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.

scholarly journals Visual Representation in Earth Sciences History after “The Emergence”

Nuncius ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-414
Author(s):  
Luca Ciancio ◽  
Domenico Laurenza
Keyword(s):  
Earth Sciences ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Comprehensive Review ◽  
Future Developments ◽  
The Earth

Abstract Starting from the analysis of Martin Rudwick’s pionieristic The emergence of a visual language for geological science (1976), this Introduction tries to assess how Rudwick’s suggestions were received by a comprehensive review of what has been published on the topic of visual culture in the earth sciences. The analysis includes studies dealing with maps, sections, landscapes, representations of specimens. We show how historians’ curiosity about cartography has grown constantly (e.g. Kenneth Taylor and David Oldroyd). The studies on geological sections include, among others, Rudwick (2005 and 2008), Gordon Craig and Kerry Magruder and recent contributions dealing with Leonardo da Vinci and Athanasius Kircker. The consideration of essays focused on geological views and landscapes include an overview of the outcomes and limits of studies devoted to the representations of the Vesuvius. Studies dealing with the pictures of rocks, minerals and fossils are considered in their relationships with the results of general works on pictures of natural specimens. The review ends with studies by art historians in the field of geological iconography and pointing out less studied aspects and possible future developments, from the modes of visualising data that have arisen with the introduction of digital technologies to the need of a better studies of geological iconography before the 18th century, a period which the studies collected in this issue of Nuncius are concentrated on.

The magnetic Sun

2008 ◽  
Vol 366 (1871) ◽  
pp. 1735-1748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Fields ◽  
Stellar Atmospheres ◽  
Magnetic Star ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Fundamental Nature ◽  
James Clerk Maxwell ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Basic Equations ◽  
The Way

The nature of our star, the Sun, is dominated by its complex and variable magnetic fields. It is the purpose of this paper to review the fundamental nature of our magnetic Sun by outlining the most basic principles behind the way the Sun works and how its fields are generated, and to examine not only the historical observations of our magnetic star, but, in particular, to study the wonderful observations of the Sun being made from space today. However, lying behind all of this are the most basic equations derived by James Clerk Maxwell, describing how the magnetic fields and plasmas of our Sun's atmosphere, and indeed of all stellar atmospheres, work and how they influence the Earth.

Esthetics and Mathematics

1927 ◽  
Vol 20 (8) ◽  
pp. 419-428
Author(s):  
David Eugene Smith
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Salient Points ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
Christopher Wren ◽  
Modern Work ◽  
Geometric Designs

In considering mathematics in relation to the beautiful, the range of possibility is so vast that a brief article like this can hardly be expected even to list the salient points of contact. The field might properly include all that we designate as the fine arts or, to use the more expressive phrase of the French, the beaux arts. Painting, for example, might be considered with reference to the works of that great genius in science, in mathematics, and in art—Leonardo da Vinci. Sculpture might equally well be included because of the mathematical principles employed by that majestic user of ponderous masses, Michelangelo. Architecture might have place with reference to the works of that Oxford professor of mathematics, Sir Christopher Wren, who rebuilt ecclesiastical London; engraving, with reference to that gifted artist of Niirnberg, Albrecht Diirer, who published the first modern work on curves; music, with reference to the fact that it always ranked as a branch of mathematics until the sixteenth century; decoration, with reference to the geometric designs found in all ages and reaching their highest degree of perfection in the works of the Moslems; and literature, with reference to the mathematics of poetry, and the poetry of mathematics. Indeed, we might properly include the beauties of nature, where mathematics plays a part of which we are usually quite unconscious.

