The Highlands Controversy: Constructing Geological Knowledge through Fieldwork in Nineteenth-Century Britain

by David R. Oldroyd

The Highlands Controversy is a rich and perceptive account of the third and last major dispute in nineteenth-century geology stemming from the work of Sir Roderick Murchison. The earlier Devonian and Cambrian-Silurian controversies centered on whether the strata of Devon and Wales should be classified by lithological or paleontological criteria, but the Highlands dispute arose from the difficulties the Scottish Highlands presented to geologists who were just learning to decipher the very complex processes of mountain building and metamorphism. David Oldroyd follows this controversy into the last years of the nineteenth century, as geology was transformed by increasing professionalization and by the development of new field and laboratory techniques. In telling this story, Oldroyd's aim is to analyze how scientific knowledge is constructed within a competitive scientific community—how theory, empirical findings, and social factors interact in the formation of knowledge.

Oldroyd uses archival material and his own extensive reconstruction of the nineteenth-century fieldwork in a case study showing how detailed maps and sections made it possible to understand the exceptionally complex geological structure of the Highlands

An invaluable addition to the history of geology, The Highlands Controversy also makes important contributions to our understanding of the social and conceptual processes of scientific work, especially in times of heated dispute.

448 pages, Paperback

First published July 25, 1990

Reviews

[Nick Simpson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone clicking on this review will, like me, be motivated by an interest in the geology of the NW Highlands. If you have the patience to get through it, Prof Oldroyd's tome will be a satisfying read.

For the uninitiated, the subject is the period in the mid-late 19th century when the officials of the state-funded Geological Survey were close to providing a plausible account of Britain's rocks. The Big Beast was Roderick Murchison, with his Mini-Me sidekick Archibald Geikie in tow. Murchison dominated the intellectual landscape, and his reading of the landscape of the far north became the unchallenged norm. Prof Oldroyd doesn't just set out the intellectual battlelines between the Survey chiefs and the "amateurs" outside, but also accounts for social and professional motivations (jobs, career, glory) which led these scientists to behave the way they did.

For in time Murchison and Geikie were challenged by James Nicol, an Aberdeen academic, and Charles Lapworth, an English schoolteacher. Nicol died before he could be vindicated, but Lapworth lived to see the Survey view overturned. Essentially, Murchison had spent insufficient time walking the (exceptionally arduous) ground; he and his fellows did not have the intellectual tools which would have made diagnosis easier. They did not understand that rocks are malleable things under sufficient pressure; they knew about vertical faults, but had no notion that rock formations could be pushed sideways for many miles by the forces of mountain building, driven in turn by plate tectonics.

For the NW highlands was one of the first areas studied in detail where lateral thrust faults built the landscape, and it was an appreciation of the enormous forces required which led in the decades that followed to the notion of continental plates drifting and banging into each other, making oceans, earthquakes and mountains.

I've read other books on this subject, but Oldroyd's is by far the most thorough. He has read all the surviving papers so we don't have to. It's not a journalist's book, which is to its credit, but it's well-enough written to transcend its academic origins. Anyone interest in the subject should give it a go.