as much for his eccentricities. He was particularly noted for a menagerie of wild animals, some large and dangerous, that were allowed to roam through his house and garden, and for his desire to eat his way through every animal in creation. Depending on whim and availability, guests to Buckland’s house might be served baked guinea pig, mice in batter, roasted hedgehog, or boiled Southeast Asian sea slug. Buckland was able to find merit in them all, except the common garden mole, which he declared disgusting. Almost inevitably, he became the leading authority on coprolites-fossilized feces-and had a table made entirely out of his collection of specimens.
Even when conducting serious science his manner was generally singular. Once Mrs. Buckland found herself being shaken awake in the middle of the night, her husband crying in excitement: “My dear, I believe that
Lyell was extremely shortsighted and went through most of his life with a pained squint, which gave him a troubled air. (Eventually he would lose his sight altogether.) His other slight peculiarity was the habit, when distracted by thought, of taking up improbable positions on furniture-lying across two chairs at once or “resting his head on the seat of a chair, while standing up” (to quote his friend Darwin). Often when lost in thought he would slink so low in a chair that his buttocks would all but touch the floor. Lyell’s only real job in life was as professor of geology at King’s College in London from 1831 to 1833. It was around this time that he produced
Between Hutton’s day and Lyell’s there arose a new geological controversy, which largely superseded, but is often confused with, the old Neptunian-Plutonian dispute. The new battle became an argument between catastrophism and uniformitarianism-unattractive terms for an important and very long-running dispute. Catastrophists, as you might expect from the name, believed that the Earth was shaped by abrupt cataclysmic events-floods principally, which is why catastrophism and neptunism are often wrongly bundled together. Catastrophism was particularly comforting to clerics like Buckland because it allowed them to incorporate the biblical flood of Noah into serious scientific discussions. Uniformitarians by contrast believed that changes on Earth were gradual and that nearly all Earth processes happened slowly, over immense spans of time. Hutton was much more the father of the notion than Lyell, but it was Lyell most people read, and so he became in most people’s minds, then and now, the father of modern geological thought.
Lyell believed that the Earth’s shifts were uniform and steady-that everything that had ever happened in the past could be explained by events still going on today. Lyell and his adherents didn’t just disdain catastrophism, they detested it. Catastrophists believed that extinctions were part of a series in which animals were repeatedly wiped out and replaced with new sets-a belief that the naturalist T. H. Huxley mockingly likened to “a succession of rubbers of whist, at the end of which the players upset the table and called for a new pack.” It was too convenient a way to explain the unknown. “Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity,” sniffed Lyell.
Lyell’s oversights were not inconsiderable. He failed to explain convincingly how mountain ranges were formed and overlooked glaciers as an agent of change. He refused to accept Louis Agassiz’s idea of ice ages-“the refrigeration of the globe,” as he dismissively termed it-and was confident that mammals “would be found in the oldest fossiliferous beds.” He rejected the notion that animals and plants suffered sudden annihilations, and believed that all the principal animal groups-mammals, reptiles, fish, and so on-had coexisted since the dawn of time. On all of these he would ultimately be proved wrong.
Yet it would be nearly impossible to overstate Lyell’s influence.
Meanwhile, geology had a great deal of sorting out to do, and not all of it went smoothly. From the outset geologists tried to categorize rocks by the periods in which they were laid down, but there were often bitter disagreements about where to put the dividing lines-none more so than a long-running debate that became known as the Great Devonian Controversy. The issue arose when the Reverend Adam Sedgwick of Cambridge claimed for the Cambrian period a layer of rock that Roderick Murchison believed belonged rightly to the Silurian. The dispute raged for years and grew extremely heated. “De la Beche is a dirty dog,” Murchison wrote to a friend in a typical outburst.
Some sense of the strength of feeling can be gained by glancing through the chapter titles of Martin J. S. Rudwick’s excellent and somber account of the issue,
Because the British were the most active in the early years, British names are predominant in the geological lexicon.
Originally, geological history was divided into four spans of time: primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary. The system was too neat to last, and soon geologists were contributing additional divisions while eliminating others. Primary and secondary fell out of use altogether, while quaternary was discarded by some but kept by others. Today only tertiary remains as a common designation everywhere, even though it no longer represents a third period of anything.
Lyell, in his
Nowadays, and speaking very generally, geological time is divided first into four great chunks known as eras: Precambrian, Paleozoic (from the Greek meaning “old life”), Mesozoic (“middle life”), and Cenozoic (“recent life”). These four eras are further divided into anywhere from a dozen to twenty subgroups, usually called periods though sometimes known as systems. Most of these are also reasonably well known: Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Silurian, and so on.[8]
Then come Lyell’s epochs-the Pleistocene, Miocene, and so on-which apply only to the most recent (but paleontologically busy) sixty-five million years, and finally we have a mass of finer subdivisions known as stages or ages. Most of these are named, nearly always awkwardly, after places: