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Format: Lithograph
Description: De la Beche's most famous cartoon. On one level, the farcical nature of the cartoon speaks for itself. However, a great deal is going on just below the surface.
Until Rudwick's work in the 1970s, Awful Changes was believed to be a light-hearted prodding at the teaching style of De la Beche's friend and fellow geologist, William Buckland. Buckland was a priest and professor at Oxford. He was a popular lecturer, known for vividly bringing prehistoric animals to life by description and imitation. Some of his critics saw his lecturing style as buffoonery that threatened to undermine the dignity of their field. Buckland himself liked the cartoon, and apparently had a large copy that he used in teaching.
The target of Awful Changes, however, was not Buckland. Thanks to Rudwick (1975), the cartoon is now interpreted as satire of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (which Buckland incidentally also opposed). Under one theory presented in Principles, the sorts of animals and plants that inhabit any particular place at any particular time in Earth's history is determined by the region's climate. If climate changes, the fossil assemblage will change. In a broad sense, this is not controversial today, but Lyell was working before evolution was understood and described his theory as a "recipe" for fossil assemblages. He believed that if a region's climate reverted to a previous state, the original animals and plants (or very similar ones) would reemerge. He wrote in Principles that if climate reverted, "then might those genera of animals return, of which the memorials [i.e. fossils] are preserved in the ancient rocks of our continents. The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns."
This seemed absurd to De la Beche. He believed that the history of life was one of progressive advancement, with life getting more complex over time. The idea of "lower" forms of life succeeding "higher" forms at some future time was ridiculous (and, perhaps, threatening to that most cherished of human hopes, the elevation of humans above other animals).
The version of Awful Changes at the top of this page must have been taken from some later reprinting. I have chosen it because the text is clearer, but the original printing also contains the epigram "A change came o'er the spirit of my dream." - Byron. This is a line repeated throughout Byron's poem "The Dream" [bartleby.com], invoking for Awful Changes the sense of a mystical, changing dreamscape.
For more on De la Beche vs Lyell, see this page.
For more on Lyell himself, see his entry on the biography page.
For more on Buckland, his entry.
Other versions:
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| The first lithograph. Copied from Rudwick (1975) Click image for larger view |
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| The second lithograph. Almost identical to the first, but words in the subtitle are reversed and the shading is subtly different. Copied from a University of Arizona course website [blc.arizona.edu] Click for larger view |
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| An 1880 reimagining of Awful Changes for a Christmas card Copied from the Man Creates Dinosaurs tumblr [man-creates-dinosaurs.tumblr.com] Click image for larger view |
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Sources & further discussion:
The modern interprepretation of Awful Change was first described in Rudwick, M. J. (1975). Caricature as a source for the history of science: De la Beche's anti-Lyellian sketches of 1831. Isis, 66(4), 534-560. Link [www.journals.uchicago.edu]
Clary, Renee M. "Uncovering strata: an investigation into the graphic innovations of geologist Henry T. De la Beche." Thesis. (2003). Link [digitalcommons.lsu.edu]
Images yoinked from:
Bressem, D. October 14, 2011. "Geology History in Caricatures: Exploring and Educating Geohistory". On the History of Geology blog. Link [historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com].
Rudwick, M. J. (1975). Caricature as a source for the history of science: De la Beche's anti-Lyellian sketches of 1831. Isis, 66(4), 534-560. Link [www.journals.uchicago.edu]
a University of Arizona course website [blc.arizona.edu]
The Man Creates Dinosaurs tumblr [man-creates-dinosaurs.tumblr.com]
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