The Emergence of the Diversity of Igneous Rocks As A Geological Problem: Part One—Early Speculations

1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davis Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Igneous Rock ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Rock Type ◽  
Great Depth ◽  
Igneous Rocks ◽  
Feldspathic Material ◽  
Clarence King ◽  
Crystal Settling ◽  
Basaltic Material

Speculation about igneous rock diversity began in the first half of the nineteenth century after acceptance of the existence of ancient volcanism and the recognition of two fundamental types of lava: basalt and trachyte. Before 1850, George Poulett Scrope (1797-1876), Charles Darwin (1809-1882), and James Dwight Dana (1813-1895) attributed diversity to intumescence of gas-rich lava, crystal settling, and differential fusion of minerals. In the 1850s, Robert Bunsen (1811-1899) maintained that lava is derived from two deep normal trachytic and normal pyroxenic sources. Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen (1809-1876), Joseph Durocher (1817-1860), and Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833-1905) universalized Bunsen's sources by postulating a density-stratified Earth in which a layer of acid, feldspathic material rested above a layer of basic, basaltic material. Exploration of the complex volcanic terranes of western America in the 1860s and 1870s undermined the two-source theories and opened the way for the concept of fusion of already solid crust. Prior to 1880, speculations about diversity were typically suggested by naturalists, chemists, and geological generalists with strong interests in the geomorphic or geophysical aspects of Earth. Consequently, the problem of diversity was a peripheral concern to most of those proposing hypotheses. The hypotheses characteristically reflected the professional interests of their proposers. The content of the early speculations was further shaped by the nature of the field areas studied by proposers, and by their views on the correlation between geologic age and igneous rock type. Those, like Scrope, Darwin, Dana, Joseph Jukes (1811-1869), Carl Bernhard von Cotta (1808-1870), and Clarence Dutton (1841-1912), who rejected such correlations, located the source of igneous rock diversity at the surface, within a volcano, or within the acid crust. Those, like Bunsen, von Waltershausen, Durocher, von Richthofen, and Clarence King (1842-1901), who accepted the Wernerian idea that there had been changes in igneous rock type through time were more inclined to attribute diversity to multiple lava sources at great depth.

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Science And Literature ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
Humphry Davy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
John Tyndall ◽  
Michael Faraday

‘It has been said by its opponents that science divorces itself from literature; but the statement, like so many others, arises from lack of knowledge.’ John Tyndall, 1874 Although we are used to thinking of science and the humanities as separate disciplines, in the nineteenth century that division was not recognized. As the scientist John Tyndall pointed out, not only were science and literature both striving to better 'man's estate', they shared a common language and cultural heritage. The same subjects occupied the writing of scientists and novelists: the quest for 'origins', the nature of the relation between society and the individual, and what it meant to be human. This anthology brings together a generous selection of scientific and literary material to explore the exchanges and interactions between them. Fed by a common imagination, scientists and creative writers alike used stories, imagery, style, and structure to convey their meaning, and to produce work of enduring power. The anthology includes writing by Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, Sir Humphry Davy, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Thomas Malthus, Louis Pasteur, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain and many others, and introductions and notes guide the reader through the topic's many strands. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

scholarly journals ‘Constitutions selection’: Darwin, race and medicine

BJHS Themes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Suman Seth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Skin Colour ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Race ◽  
Descent Of Man

Abstract In the course of his discussion of the origin of variations in skin colour among humans in the Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that darker skin might be correlated with immunity to certain diseases. To make that suggestion, he drew upon a claim that seemed self-evidently correct in 1871, although it had seemed almost certainly incorrect in the late eighteenth century: that immunity to disease could be understood as a hereditary racial trait. This paper aims to show how fundamental was the idea of ‘constitutions selection’, as Darwin would call it, for his thinking about human races, tracking his (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to find proof of its operation over a period of more than thirty years. At the same time and more broadly, following Darwin's conceptual resources on this question helps explicate relationships between conceptions of disease and conceptions of race in the nineteenth century. That period saw the birth of a modern, fixist, biologically determinist racism, which increasingly manifested itself in medical writings. The reverse was also true: medicine was a crucial site in which race was forged. The history of what has been called ‘race-science’, it is argued, cannot and should not be written independent of the history of ‘race-medicine’.

