What Non-Fiction are you currently/just read?

[eppur_se_muova]

23. The Dawnseekers ...

Last edited Sun Feb 2, 2020, 10:06 PM - Edit history (1)

The First History of American Paleontology, by Robert West Howard

I read this book *many* years ago, but remember the contents in only the most general way, so I'm re-reading it. I'm finding it to be a truly rewarding read, esp. re. the 18th and early 19th century scientists who paved the way BD (before Darwin). We've all heard about the great Scopes "Monkey Trial" and all the opposition by reactionary religionists, but it was fascinating to see how the study of fossils, from shells in the high mountains to elephantid bones in New York bogs to giant lizard teeth in English quarries, and the growth of the then-infant science of geology, nursed by stratigraphy, made the whole idea of a recent Creation increasingly untenable -- yet to declare the Earth to be older than 6000 years was considered anti-Christian blasphemy, and not to be risked in too public a fashion. Even acknowledging that some animals might have gone extinct was to take too great a risk of controversy for some.

Controversy aside, it's interesting to read how hungry people once were for practical knowledge, and how popular public lectures and lyceums were, and how much they contributed to the growth of trade and industry and the expansion of the country. There's some interesting overlap, at least as I see it, with Paul Johnson's "The Birth of the Modern", although covering events both preceding and following the era in that discussion.

The following excerpt, which follows a lengthy quote from the diary of Charles Lyell, is worth reflecting on:

The revolutionary significance of this reverie by the forty-four-year-old Scotsman as he stared into the rainbowed spray of Niagara can be understood only when it is viewed in historical perspective. When Lyell was born, any expression of doubt about the "sacred truth" of the traditional interpretation of Genesis was punishable in the new United States by a three-year jail sentence and virtual loss of civil rights. Then Thomas Jefferson knew that as a public servant he had to insist that the Almighty would not permit any species to become extinct, and congregations nodded grim agreement to the cry of "heresy" thundered from the pulpits against Hutton and his uniformitarianism*. Lyell was a schoolboy when Benjamin Silliman's lectures demonstrated to James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Amos Eaton, and others that the "giant footprints" found in New England's rocks were records of the chaos of Noah's Flood and upheld Ussher's edict that the Creation had taken place in 4004 B.C.. William Smith's stratigraphy began to gain credence while Lyell was at Oxford.

Now, at forty-four, staring at the mightiest cataract on the ancient land mass curiously called the New World, he could conceive of and freely muse about an Earth so ancient that "the imagination in vain endeavors to grasp it." No passage in nineteenth-century literature so succinctly reveals the rapidity with which science, and its technological offspring, developed and was accepted as respectable by civilized men on both sides of the Atlantic, despite the campaign waged against it by religious leaders.

* (Uniformitarianism is the idea that the Earth has changed only gradually over long periods of time by the slow cumulative effects of the same geologic processes which operate today, as opposed to "Catastrophism" which posited that geologic and biological change was brought about by rare, massive events such as Noah's Flood. Today we know that both operate, with the former being more imporant the vast majority of the time, only asteroid/comet strikes, a few post-Ice Age floods, and some supervolcanic eruptions providing the exceptions.)

I'm still finishing the book, but the remaining material covers more modern events, with the Cope-Marsh "bone wars" being all too familiar, as they have been covered elsewhere many times. I'm not really expecting any great surprises from the remainder of the book. I'm just a little surprised that more of the material in the first half didn't stick with me from the first reading, but then, I was a callow youth when I first read it.

PS: If you've read Simon Winchester's "The Map That Changed The World", you might consider this book a broader, less tightly focused treatment of the same topic.