“The old battle is to be fought again”: Reginald Stuart Poole, Edward William Lane, and the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Genesis-Geology Debate

2010 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 633-649
Author(s):  
Jan Marten Ivo Klaver
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Edward William Lane

AbstractIn 1856 a small octavo volume with the title Genesis of the Earth and of Man was anonymously published. It argued for the existence of preadamites as a solution to the mid-Victorian debate about the veracity of the biblical account of creation in the light of geological discoveries, and as such it was widely read and commented. This essay examines the author's main theses, places it in the scholarly tradition of Biblical chronology, and analyzes it in the context of mid-nineteenth-century apologetic literature. It also surveys the contemporary reaction to the book and discusses the possibility that the book was written by the orientalist Edward William Lane.

The Geological Unconscious

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Groves
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
German Language ◽  
Stable Point ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Current Climate ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Point Of Reference

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. In The Geological Unconcious, Jason Groves traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown, let alone the technologies that could forecast those changes. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, the author traces out a geological unconscious—in other words, unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—where it manifests in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period where this novel geological epoch, though arguably already underway, remains unnamed and otherwise unmarked. These close readings also unearth an entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of cotemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters on which The Geological Unconcious lingers, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination becomes apparent. While The Geological Unconcious does not explicitly set out to imagine alternatives to fossil capitalism, in elaborating a range of such encounters and in registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, it points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.

An Ancient Tradition

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan von Plato
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Logical Truth ◽  
Great Circle ◽  
Hypothetical Reasoning ◽  
The Earth

This chapter talks about how the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth century changed the traditional picture of axioms as evident truths: If triangles are drawn on the surface of the Earth so that each side is a part of a great circle (one that passes through two opposite points of the globe), the geometry is elliptic, and the sum of the angles of triangles is greater than that of two right angles. Axioms are now just some postulates that scholars choose as a basis. For some reason, today's logic did not first follow the lead of geometry, as a theory of hypothetical reasoning from axioms, but was formulated as a theory of logical truth on which even truth in mathematics was to be based.

Cumberer of the Earth

2018 ◽  
pp. 235-254
Author(s):  
Diane Miller Sommerville
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Religious Doctrine ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Suicide Note ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

This chapter surveys the long nineteenth century with an eye toward assessing how suffering and suicidal activity during the Civil War ushered in cultural and religious changes in ideas about suicide and the importance of those changes in laying groundwork for a new Confederate identity. The psychological crisis that grew out of the Civil War remapped the cultural, theological, and intellectual contours of the region. The scourge of war-related psychiatric casualties altered long-held axioms about suicide yielding a more tolerant, nuanced understanding of self-destruction as a response to suffering, one that found expression in sympathy and compassion for suicide victims. More routinely, denunciations of suicide were replaced with compassionate resignation. The writings of fire-eater Edmund Ruffin’s about suicide -- on the suicide of Thomas Cocke in 1840 and his own suicide note in 1854 -- are a window into how southerners thought about self-murder. His more tolerant views toward suicide before the war were out-of-step with most, but by war’s end more and more southerners dissented from rigid religious doctrine that cast self-murder as a mortal sin and came to share his view that sometimes circumstances justified death by one’s hand.

Earth as a Snowball

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Zalasiewicz ◽  
Mark Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Rock Fragments ◽  
Sedimentary Deposits ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Rock Strata ◽  
Louis Agassiz ◽  
Better Than

Our attempts to reconstruct the climate of the distant Archaean in Chapter 1 might seem a little like reading a volume of Tolstoy’s War and Peace recovered from a burnt-out house. Most of the pages have turned to ash, and only some scattered sentences remain on a few charred pages. The Proterozoic Eon that followed began 2.5 billion years ago, thus is not quite so distant from us in time. We know it a little better than the Archaean—at least a handful of pages from its own book have survived. And this book is long—the Proterozoic lasted nearly two billion years. This is as long as the Hadean and Archaean together, and not far short of half of Earth’s history. Like many a soldier’s account of war, it combined long periods of boredom and brief intervals of terror—or their climatic equivalents, at least. The latter included the most intense glaciations that ever spread across the Earth. Some of these may have converted the planet into one giant snowball. The earliest traces of glaciation on Earth are seen even before the Proterozoic, in rock strata of Archaean age, 2.9 billion years old, near the small South African town of Pongola. These rocks include sedimentary deposits called tillites, which are essentially a jumble of rock fragments embedded in finer sediment. The vivid, old-fashioned term for such deposits is ‘boulder clays’, while the newer and more formal name is ‘till’ for a recent deposit and ‘tillite’ for the hardened, ancient version. Many of the ancient blocks and boulders in the tillites of Pongola are grooved and scratched—a tell-tale sign that they have been dragged along the ground by debris-rich ice. This kind of evidence is among the first ever employed by scientists of the mid-nineteenth century, such as Louis Agassiz and William Buckland, to tell apart ice-transported sediments from superficially similar ones that had formed as boulder-rich slurries when rivers flooded or volcanoes erupted. Ice, then, appeared on Earth in Archaean times.

scholarly journals Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nur Masalha
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Politics Of Place ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Place Naming

