By Barbara Kennedy
This ebook chronicles how successive generations of average philosophers, geologists and geomorphologists have come to invent the view of the Earth during the last 250 years. Chronicles how successive generations of normal philosophers, geologists and geomorphologists have come to invent varied perspectives of the Earth over the past 250 years. makes use of as its imperative perspective altering rules concerning the importance of the motion of rain and rivers at the Earth’s floor. indicates how our modern “truths” have end up accredited and exposes the frailty of even the main impeccably clinical visions of the Earth.
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Extra info for Inventing the Earth: Ideas on Landscape Development Since 1740
Example text
209–10: my translation). In a stirring flight of fancy, he locates the great empires of America in the old highlands, whilst ‘les sauvages au contraire se sont trouvé dans les contrées les plus basses et les plus nouvelles . ’ What was the significance of all this? Clearly – recall his First, Second, Third and Fourth Epochs (Chapter 2) – when the Earth’s surface was still hot and plastic, it was deformable by rotation. At a later stage (the Fourth Epoch) the grand lineaments of the continents were created by the draining away of the sea, whilst influenced by the centrifugal forces of rotation.
In a stirring flight of fancy, he locates the great empires of America in the old highlands, whilst ‘les sauvages au contraire se sont trouvé dans les contrées les plus basses et les plus nouvelles . ’ What was the significance of all this? Clearly – recall his First, Second, Third and Fourth Epochs (Chapter 2) – when the Earth’s surface was still hot and plastic, it was deformable by rotation. At a later stage (the Fourth Epoch) the grand lineaments of the continents were created by the draining away of the sea, whilst influenced by the centrifugal forces of rotation.
As far as other theories went, Cuvier was distinctly damning with faint praise: ‘How ever much genius, how ever much imagination was needed to invent these systems and make them fit the facts, yet we cannot include them in this picture of scientific progress: rather they have tended to obstruct the true path since they encouraged the belief that one did not need further observations . ’ (p. 198: my translation). A similarly dismissive view of Hutton was to be found in Charles Lyell’s survey of geology at the outset of the first volume of the Principles of Geology (1830), and the innocent reader would have had no way of knowing that Lyell, in fact, had become one of the chief promulgators of the Huttonian vision, most especially with respect to the acceptance of the idea of there being a vast expanse of geological time and the abandonment of any attempt to speculate as to the precise nature and origin of the Creation (see below).