Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian-Silurian Dispute

9780691024417

0691024413

This book aims at serious goals and achieves all of them. It provides a fundamentally new interpretation of the Cambrian-Silurian dispute based on exacting research and thoughtful interpretation. It also relates the dispute both to the general social background of British geology and to the distinctive personal experiences of Sedgwick and Murchison. Secord writes clear, vigorous prose and provides plenty of helpful illustrations. One cannot ask for more. --William Montgomery, Science Secord gives a dazzlingly detailed account of this scientific trench warfare and its social consequences. One ends up with a marvellous feeling for the major taxonomic enterprises in Darwin's younger day: mapping, ordering, conquering--'taming the chaos of the strata.' All of these of course had social and imperial ramifications; and Secord mentions geology's moral appeal (in supporting a divinely-stratified Creation) to a beleaguered lite intent on subduing the lower orders.--Adrian Desmond, London Review of Books