Perpetual Excitement: The Heroic Age of British Geology

Abstract

This paper is derived from a talk delivered to the annual meeting of the Geological Curators' Group held in the Yorkshire Museum, York, on 6 December 1990. That meeting attempted to examine why geology had lost ground to archaeology in the popular imagination and how museum geologists might help geology to re-capture the initiative. I was invited to review briefly the heroic age of British geology and the nature of curatorship at that time to see what could be learned from the past which might interest curators trying now to promote geology against the competing attractions of archaeology. The talk was accordingly divided into two parts. Firstly, it tried to analyse the attractions of geology in Britain in the so-called 'Heroic Age' which was adorned by such brethren of the hammer as William Smith, Greenough, Buckland, Sedgwick, Murchison, Lyell and Darwin. Secondly, given the location of the meeting, it seemed worth while to look at the aims of curatorship pursued by one of those heroic geologists, John Phillips, Keeper of the Yorkshire Museum from 1826 to 1840 and its leading spirit until 1853 when he left York for Oxford. Parts of the talk leaned on my current research towards a biography of Phillips and on my recent analysis of his geological work in the 1820s (Morrell 1989).