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From this increased interest in the nature of the Earth and its origin, came a heightened attention to minerals and other components of the Earth’s crust. Moreover, the increasing economic importance of mining in Europe during the mid to late 18th century made the possession of accurate knowledge about ores and their natural distribution vital.[8] Scholars began to study the makeup of the Earth in a systematic manner, with detailed comparisons and descriptions not only of the land itself, but of the semi-precious metals it contained, which had great commercial value. For example, in 1774 Abraham Gottlob Werner published the book Von den äusserlichen Kennzeichen der Fossilien (On the External Characters of Minerals), which brought him widespread recognition because he presented a detailed system for identifying specific minerals based on external characteristics.[8] The more efficiently productive land for mining could be identified and the semi-precious metals could be found, the more money could be made. This drive for economic gain propelled geology into the limelight and made it a popular subject to pursue. With an increased number of people studying it, came more detailed observations and more information about the Earth. Also during the eighteenth century, aspects of the history of the Earth—namely the divergences between the accepted religious concept and factual evidence—once again became a popular topic for discussion in society. In 1749 the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon published his Histoire Naturelle, in which he attacked the popular Biblical accounts given by Whiston and other ecclesiastical theorists of the history of Earth.[9] From experimentation with cooling globes, he found that the age of the Earth was not only 4,000 or 5,500 years as inferred from the Bible, but rather 75,000 years.[10] Another individual who described the history of the Earth with reference to neither God nor the Bible was the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who published his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels) in 1755.[11] From the works of these respected men, as well as others, it became acceptable by the mid eighteenth century to question the age of the Earth. This questioning represented a turning point in the study of the Earth. It was now possible to study the history of the Earth from a scientific perspective without religious preconceptions. With the application of scientific methods to the investigation of the Earth's history, the study of geology could become a distinct field of science. To begin with, the terminology and definition of what constituted geological study had to be worked out. The term "geology" was first used technically in publications by two Genevan naturalists, Jean-André Deluc and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure,[12] though "geology" was not well received as a term until it was taken up in the very influential compendium, the Encyclopédie, published beginning in 1751 by Denis Diderot.[12] Once the term was established to denote the study of the Earth and its history, geology slowly became more generally recognized as a distinct science that could be taught as a field of study at educational institutions. In 1741 the best-known institution in the field of natural history, the National Museum of Natural History in France, created the first teaching position designated specifically for geology.[13] This was an important step in further promoting knowledge of geology as a science and in recognizing the value of widely disseminating such knowledge. As well as geology becoming a specific field of study in institutions, the subject was continuing to attract attention in educated society. By the 1770s two opposite theories with committed followers had emerged. These contrasting theories offered differing explanations of how the rock layers of the Earth’s surface had formed. The German geologist Abraham Werner proposed the theory that the Earth’s layers, including basalt and granite, had formed as a precipitate from an ocean that covered the entire Earth, referring to the Deluge. Werner’s system was influential and those who accepted his theory were known as Neptunists.[14] The Scottish naturalist James Hutton argued against the theory of Neptunism, proposing instead the theory of Plutonism: the formation of the Earth through the gradual solidification of a molten mass at a slow rate by the same processes that had occurred throughout history and continued in the present day. This led him to the conclusion that the Earth was immeasurably old and could not possibly be explained within the limits of the chronology inferred from the Bible. Plutonists believed that volcanic processes were the chief agent in rock formation, not water from a Great Flood.[15] |
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