Caption:. Man Found only in a Fossil State - Reappearance of Ichthyosauri." the rest of the text is below.
This is the first in a series of articles that will explore the people who turned geology into a formalised discipline in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Their day and age was not ours, and sadly, with the exception of Mary Anning ( a remarkable woman, discoverer of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, covered at http://tinyurl.com/n737jqj), all the characters involved are white, male and often sporting the outrageous display of facial hair that characterises the 19th century 'great man of science'. Before anyone comments, we at TES disclaim all responsibility for the 19th century social order.
In those days, there were very few professional scientists, as in people who earn their daily bread through practise of the discipline. Those interested had to have private means or another income (such as being a clergyman with what was then called 'a living' or an educated professional such as a country doctor), and were called 'gentlemen geologists'. People from this generation became the first professionals, as the discipline converted itself from a hobby into a job, and Henry was one of the first to take this leap.
He was born rich, his father being an English army officer (commissions had to be bought) who owned a sugar plantation (manned by slaves) in Jamaica. Henry's love of geology and palaeontology started during childhood. These two disciplines were then one subject within natural philosophy, since long before Strata Smith first correlated rocks using their fossils. Henry grew up near Lyme Regis on England's Jurassic coast and was a friend of Mary Anning, accompanying her on some of her fossil hunting expeditions, catching his love of Earth science in the process. He did officer's training, but as the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815, he left the army and joined the Geological Society of London where he was active for several decades, serving as its president in 1848. He was also elected to the Royal Society in 1823.
He became a famed collector and illustrator of fossils, cooperating in the description of Mary Anning's marine dinosaur finds in the 1820's. After a stay on his sugar estate he published his geology of Jamaica in 1827, before returning to south west England. During the late 20's and 30's he established himself as a competent geologist with a series of publications such as the Manual of Geology.
A crisis in the sugar market and expanded demand for minerals as the industrial revolution kicked off led him to seek paid employment (and sell his renowned fossil collection). He convinced the ordnance survey (military mapping unit) to start a geological survey of the country that became his main occupation for the remainder of his life. The intent was practical, in order to serve the developing mining industry, who were following coal seams ever deeper into the ground, and it produced one of the first detailed national geological maps.
The British Geological Survey was started in 1835, with de la Beche as first director, serving for two decades until his death. He also oversaw the amalgamation of his survey with the school of mines, museum of practical geology (which he founded with government assistance, and where representative samples of rocks and fossils were held for study) and the mining record office (that dealt wih mining statistics), creating a centralised repository of knowledge on all Britain's mineral resources.
His examination of strata also led to a good understanding of Earth processes, and he contributed to a grwoing theory of the Earth, arguing against the uniformitarian insistence that the world of the past had always been the same and that the past could only be understood by using present processes. He agreed with them that close attention to current processes revealed many of the world's secrets, but did not share their view that these principles were uniformly applicable. He also accepted that occasional catastrophes had impacted Earth back in deep time. As well as mapping and collecting, he made his surveyors do minute surveys of important localities in order to reconstruct the details of past environments, adding a new dimension to the use of fossils in our discipline that remains vital to this day.
His most lasting fame however is as an artist, pioneering the use of illustration in geology, such as the plates in 'Sections and Views Illustrative of Geological Phenomena' (1830). He frequently used sarcastic cartoons to make political geological points, and the image illustrating this article was a poke at Charles Lyell's theory of cyclical history, implying that one day the dinosaurs will return and study our remains. He made some of them into lithographs, which he sold to help the impoverished Anning, and also arranged for her small government pension that tided her through her last years. His cartoons will be the topic for the next post.
His work also underlines the importance of the interaction with mining that made geology the science of today. His combined geological and mining institution became a model later used worldwide. Geological theory was developed in order to improve mining practise (such as digging for coal in the correct strata), and all our wonderful knowledge of the Earth ultimately came from the need for understanding of our mineral resources.
He was knighted in 1848, and received geology's premier award, the Wollaston medal, in the final year of his life. He is survived by the British Geological Survey and the beautiful Earth Galleries in London's Natural History Museum. .
Ave atque vale: 1796-1855
Image Awful Changes, out of copyright, caption:. Man Found only in a Fossil State - Reappearance of Ichthyosauri." - "A lecture, - 'You will at once perceive,' continued Professor Ichthyosaurus, 'that the skull before us belonged to some of the lower order of animals; the teeth are very insignificant, the power of the jaws trifling, and altogether it seems wonderful how the creature could have procured food."
The caricature by De la Beches of Charles Lyell as Prof. Ichthyosaurus on the pages of Francis Buckland's "Curiosities of Natural History" (1858)
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/1891 http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2010/10/geology-history-in-caricatures.html
