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Date: 1831
Format: Drawn in the back of a 1830-31 field notebook
Description: This cartoon and "Old world and New World balanced" make fun of Lyell's idea that apparent sea level changes in the geologic record were due to continental elevation change rather than rather than actual eustatic sea level change. In both cartoons, the American continent is balanced against Europe and Africa. The ocean surface is the line that stretches between them.
Rudwick thinks that De la Beche misinterpreted Lyell here. De la Beche may have thought Lyell meant that large continents separated by vast distances were somehow in dynamic equilibrium. As the old world slowly rose, the new world would slowly sink, and vice-versa. In fact, Lyell argued only that continents and adjacent marine sedimentary basins were in equilibrium. Continents would be worn down by erosion, and eventually mountains would rise from the adjacent basins.
De la Beche has drawn a large clock for Father Time, but has also drawn an hourglass next to it. My own speculation, informed by Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Stephen J. Gould, 1987) is that perhaps the clock represent's Lyell's more cyclic view of time (as parodied by De la Beche in Awful Changes) whereas the hourglass is more representative of De la Beche's view. (Although I must admit that while the imagery of a cycle vs an arrow was Gould's chosen motif, I have no evidence that De la Beche considered the difference between himself and Lyell in such terms.)
For more on De la Beche vs Lyell, see this page.
For more on Lyell himself, see his entry on the biography page.
Sources & further discussion:
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]
Image yoinked from:
Rudwick (1975)
Format: Drawn in the back of a 1830-31 field notebook
Description: This cartoon and "Old world and New World balanced" make fun of Lyell's idea that apparent sea level changes in the geologic record were due to continental elevation change rather than rather than actual eustatic sea level change. In both cartoons, the American continent is balanced against Europe and Africa. The ocean surface is the line that stretches between them.
Rudwick thinks that De la Beche misinterpreted Lyell here. De la Beche may have thought Lyell meant that large continents separated by vast distances were somehow in dynamic equilibrium. As the old world slowly rose, the new world would slowly sink, and vice-versa. In fact, Lyell argued only that continents and adjacent marine sedimentary basins were in equilibrium. Continents would be worn down by erosion, and eventually mountains would rise from the adjacent basins.
In this cartoon, Father Time holds the scale. He wears the tinted glasses of theory. The clock next to him moves in millions of centuries. De la Beche was no scriptural geologist, (Lyell would unfairly portray his opponents as believing in a young Earth, but the scientific conversation had moved past that long before,) yet the timescales required by Lyell nevertheless seemed extraordinary to his critics.
De la Beche has drawn a large clock for Father Time, but has also drawn an hourglass next to it. My own speculation, informed by Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle (Stephen J. Gould, 1987) is that perhaps the clock represent's Lyell's more cyclic view of time (as parodied by De la Beche in Awful Changes) whereas the hourglass is more representative of De la Beche's view. (Although I must admit that while the imagery of a cycle vs an arrow was Gould's chosen motif, I have no evidence that De la Beche considered the difference between himself and Lyell in such terms.)
For more on De la Beche vs Lyell, see this page.
For more on Lyell himself, see his entry on the biography page.
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Sources & further discussion:
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]
Image yoinked from:
Rudwick (1975)
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