Essay review: Stone ages, old and new

Abstract

The history of geology has come a long way over the last generation. As recently as twenty years ago, almost no scholarly book-length studies in this field were being published in the English language. Despite the invaluable biobibliographical research undertaken by geologists such as George White and Joan and Victor Eyles, it was the venerable authors whose books were wellthumbed and whose interpretations were influential; Karl von Zittel, Archibald Geikie, and slightly more of a youngster! Frank Dawson Adams. Then, heralded by Gordon Davies' Earth in Decay (1969) and Martin Rudwick's Meaning of Fossils (1972), a new wave of studies began to appear, typically combining three vital qualities.' They had real chronological breadth (both Davies and Rudwick covered several centuries). Their discussion of the internal fine-texture of science was expert and perceptive (the history of geology was still being pioneered by scholars whose training lay in science). And, third, they reached out to embrace both the lessons of Lovejoyan history of ideas and the newly erupting debates over methods and approaches in the historiography of science. By analogy perhaps to solid paleontological technique, scholars were recognizing that the meaning of fossilized geological theories and systems could be grasped only by paying due attention to their matrices in the belief systems of yesteryear: metaphysical criteria, aesthetic values, theological commitments, philosophies of man, and doctrines of natural order at the highest level. By the later 1970s these new stirrings had turned into a veritable ferment; it looked as though the history of geology would simply disintegrate in the melting pot and never reemerge as a coherent field. This was partly because of the seemingly inevitable drift toward scholarly fragmentation and subdivision of labor: that contagious disease, researchers' myopia, meant that more was increasingly being