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Geology and Orthodoxy: The Case of Noah's Flood in Eighteenth-Century Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Rhoda Rappaport
Affiliation:
Department of History, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York 12601, USA.

Extract

The view that religious orthodoxy stifled geological progress has had many distinguished exponents, one of the earliest being Georges Cuvier. To Cuvier, however, efforts to combine Genesis with geology ended before the middle of the eighteenth century, and opened the way not for progress but for wild speculation. We may admire the genius of Leibniz and Buffon, he declared, but this should not lead us to confuse system-building with geology as ‘une science positive’. While Cuvier's younger contemporary, Charles Lyell, agreed that ‘extravagant systems’ had retarded progress, he insisted that ‘scriptural authority’ had had a similar effect until late in the eighteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1978

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References

NOTES

An abstract of this paper was presented on 8 April 1976 at a meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

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17 One of the many useful treatments of liberal Anglicanism is Stromberg, Roland N., Religious liberalism in eighteenth-century England, London, 1954Google Scholar, especially chapter IV. See also Gillett, Charles R., Burned books: neglected chapters in British history and literature, 2 vols., New York, 1932, iiGoogle Scholar. chapters XXVII–VIII. Gillett has discovered virtually no ‘heterodox’ books condemned after 1720; ‘virtual’ is necessary because of unsubstantiated reports that there may have been two.

18 The quotation is from Gay, , op. cit. (16), p. 71Google Scholar. The Berlin Academy was under far greater royal control than its Paris counterpart, but it awarded its prize in 1772 to Herder's non-biblical account of the origin of language, and it boasted Maupertuis as its President for a time. Maupertuis published several heterodox works during this period; see Glass, Bentley, ‘Maupertuis’, in Dictionary of scientific biography, New York, 1974, ix. 186–9.Google Scholar

19 Clayton's arguments are summarized by one of his critics, Catcott, Alexander, A treatise on the Deluge, and edn., London, 1768, pp. 1112Google Scholar. Also, Collier, K. B., Cosmogonies of our fathers, New York, 1934, pp. 229, 234Google Scholar. At the time of his death, Clayton was in imminent danger of being charged with heresy for his Arian views; but this was so unusual that I suspect the problem stemmed from his being a bishop rather than a lesser cleric or a layman. See Winnett, A. R., in Baker, Derek (ed.), Schism, heresy and religious protest, Cambridge, 1972, pp. 311–21.Google Scholar

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25 Jahn, Melvin E., in Schneer, C. J. (ed.), Toward a history of geology, Cambridge, Mass., 1969, pp. 198, 200Google Scholar. Also, Henckel, , op. cit. (23), i. 110–11, 123, 131Google Scholar and Bourguet, Louis, Traité des pétrifications, 2 vols., Paris, 1742, i. 5394Google Scholar. Henckel's work first appeared in 1725.

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27 Walker, John, Lectures on geology (ed. by Scott, Harold W.), Chicago & London, 1966, p. 181Google Scholar. The lectures seem to date from about 1780.

28 Réaumur, , in Mémoires de l'Académie royale des sciences, 1720 (1722), pp. 400–16Google Scholar. References to Réaumur and the Touraine are frequent throughout the century.

29 Nathorst, A. G., ‘Carl von Linné as a geologist’. Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1908, pp. 713, 721Google Scholar; Haber, , op. cit. (4), p. 160Google Scholar; and Desmarest, , ‘Linné’, Encyclopédie méthodique: géographie physique, Paris, 1795, i. 304Google Scholar. For Bergman, see Hedberg, Hollis, in Schneer, , op. cit. (25), p. 189Google Scholar. Whitehurst, John, An inquiry into the original state and formation of the earth, 2nd edn., London, 1786, pp. 58–9, 118–22.Google Scholar

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31 See notes 29, 30, 34. The phrase by Linnaeus is quoted in Haber, F. C., ‘Fossils and the idea of a process of time in natural history’, in Glass, B., Temkin, O., and Straus, W. L. (eds.), Forerunners of Darwin: 1745–1853, Baltimore, 1968, p. 242.Google Scholar

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33 Valmont de Bomare, J.-C., Dictionnaire raisonné universel d'histoire naturelle, nouv. éd., 6 vols., Paris, 17671768, ii. 708Google Scholar, article ‘Fossiles’. The articles ‘Déluge’ in the 1764 and 1767 editions recount the views of those who think marine fossils relics of the flood; discussion of evidence is reserved for articles ‘Falun’, ‘Fossiles’, and ‘Terre’, which deal with the universal ocean and the concept of successive revolutions.

34 Details of this research and the different interpretations of results are in Desmarest, , ‘Ferner’, Encyclopédie méthodique, op. cit. (29), i. 133–50Google Scholar. Cf. Wegmann, , in Schneer, , op. cit. (25), pp. 386–94Google Scholar, who believes that these issues had little impact outside Scandinavia during the eighteenth century.

35 Boyle's little tract, De fundo maris (Relations about the bottom of the sea), was first published in English and Latin in 1670. Allusions to this work are numerous, some perhaps based on the summary in the better known study by Marsigli, L. F., Histoire physique de la mer, Amsterdam, 1725, pp. I, 48Google Scholar. Marsigli could reach no conclusion about bottom currents, later discussed in Telliamed, op. cit. (11), especially pp. 60–9Google Scholar.

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39 Vallisneri, De' corpi marini, che su' monti si trovano, 2nd edn., Venice, 1728, pp. 34, 35, 41, 47, 73.Google Scholar

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48 Galileo, , ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina’, in Discoveries and opinions of Galileo (tr. with introduction and notes by Drake, Stillman), New York, 1957, pp. 175216.Google Scholar

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