Summary
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the emergence of geology as a scientific discipline. A little over two hundred years ago a small group of friends founded the Geological Society of London. This organisation was the first devoted to furthering the discipline of geology - the study of the Earth, its history and composition. Although geology only emerged as a separate area of study in the late eighteenth century, many earlier thinkers had studied rocks, fossils and the materials from which the Earth is made. Ancient scholars in Egypt and Greece speculated about the Earth and its composition. And in the Renaissance the advent of mining brought further insight into the nature of objects found underground and how they got there. But how did such haphazard study of rocks and fossils develop into a rigorous scientific discipline?With:Stephen PumfreySenior Lecturer in the History of Science at Lancaster UniversityAndrew ScottProfessor of Applied Palaeobotany at Royal Holloway, University of LondonLeucha VeneerResearch Associate at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester.Producer: Thomas Morris.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
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| 0:49.2 | Hello the Geological Society of London was found at a dinner at the |
| 0:52.4 | Freemason's tavern in |
| 0:53.4 | Covent Garden in London on the 13th of October 1807. The 13 founder members wrote a |
| 0:58.9 | declaration in which they outlined their aims of, quote, making geologists acquainted with each other, |
| 1:05.0 | of stimulating their zeal, |
| 1:06.9 | of inducing them to adopt one nomenclature, |
| 1:09.9 | of facilitating the communications of new facts and of ascertaining what's known in their science and what remains to be discovered. |
| 1:17.0 | Geology, the study of the origin, history and structure of the earth was still an emerging discipline in the early 19th century. |
| 1:24.0 | The very word geology was new, first used less than a hundred years earlier. |
| 1:28.0 | Many earlier scholars, including Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci, had paid attention to the mistress of the earth and the materials |
| 1:34.6 | from which it's made. |
| 1:36.1 | But how did the piecemeal study of rocks and fossils turn into a rigorous scientific |
| 1:40.6 | discipline? |
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