Charles Lyell and G. B. Brocchi: A Study in Comparative Historiography

1976 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul J. McCartney
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of Geology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Principles Of Geology

In the second volume of the Principles of geology Lyell had occasion to speak of G. B. Brocchi, ‘whose untimely death in Egypt’, he said, ‘is deplored by all who have the progress of geology at heart’. Whatever he understood to be the debt of other geologists to that Italian fossil conchologist, Lyell himself owed him much for providing scientific data and interpretations integrated in his own geological synthesis, but especially for furnishing the escutcheon of the third chapter in the review of the history of geology which Lyell appended as a late but enthusiastic embellishment to the Principles of geology. The ‘Discorso sui progressi dello studio della conchiologia fossile in Italia’, an eighty-page essay on the history of his subject, was contained in the first volume of Brocchi's Conchiologia fossile subappennina and afforded Lyell succinct notices on Italian geologists from the sixteenth century to his own time, as well as cues for the introduction of other non-Italian sources.

scholarly journals Two critical books in the history of loess investigation: ‘Charakteristik der Felsarten’ by Karl Caesar von Leonhard and ‘Principles of Geology’ by Charles Lyell

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 447-451
Author(s):  
Ulrich Hambach ◽  
Ian Smalley
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
The Third ◽  
Worldwide Distribution ◽  
The World ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
History Of ◽  
Rhine Valley ◽  
Principles Of Geology ◽  
Short Section

Abstract The two critical books, launching the study and appreciation of loess, were ‘Charakteristik der Felsarten’ (CdF) by Karl Caesar von Leonhard, published in Heidelberg by Joseph Engelmann, in 1823-4, and ‘Principles of Geology’ (PoG) by Charles Lyell, published in London by John Murray in 1830-3. Each of these books was published in three volumes and in each case the third volume contained a short piece on loess (about 2-4 pages). These two books are essentially the foundations of loess scholarship. In CdF Loess [Loefs] was first properly defined and described; section 89 in vol. 3 provided a short study of the nature and occurrence of loess, with a focus on the Rhine valley. In PoG there was a short section on loess in the Rhine valley; this was in vol.3 and represents the major dissemination of loess awareness around the world. A copy of PoG3 (Principles of Geology vol. 3) reached Charles Darwin on the Beagle in Valparaiso in 1834; worldwide distribution. Lyell and von Leonhard met in Heidelberg in 1832. Von Leonhard and Heinrich Georg Bronn (1800-1862) showed Lyell the local loess. These observations provided the basis for the loess section in PoG3. Lyell acknowledged the influence of his hosts when he added a list of loess scholars to PoG; by the 5th edition in 1837 the list comprised H.G. Bronn, Karl Caesar von Leonhard (1779-1862), Ami Boue (1794-1881), Voltz, Johann Jakob Noeggerath (1788-1877), J. Steininger, P. Merian, Rozet, C.F.H. von Meyer (1801-1869), Samuel Hibbert (1782-1848) and Leonard Horner (1785-1864); a useful list of loess pioneers. The loess is a type of ground that has only recently been established, and it seems, the peculiarity of the Rhine region, and of a very general but inconsistent spread.” H.G. Bronn 1830

Geology Emerges as a Science

2021 ◽  
pp. 6-33
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Ervin-Blankenheim
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Principles Of Geology ◽  
The Way

This chapter and the next one cover the way in which geology came to be a science in its own right, spanning the early centuries of geology. Lives of crucial individual scientists from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century are discussed by relating the stories and discoveries of each, commencing with Leonardo da Vinci and continuing with the European geologists, including Nicholaus Steno, Abraham Werner, James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and early fossilists such as Etheldred Benet. Steno, Werner, Hutton and Lyell, and other early geologists revealed and wrote about the basic principles of geology, painstakingly untangling and piecing together the threads of the Earth’s vast history. They made sense of jumbled sequences of rocks, which had undergone dramatic changes since they were formed, and discerned the significance of fossils, found in environments seemingly incongruous to where the creatures once lived, as ancient forms of life. They set the stage for further research on the nature of the Earth and life on it, providing subsequent generations of geologists and those who study the Earth the basis on which to refine and flesh out the biography of the Earth.

