The New Science of Geology: Studies in the Earth Sciences in the Age of Revolution

by Martin J.S. Rudwick

The science of geology was constructed in the decades around 1800 from earlier practices that had been significantly different in their cognitive goals. In the studies collected here Martin Rudwick traces how it came to be recognised as a new kind of natural science, because it was constituted around the idea that the natural world had its own history. The earth had to be understood not only in relation to unchanging natural laws that could be observed in action in the present, but also in terms of a pre-human past that could be reliably known, even if not directly observable and its traces only fragmentarily preserved. In contrast to this radically novel sense of nature's own contingent history, the earth's unimaginably vast timescale was already taken for granted by many naturalists (though not yet by the wider public), and the concurrent development of biblical scholarship precluded any significant sense of conflict with religious tradition. A companion volume, Lyell and Darwin, Studies in the Earth Sciences in the Age of Reform, was published in 2005.

Hardcover

First published October 21, 2004

About the author

Martin John Spencer Rudwick is a British geologist, historian, and academic. He is an emeritus professor of History at the University of California, San Diego and an affiliated research scholar at Cambridge University's Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

His principal field of study is the history of the earth sciences; his work has been described as the "definitive histories of the pre-Darwinian earth sciences".

Rudwick was awarded the Sue Tyler Friedman Medal in 1988. In 2008, he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). He was the recipient of the 2007 George Sarton Medal from the History of Science Society.