or, some of the Artists & their Victims
2. Mary Anning (subject)
3. August Breüner (artist)
4. William Buckland (subject)
5. William Conybeare (artist/subject)
6. Charles Lyell (subject)
7. Roderick Impey Murchison (subject)
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| A statue of Louis Agassiz after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Photo by Frank Davey (1906) WBUR [wbur.org] |
It was a radical idea, and was initially met with hostility among the British scientific establishment. William Buckland and Charles Lyell were notably an early adopters, though Lyell later turned against the theory.
As research continued, one great Pleistocene ice age would become four, and in the middle of the 20th century four would become dozens of individual glacial episodes. Glacial research remains the best & most interesting field in geology cough cough cough...
Agassiz would eventually move to America where he would set up the museum of natural history at Harvard, which still exists. He never accepted Darwin's theory of natural selection, and was one of the last major scientist to hold out. He was a strict instructor, whose own graduate students would eventually rebel against him. He is also, unfortunately, remembered for his racist and polygenist views.
>> Cartoons about Agassiz
Sources:
A general biographical sketch: The University of California Museum of Paleontology biographical sketch [ucmp.berkeley.edu]
A detailed description of the British reaction to glacial theory: Boylan, P. J. (1998). Lyell and the dilemma of Quaternary glaciation. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 143(1), 145-159. Link [sp.lyellcollection.org]
Discussion of Agassiz's polygenist views: Gould, S. J. (1996). The Mismeasure of Man. WW Norton & Company.
For Agassiz as a teacher: The essay "In a Jumbled Drawer", collected in Gould, S. J. (1991). Bully for brontosaurus: Reflections in natural history. WW Norton & Company. Gould half-humorously argues that the student's rebellion (and their subsequent expulsion from Agassiz's tutelage) was a benefit for paleontology as a whole, since the capable students were scattered to other universities. Agassiz hired people closer in line with his creationist views, and brought "peace and mediocrity once again to Harvard."
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| Mary Anning (artist unknown, before 1842) Color-adjusted from Smithsonian [ocean.si.edu] |
In about 1810 she and her brother Joseph discovered the first ichthyosaur, that animal which would so captivate Victorian imaginations. (Alas, today the ichthyosaurs have been reduced to also-ran status beside the dinosaurs). Later she discovered the first complete plesiosaur. Her reputation and career were threatened when the renown naturalist Cuvier suggested that the plesiosaur was a hoax, but was defended by Conybeare and Buckland, and Cuvier admitted his mistake. She also supplied Buckland with some of the coprolites that would be so crucial to his research.
She was renown as one of the best "fossilists" of her age, and was considered an authority on the fossils of the Lyme Regis area. Nevertheless, class, gender, and religion were significant barriers, and she complained that scientists "sucked her brains", took her fossils and published on them, and gave her very little credit in return. Eventually, in appreciation of her contributions to science and in light of her financial struggles, William Buckland secured a public annuity for her. She was honored as the first non-Fellow to have an obituary read at the Geological Society (though she surely would have been a member had the Society not barred women).
Anning and Henry De la Beche were childhood friends, a friendship which would prove fruitful for both of their careers. She also knew William Buckland as a child.
>> Cartoons about Anning
Sources:
The Lyme Regis museum [lymeregismuseum.co.uk] and The London's Natural History Museum [nhm.ac.uk] both have biographical sketches.
The biographical sketches on Strange Science on Anning [strangescience.net] and Conybeare [ibid] are detailed and include some analysis.
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| Breüner by Friedrich von Amerling (1834) (According to Wikipedia [de.wikipedia.org]) (I haven't been able to find non-wiki confirmation) |
Some information can be found on the entry for Breunnerite on MinDat [mindat.org]. His Geological Society membership is attested to in the 1866 list of Foreign GS members [books.google.com]. The German-language Wikipedia has an article about him [de.wikipedia.org], but I cannot read it. Complicating matters, his name is spelled variously "Breüner", "Breuner", and Breunner".
The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland, from which the cartoons reproduced here have been taken, remarks merely that he was a "skilful draughtsman, with a keen sense of humour". As the book is poor with citations, and it is not even clear to me that all of the sketches in Life and Correspondence that appear to be attributed to Breüner are actually by him.