Wanted: A Comparative History of the Modern Mediterranean

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-53
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Third World ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Third World

There is something seriously flawed about models of social change that posit the dominant role of in-built civilizational motors. While “the rise of the West” makes great ideology, it is poor history. Like Jared Diamond, I believe that we need to situate the fate of nations in a long-term ecohistorical context. Unlike Diamond, I believe that the ways (and the sequences) in which things happened mattered deeply to what came next. The Mediterranean is a particularly useful case in this light. No longer a center of progress after the sixteenth century, the decline of the Mediterranean is usually ascribed to its inherent cultural deficiencies. While the specific cultural infirmity varies with the historian (amoral familism, patron/clientalism, and religion are some of the favorites) its civilizationalist presuppositions are clear. In this respect the search for “what went wrong” typifies national histories across the region and prefigures the fate of the Third World.

A REPUBLIC OF CUCKOO CLOCKS: SWITZERLAND AND THE HISTORY OF LIBERTY

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
ISAAC NAKHIMOVSKY
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Black Forest ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
The Third ◽  
Forest Region ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps

The history of Swiss republicanism was memorably summed up by Orson Welles in the classic filmThe Third Man(1949): whereas the tumultuous and tyrannical politics of the Italian Renaissance produced a great cultural flourishing, Welles observed, “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Suggestive as it may be, Welles's contrast is as misleading as it is memorable. The Swiss were a fearsome military power at the beginning of the sixteenth century, admired by no less a Florentine than Niccolò Machiavelli, but by the eighteenth century they were no longer capable of defending themselves, and they were summarily occupied by the armies of revolutionary France in 1798. The nature of Swiss democracy was long contested, and in 1847 the Swiss fought a civil war over it. Finally, it must be said, cuckoo clocks were invented in the Black Forest region, on the other side of the Alps. As we shall see, the success of the Swiss watchmaking industry does in fact deserve a place in the history of liberty, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau turns out to be a more helpful guide for understanding its significance.

Daniel Weiman and Libri picturati A 16–31

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Simonini
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Final Shape ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of

The history of the collection of zoological and botanical watercolours known as Libri Picturati A 16–31 is a long and complex one. Scholars have mainly focused on its origin and vicissitudes during the sixteenth century. Daniel Weiman (originally Weimann), Chancellor of Kleve, was possibly the third known owner of the 16-volume collection, but so far little attention has been paid to the vital role he played in the compilation of Libri Picturati A 16–31. This paper sets out to analyse the importance of Daniel Weiman and to chart the history of the volumes during the seventeenth century, when the collection assumed its final shape.

Proctorial Representation in the House of Lords during the Reign of Edward VI

1969 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon F. Snow
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
Satisfactory Treatment ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship

This is the third in a series of studies dealing with the history of the proxy system in the House of Lords. The first, after tracing the origin of proxies to the Roman law of agency, dealt with the emergence and spread of representation by proctors in the ecclesiastical and political assemblies of medieval England. The second study demonstrated how the proxy system was perfected in the upper house during the reign of Henry VIII and how the Crown benefited from that system. The ensuing article concerns proctorial representation during the crucial years of the Edwardian Reformation. Because of the brief period under consideration — only six years — it seemed best to cast the study in an analytical rather than a chronological framework. The first section deals with the general characteristics of proctorial representation in mid-Tudor times; the second and third sections cover the spiritual and temporal lords, respectively; and the fourth section treats the relationship between the proxy system and conciliar government.IKnowledge of the proxy system in the mid-sixteenth-century House of Lords remains somewhat fragmentary and limited in scope. A satisfactory treatment of the subject does not exist. Constitutional and legal historians have paid little attention to proxies and less to the procedure governing their use in the upper house. As one might expect, Bishop Stubbs dealt with proxies in medieval Parliaments and correctly associated them with parliamentary privileges, but at the same time he concluded that “its history has not yet been minutely traced.

A THREE-STEP VIEW FOR THE HISTORY OF GEOLOGY

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 388-402
Author(s):  
ALESSANDRO IANNACE
Keyword(s):  
Plate Tectonics ◽  
Continuous Process ◽  
Second Step ◽  
Geologic History ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of Geology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Geology ◽  
New Community ◽  
Epistemological Basis

ABSTRACT The evolution of geology as an independent science can be envisaged as a relatively continuous process yet marked by three fundamental steps. These represented singularities which established significant advances in the epistemological and heuristic power of the discipline. This interpretation of history has to be strictly based on an evaluation of the epistemological basis of geology according to modern scholarship. The recognition of these ‘golden spikes’, albeit artificial, may help geologists to better grasp the philosophical position of geology with respect to other sciences. The first step was the publication of Steno's Prodromus in 1669, which established the methodological rules for decoding a geologic history from the geometrical arrangements of beds. The second step was the founding of the Geological Society of London in 1807, an act by which a new community recognized itself as a scientific and professional entity applying a novel methodology in the study of Earth. Their approach represented a synthesis of the Wernerian-historical and the Huttonian-causal methods. The third step was the emergence of plate tectonics in 1967, when the actualistic method (i.e. uniformity of laws and processes) could be extended to the interpretation of the whole lithosphere. At the same time, the heuristic power of historical geology was validated by independent, physico-mathematical testing.

