Early Geology

In Our Time: Science

BBC

History

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2012

⏱️ 42 minutes

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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	Thanks for down learning the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:10.0	I hope you enjoy the programme.
0:12.0	Hello, the Geological Society of London was founded at a dinner at the Freemasons Tavern in
0:17.2	Covent Garden in London on the 13th of October 1807.
0:21.2	The 13 founder members wrote a declaration in which they outlined their aims of quote
0:25.7	making geologists acquainted with each other of stimulating their zeal of
0:30.7	inducing them to adopt one nomenclature of facilitating the communications of new facts
0:36.2	and of ascertaining what's known in their science and what remains to be discovered.
0:41.1	Geology, the study of the origin, history and structure of the earth, was still an emerging discipline in the early 19th century.
0:48.0	The very word geology was new, first used less than a hundred years earlier.
0:52.0	Many earlier scholars including Aristotle in Leonardo da Vinci, had paid attention to the mistress of the earth and the materials from which it's made. But how did the piecemeal study of rocks and fossils turn into a rigorous scientific discipline?
1:05.3	With me to discuss the history of geology are Stephen Pumphrey, senior lecturer in the History of Science at Lancaster University, Andrew Scott, Professor of Applied
1:14.4	Paliobotony at Royal Holloway University of London, and Lucia Vanier,
1:18.4	Research Associate at the Center for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine
1:22.1	at the University of Manchester.
1:24.0	Stephen Pumphrey, can you talk about the first scholars to turn their minds to what we now call
1:29.4	geology?
1:30.4	It probably goes back to ancient Egypt where geology, the science of the earth, could well have been developed alongside geometry, the measurement of the earth because of the annual floods on the plains of the Nile.
1:43.0	And it would appear that that was there,
1:45.0	that the thinkers began to try to think of rational explanations
1:49.0	rather than attributing to gods the annual floods.
1:52.0	We can certainly see that in the pre-Socratic Greek thinkers. Take for example Farleys of the 6th century BC.
	...

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