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Humphry Davy as Geologist, 1805–29

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Robert Siegfried  and
R. H. Dott Jr
Robert Siegfried
Affiliation:
Department of the History of Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, U.S.A.
R. H. Dott Jr
Affiliation:
Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisonsin 53706, U.S.A.
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Extract

When Charles Lyell was writing his Principles of geology early in 1830, he interpolated five chapters between a recently written historical account of the science and the main body of textual material whose structure had long been determined. These added chapters contained not only Lyell's effort ‘to express the consequences of the uniformity of nature in the history of the earth’, but also his general arguments against the catastro-phic-progressionist interpretation, which he felt obliged to refute. In Chapter IX, the final one in the introductory sections, Lyell chose as representative of the progressionist view, Sir Humphry Davy, ‘a late distinguished writer’ who had ‘advanced some of the weightiest of these objections’ to Lyell's own steady-state view of the earth. No other defender of the progressionist history of the earth was named in Lyell's chapter, and we might well ask, why Humphry Davy? Was he merely an easy target for Lyell's refutations, a straw man set up by Lyell for his own rhetorical convenience?

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , July 1976 , pp. 219 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1976

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References

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