Humphry Davy as Geologist, 1805–29

1976 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Siegfried ◽  
R. H. Dott
Keyword(s):  
Steady State ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Textual Material ◽  
Humphry Davy ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Principles Of Geology

When Charles Lyell was writing his Principles of geology early in 1830, he interpolated five chapters between a recently written historical account of the science and the main body of textual material whose structure had long been determined. These added chapters contained not only Lyell's effort ‘to express the consequences of the uniformity of nature in the history of the earth’, but also his general arguments against the catastro-phic-progressionist interpretation, which he felt obliged to refute. In Chapter IX, the final one in the introductory sections, Lyell chose as representative of the progressionist view, Sir Humphry Davy, ‘a late distinguished writer’ who had ‘advanced some of the weightiest of these objections’ to Lyell's own steady-state view of the earth. No other defender of the progressionist history of the earth was named in Lyell's chapter, and we might well ask, why Humphry Davy? Was he merely an easy target for Lyell's refutations, a straw man set up by Lyell for his own rhetorical convenience?

Victorian Lyric in the Anthropocene

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 753-783
Author(s):  
Devin M. Garofalo
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Single Species ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Reasonable Doubt ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Real Possibility ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Principles Of Geology

When Charles Lyell chronicles humankind's rise to geologic power in thePrinciples of Geology, he talks out of both sides of his mouth. Detailing the human species’ seemingly unmatched force as a terrestrial “levelling agent,” he ruminates on an unsettling possibility that haunts the present: “it admits of reasonable doubt whether, upon the whole, we fertilize or impoverish the lands we occupy.” Already at the time of Lyell's writing, the human species had “displaced” or altogether extinguished “a number of beasts of prey, birds, and animals of every class” (2:148) through deforestation, hunting, and the “progress of colonization” (2:150–51). But elsewhere in thePrinciples, Lyell puts into question what this history of environmental degradation otherwise seems to assert: that to be human is to possess a singular capacity for mastery. Thus, Lyell declares, “we ought always, before we decide that any part of the influence of man is novel and anomalous, carefully to consider all the powers of other animate agents which may be limited or superseded by him” (2:206). Tracing how swarms of insects gave dramatic and lasting shape to the German arboreal landscape in ways that humans could never replicate, he concludes: “[I]t does not follow that this kind of innovation”—human innovation—“is unprecedented” (2:206). Even as Lyell imagines humankind as “superior” in its capacity to act as “a single species,” he persistently lingers with the very real possibility that humans donotpossess a “novel and anomalous” hold over the world (2:207, emphasis original). Instead, thePrinciplestraces how the world is shaped by “physical causes” and nonhuman agencies that elude control and unmask the relative “insignifican[ce]” of humankind's “aggregate force” (2:207). Inasmuch as humans comprise only one part of an agential assemblage whose shifting interactions elude anthropogenic mastery, thePrinciplesimagines humankind as interpenetrated by and profoundly susceptible to nonhuman life-forms and forces. According to Lyell, then, deep history speaks not only of the human species’ seemingly privileged capacity for action but also its nonintentionality, noninstrumentality, and vulnerability. That thePrinciplestells a story about the porous interfaces between human and nonhuman geologic agents is perhaps surprising, given that it emerged and participated in a moment which, for many, marks the zenith of imperial and anthropogenic power.

Dialogism and Territoriality in a Mughal History of the Islamic Millennium

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 220-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Anooshahr
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
European Literature ◽  
The Third ◽  
New Information ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe sixteenth century witnessed the flowering of European literature that claimed to describe the encounter between Western travelers and the indigenous population of the rest of the world. Similarly, some Persianate writings of the same period present a dialogical encounter, not so much with the Europeanother, but with rival Muslim empires. One of the writers in this genre was Jaʿfar Beg Qazvīnī, sole author of the third part of theTaʾrikh-i alfī(Millennial History), supervised by the Mughal emperor Akbar. In his book, Jaʿfar Beg drew on an unprecedented store of sources from rival courts and treated the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids as essentially equal political and cultural units following identical historical trajectories. He also developed one of the earliest Mughal expressions of “Hindustan” encompassing South Asia in its entirety. While most analyses of this outstanding example of dialogical historiography have downplayed its value because of its paucity of new information, the present article will seek instead to demonstrate its significance for its unusual worldview.

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