Igneous Rock-Series and Mixed Igneous Rocks

1900 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 389-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfred Harker
Keyword(s):  
Igneous Rock ◽  
Igneous Rocks ◽  
Rock Series

The Legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’

2019 ◽  
pp. 156-195
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Student ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.

scholarly journals II.—The Order of Consolidation of the Mineral Constituents of Igneous Rocks

1900 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 295-298
Author(s):  
W. J. Sollas
Keyword(s):  
Igneous Rock ◽  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Igneous Rocks ◽  
Important Data ◽  
Mineral Constituents

The order in which the various mineral constituents of an igneous rock may crystallize out from an igneous magma offers to the petrologist a problem of great difficulty and complexity. It is generally admitted that the order of consolidation is not wholly determined by the order of the fusion-points of the constituents, and with this admission the fusion-points have come to be consistently disregarded, as though they might safely be left out of account. That this is not the case has of late become strongly impressed upon me, especially after a consideration of the important data obtained by Mr. Ralph Cusack, B.A., who, by means of Professor Joly's meldometer, has determined the precise temperature of fusion of most of the rock-forming minerals.

scholarly journals Charles Darwin and the scientific mind

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID STACK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Self ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Scientific Mind ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Erasmus Darwin ◽  
William Whewell

AbstractAlthough often presented as an essential, ahistorical or innate psychological entity, the notion of a ‘scientific mind’ is ripe for historical analysis. The growing historical interest in the self-fashioning of masculine identities, and more particularly the self-fashioning of the nineteenth-century scientist, has opened up a space in which to probe what was understood by someone being said to possess a ‘scientific mind’. This task is made all the more urgent by the recently revived interest of some psychologists in the concept and the highly gendered and culturally conditioned understanding of the scientific mind displayed in some contemporary debates. This article contributes to that task, and fills a rare gap in Darwin studies by making the first detailed exploration of Charles Darwin's understanding of the scientific mind, as revealed in the psychological self-analysis he undertook in his ‘Recollections of the development of my mind and character’ (1876), and supplemented in hisLife of Erasmus Darwin(1879). Drawing upon a broad range of Darwin's published and unpublished works, this article argues that Darwin's understanding of the scientific mind was rooted in his earliest notebooks, and was far more central to his thought than is usually acknowledged. The article further delineates the differences between Darwin's understanding and that of his half-cousin Francis Galton, situates his understanding in relation to his reading of William Whewell and Auguste Comte, and considers what Darwin's view of the scientific mind tells us about his perspective on questions of religion and gender. Throughout, the article seeks to show that the ‘scientific mind’ is always an agglomeration of historically specific prejudices and presumptions, and concludes that this study of Darwin points to the need for a similarly historical approach to the question of the scientific mind today.

scholarly journals VI.—Geological Notes on the Neighbourhood of Ladysmith, Natal. No. 1: On some Igneous Rocks

1901 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 509-510
Author(s):  
H. Exton
Keyword(s):  
Igneous Rock ◽  
Igneous Rocks ◽  
Geological Feature ◽  
Station Hospital

Writing from the Station Hospital at Ladysmith, Dr. Henry Exton, F.G.S., has communicated his observations on the geology of the country near Ladysmith, in the northern part of Natal, in letters to Professor T. Rupert Jones. A very noticeable geological feature is the prevalence of an igneous rock (intrusive andesitic diabase) on all the hills from Umbulwana, four miles east by south from Ladysmith, to the famed Spion Kop, sixteen miles west from here.

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