>> Cartoons by Breüner
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| Buckland by Richard Ansdell (1843) Wikimedia Commons [commons.wikimedia.org] |
He is known for many things, but one special interest of his was the use of coprolites (fossil feces) to reconstruct the diets, lifestyles, and anatomies of extinct animals. He was interested in seeing extinct animals as living, breathing creatures, rather than collections of bones. In a sense he was an early paleo-ecologist.
He was a personal friend of both Conybeare and De la Beche, having known the former since childhood. Together, he and Conybeare described megalosaurus, the first of the member of the group that would become known as dinosaurs to receive that treatment.
The "blue bag" depicted in the portrait was something of a personal trademark, which he carried everywhere with him.
>> Cartoons about Buckland
Sources:
A biographical sketch: Oxford University Museum's Learning More biography [www.oum.ox.ac.uk; pdf]
A historical life and letters treatment that includes many fun anecdotes (though is perhaps too fawning): Gordon, E. O. (1894). The life and correspondence of William Buckland, DD, FRS: sometime dean of Westminster, twice president of the Geological society, and first president of the British association. London: J. Murray. Link [archive.org]
A number of contemporary drawings and poems about him: Pemberton, S. G. (2010). History of Ichnology: The Reverend William Buckland (1784–1856) and the Fugitive Poets. Ichnos, 17(4), 246-263. Link [tandfonline.com]
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| I have not yet been able to find a portrait of Conybeare with valid artist and date information, so Breüner's sketch will have to do. |
>> Cartoons by/about Conybeare
Sources:
Strange Science [strangescience.net] has a good biographical sketch
Other information from Gordon, E. O. (1894). The life and correspondence of William Buckland, DD, FRS: sometime dean of Westminster, twice president of the Geological society, and first president of the British association. London: J. Murray. Link [archive.org]
and Norman, D. B. (2000). Henry De la Beche and the plesiosaur's neck. Archives of natural history, 27(1), 137-148. Link [euppublishing.com]
Henry De la Beche is discussed here.
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| Lyell by Ernest Edwards (1863) National Portrait Gallery [npg.org.uk] |
He is best remembered today as a friend and mentor to Charles Darwin (and due to this fact, now seems to overshadow all of his peers.) In Darwin's story, he is mostly known as the man who (slightly underhandedly) secured Darwin's priority on natural selection when Alfred Wallace threatened to preempt it. He engineered a deal in which Darwin and Wallace concurrently had papers presented at the Geological Society. It was a deal made without Wallace's knowledge, though in Lyell's defense Wallace was collecting specimens in southeast Asia at the time and mail was slow.
More about De la Beche's issue with Lyell can be read here.
>> Cartoons about Lyell.
Sources:
James Secord's introduction to the 1997 Penguin Books reprint of Principles of Geology is an excellent discussion of Lyell's goals and strategy in Principles, and its impact on Victorian Britain.
Lyell's strategy in Principles is also discussed extensively in Gould, S. J. (1987). Time's arrow, time's cycle: Myth and metaphor in the discovery of geological time (Vol. 2). Harvard University Press.
Most biographies of Darwin will mention Lyell
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| Murchison by Hennah and Kent (1860s) National Portrait Gallery [npg.org.uk] |
He opposed De la Beche's early interpretation of the rocks of Devon (which was indeed incorrect) because it threatened his belief that rocks from his Silurian system could not have coal. This was important because if Silurian rock had no coal, then the presence of Silurian rock would constrain the areas available for the search for economic coal beds in Britain. Reducing waste in time and resources in coal prospecting would be have been a victory for geology as a fledgling science, and a victory for Murchison personally.
While De la Beche and Murchison seemed to have some personal enmity in the 1830s, this appears to have subsided later on. Murchison didn't like uniformitarianism any more that De la Beche, and maintained that stance even after De la Beche had come around, writing to De la Beche that he hoped he had not become an "inch by inch geologist" in 1851.
>> Cartoons about Murchison
Sources:
Murchison has a starring role in Rudwick, M. J. (1988). The great Devonian controversy: the shaping of scientific knowledge among gentlemanly specialists. University of Chicago Press.
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