Dosso Dossi's Allegory at Florence about Music

1990 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-98
Author(s):  
H. Colin Slim
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Right

An examination of a dozen paintings and several woodcuts by the Ferrarese artist Dosso Dossi (ca. 1490-1542) suggests that he belongs to the select company of other doubly gifted painters of the sixteenth century who were also musicians. The evidence rests on the accuracy of Dosso's depictions of musical instruments, his knowledge of their symbolism, and above all, from his inclusion of two canons, one circular and the other triangular, in a painting (ca. 1524-1534) once at the Este castle in Ferrara, and now in the Museo Horne, Florence. Whereas the composer of the former canon remains unknown, that of the latter is Josquin Desprez. The work is Josquin's celebrated proportional canon from the Agnus Dei of his Mass, L'homme armé super voces musicales. Musical aspects of Dosso's complex allegory reside not only in the relationships of the two canons on the right side of the picture to three hammers belonging to a blacksmith on the left side, but also in the tablets of stone on which the canons are inscribed. A brief notice of the changing relationships between music and painting at this period sets the stage for a more thorough examination of statements by Leonardo da Vinci concerning both arts, statements that help provide a conceptual framework for Dosso's allegory of music.

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.

Leonardo da Vinci Our Contemporary?

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nina Witoszek
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Free Inquiry ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
A Value ◽  
Ethical Vision ◽  
European Renaissance ◽  
The Way

This essay polemicizes with a number of historians who claim that the European Renaissance has either “failed” or “continues to recede from us at an accelerating rate” (Burke 1998: 41; Barzun 2000; Bouswma 2002). I explore and revalue the ideas and representations of Renaissance humanism and the way they become manifest in the work of Leonardo da Vinci. I argue three main points: Firstly, that there is a fascinating, and much underestimated, ecological strain in Leonardo’s opus, a view of relationship between humans and nature, which has a bearing on a paradigm shift required by the current environmental and social crisis. Secondly, in the project of re-imagining a sustainable future, there is much to learn from the way in which a small and subversive community of Renaissance umanisti managed—against all odds—to forge a ground-breaking ethical vision which became the foundation of Western modernity. Finally, both Leonardo’s legacy and a reinvention of humanity and nature in the ideas of the Renaissance writers and thinkers, draw attention to a unique code of “eco-humanism”—a value platform emphasizing human dignity, nature’s autonomy and authority, the importance of free inquiry and dialogue, as well as the codex of limitations to human pursuits.

An Artistic Perspective On The Continuity Of Space And The Origin Of Modern Geologic Thought

2001 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Rosenberg
Keyword(s):  
Earth Sciences ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Spatial Relationships ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Distinct Sequence ◽  
The Way

The western European rediscovery of geometric perspective during the fourteenth century revolutionized the understanding of spatial relationships in general, and the structure of nature in particular. Renaissance artists-naturalists wrought this revolution, and the roots of the earth sciences can be traced to achievements such as Leonardo da Vinci's oldest known work of art, a drawing of the hills of Tuscany. A perspectival analysis of it reveals a distinct sequence of laterally continuous, horizontal strata which scaffold the Tuscan hills the way that bones give structure to the flayed human body in écorché images that Renaissance anatomists such as Vesalius as well as da Vinci produced. The drawing depicts original horizontality. superposition, and lateral continuity nearly two hundred years before Steno defined them in words in his Prodromus. Steno was educated in mathematics and anatomy, and his Prodromus is clearly an attempt to apply the geometric principles he had learned to further advance the Renaissance understanding of the three-dimensional continuity of nature.

scholarly journals II.—Climate and Time

1919 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. M. Deeley
Keyword(s):  
Physical Geography ◽  
The State ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Earth ◽  
True Theory ◽  
Principles Of Geology

Sir Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology, published in 1834, remarks upon the accumulating proofs that the climate of the earth had undergone great changes in the past, and he endeavoured to show that these changes might have been produced by the varying distribution of sea and land. He says, “But if, instead of vague conjectures as to what might have been the state of the planet at the era of its creation, we fix our thoughts steadily on the connexion at present between climate and the distribution of land and sea; and if we then consider what influence former fluctuations in the physical geography of the earth must have had on superficial temperature, we may perhaps approximate to a true theory.”

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document