis was nothing if not neat: most of the bones in Kirkdale belonged to species now extinct in Europe; such bones are never found in alluvial (riverine) deposits of sand or silt; there is no evidence that these animals have ever lived in Europe since the Flood. It therefore followed, said Buckland, that the animals whose remains the miners had found, must have been interred prior to Noah’s time. He finally argued that the top layer of remains was so beautifully preserved in mud and silt ‘that they must have been buried suddenly and, judging by the layer of postdiluvial stalactite covering the mud, not much more than five or six thousand years ago.’43
However, there were still problems with the flood theory, not least the fact that, as even Buckland acknowledged, the various pieces of evidence around the world placed the Flood at widely varying epochs. (Buckland, like many others, didn’t let his faith warp his science too much.)44 In addition, by the 1830s the cooling earth theory was gaining coherence as an explanation as to why geological activity was greater in the past than now, further fuelling the view that the earth developed, and that life forms had been very different in the past. In 1824 Buckland himself described the first known dinosaur, the gigantic Megalosaurus, though the word ‘dinosaur’ wasn’t coined until 1841, by the great anatomist Richard Owen. That was also the year that John Philips identified the great sequence of geological formations, the Palaeozoic, the age of fishes and invertebrates, the Mesozoic, the age of reptiles, and the Cenozoic, the age of mammals.45 This was based in part on the work of Adam Sedgwick and Sir Roderick Murchison in Wales, which began the decoding of the Palaeozoic system. The Palaeozoic period would eventually be shown to have extended from roughly 550 million years ago to 250 million years ago, and during that time plant life had moved out of the oceans on to land, fish appeared, then amphibians and then reptiles had reached land. These new forms of life were all wiped out, about 250 million years ago, for reasons that are still hard to fathom. But it was clear from the analyses of Sedgwick and Murchison that early forms of life on earth were very old, that life had begun in the sea, and then climbed ashore. Deluge or no deluge, all this was again in dramatic contradiction of the biblical account.46
The study of fossils and of rock sequences was also put together now with the growing science of embryology. The key figure here was Karl Ernst von Baer, who argued against the early prevailing wisdom that the human embryo, in developing, recapitulates the invertebrate/fish/reptile/mammal progression, and said instead that all embryos are simple to begin with, then develop specialised characteristics that equip them for their place in the world: lower animals are not, as it were, immature forms of man.47 It was von Baer who also showed that the organisation of life forms is not a ‘man-centred hierarchy’, that the human form is just one end-result among many. Robert Owen in his Archetypes and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848) and On the Nature of Limbs (1849) showed that vertebrates have a basically similar structure, which are adapted in different ways but are not ‘aimed’ in a linear way at man.48
We are running ahead of ourselves, and of the geological story. The importance of the discoveries of Cuvier, Buckland, Sedgwick and Murchison, over and above their intrinsic merit, was that they brought about a decisive change of mind on the part of Charles Lyell. In 1830 he published the first volume of what would turn into his three-volume Principles of Geology. Lyell’s argument was contained in the subtitle, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. He was also much influenced by Georges Scrope, a Frenchman whose studies in the Massif Central had shown, he said, that ‘rivers working over limitless centuries had cut their own valleys’. Before his own book was released, Lyell made a tour of Europe, meeting fellow geologists such as Étienne de Serres, to study a number of geological features, most notably the active volcanoes of Sicily, where he found that the massive cone had been built up gradually though a long series of small eruptions. Furthermore, the volcano was resting on sedimentary rocks of recent origin, as shown by the fact that the fossil molluscs were identical with present-day ones. This convinced Lyell that there was no need to posit a single catastrophe for this mountain.
But essentially Principles was a work of synthesis, rather than of original research, in which Lyell clarified and interpreted already-published material to support two conclusions. The first, obviously enough, was to show that the main geological features of the earth could be explained as the result of actions in history that were exactly the same as those that could be observed in the present. In a review of his book, the term ‘uniformitarianism’ was used and caught on. Lyell’s second aim was to resist the idea that a great flood, or series of floods, had produced the features of the earth that we see around us. He laid great store by Scrope, supporting his view that the world’s rivers had carved out their own valleys, and that ‘gently winding river beds’ could not be the product of – nor produce – violent events, still less catastrophes. On the religious front, Lyell took the common-sense view, arguing that it was unlikely God would keep interfering in the laws of nature, to provoke a series of major cataclysms. Instead, he said, provided that one assumed that the past extended back far enough, then the geological action that could be observed as still in operation today was enough to explain ‘the record in the rocks’.49 There was, he added, no shortage of evidence to show that volcanoes had erupted regularly throughout history and that this had nothing to do with either floods or catastrophes. And he compared the findings of stratigraphy, palaeontology and physical geography to identify three separate eras with three distinct forms of life. These became known as the Pliocene, Miocene and Eocene epochs, the last of which went back 55 million years. Yet again this was a much longer time-frame than anything in the Old Testament.