Cartography, place-naming and state-sponsored explorations were central to the modern European conquest of the earth, empire building and settler-colonisation projects. Scholars often assume that place names provide clues to the historical and cultural heritage of places and regions. This article uses social memory theory to analyse the cultural politics of place-naming in Israel. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ study of the construction of social memory by the Latin Crusaders and Christian medieval pilgrims, the article shows Zionists’ toponymic strategies in Palestine, their superimposition of Biblical and Talmudic toponyms was designed to erase the indigenous Palestinian and Arabo-Islamic heritage of the land. In the pre-Nakba period Zionist toponymic schemes utilised nineteenth century Western explorations of Biblical ‘names’ and ‘places’ and appropriated Palestinian toponyms. Following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, the Israeli state, now in control of 78 percent of the land, accelerated its toponymic project and pursued methods whose main features were memoricide and erasure. Continuing into the post-1967 occupation, these colonial methods threaten the destruction of the diverse historical cultural heritage of the land.

scholarly journals “The Great End of All Government…”: Working People's Construction of Citizenship Claims in Early Nineteenth-Century England and the Matter of Class

1995 ◽  
Vol 40 (S3) ◽  
pp. 19-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc W. Steinberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Manual Labour ◽  
Working People ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
The Right ◽  
William Cobbett ◽  
A Share

In the heat of the battle for parliamentary reform William Cobbett preached to the working people of England in his inimitable blustery dictums. “[I]f you labour honestly,” he counselled, “you have a right to have, in exchange for your labour, a sufficiency out of the produce of the earth, to maintain yourself and your family as well; and, if you are unable to labour, or if you cannot obtain labour, you have a right to maintenance out of the produce of the land […]”. For honest working men this was part of the legacy of constitutional Britain, which bequeathed to them not only sustenance but, “The greatest right […] of every man, the right of rights, […] the right of having a share in the making of the laws, to which the good of the whole makes it his duty to submit”. Nonetheless, he warned, such rights could not legitimately negate the toiling lot that was the laborer's fate: “Remember that poverty is decreed by the very nature of man […]. It is necessary to the existence of mankind, that a very large proportion of every people should live by manual labour […]”.

Scandinavian Rock-engravings

Antiquity ◽  
1937 ◽  
Vol 11 (41) ◽  
pp. 56-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grahame Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Made In ◽  
Cave Art

The discovery of the cave art of France and Spain did more than anything else to make the ordinary man aware of the immense significance of the discoveries made in the field of pleistocene man during the nineteenth century. In many ways the superior of the conventionally accepted ‘art’ of the day, the paintings and engravings captured the imagination of people to whom flints and bones meant little. They made real the existence of man in the ice age, and through them men could look into a primitive world, situated not in the distant places of the earth, but close to the centres of modern civilization.

“WHERE HEAVES THE TURF”: THOMAS HARDY AND THE BOUNDARIES OF THE EARTH

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Robson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Twenty First Century

WHAT DO WE EXPECTto learn when we scrutinize the boundaries of, or within, Victorian literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Because many nineteenth-century scholars had always worked within an interdisciplinary paradigm, the theoretical shifts of the last thirty years or so, which broke down divisions between generically distinct discourses, could be said to have brought continuity, rather than change, to this particular community. Yet it is probably true that a pre-existing predilection for historicist investigation has gained added strength in Victorianist circles in recent times. Certain kinds of journeys have become especially common: intrepid explorers travel beyond the bounds of a literary text to hitherto unimagined contexts, and then return to said text laden with the spoils of their expeditions. The exotic voyage to discover the strangeness of the Victorians, then, has become a familiar event; we have witnessed an expansion of the empire of possible connections. Rarer than these heroic ventures, however, has been the practice of quiet contemplation: we have perhaps been less adept at standing still, and looking carefully at the ground we already hold, the ground we assume we share with our nineteenth-century predecessors. What happens when we eschew the temptation to strike out across new territory, and turn our eyes merely to the earth below? Might we discover boundaries between the Victorians and ourselves in the most mundane, the most fundamental of places?

The Age of the Earth in the Twentieth Century

1989 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brush
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Time Scales ◽  
Time Scale ◽  
Molten State ◽  
Expanding Universe ◽  
New Science ◽  
Upper Limit ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Age Determinations

At the end of the nineteenth century, Lord Kelvin's upper limit of only 20 or 30 million years for the age of the Earth was challenged by the American geologist T. C. Chamberlin, who showed that Kelvin's model of an Earth gradually cooling from an initial molten state was not the only possible one. Kelvin's limit was soon afterwards repealed by the new science of radioactivity, which yielded ages of a few billion years. While some geologists resisted this expanded time-scale, Chamberlin was the only one who could provide a comprehensive cosmogonical theory that did not submit to the epistemological superiority of physics and astronomy. In the 1940s, as radiometric age determinations improved in accuracy, they came into conflict with the expanding-universe cosmology — a conflict which the cosmologists eventually avoided by expanding their distance and time scales. In 1953, Patterson announced the result 4.5 billion years, which is still accepted as the best estimate for the age of the Earth. But geologists, liberated from Kelvin's limit, define the epoch of the Earth's formation as being outside the scope of their science, and their textbooks rarely give credit to the person who established the number that once seemed so important to accounts of the Earth's history.

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