Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The ancients: early chronologies
- 2 Biblical calculations
- 3 Models of Aristotelian infinity and sacred theories of the Earth
- 4 Falling stones, salty oceans, and evaporating waters: early empirical measurements of the age of the Earth
- 5 Thinking in layers: early ideas in stratigraphy
- 6 An infinite and cyclical Earth and religious orthodoxy
- 7 The cooling Earth
- 8 Stratigraphical laws, uniformitarianism and the development of the geological column
- 9 ‘Formed stones’ and their subsequent role in biostratigraphy and evolutionary theory
- 10 The hour-glass of accumulated or denuded sediments
- 11 Thermodynamics and the cooling Earth revisited
- 12 Oceanic salination reconsidered
- 13 Radioactivity: invisible geochronometers
- 14 The Universal problem and Duck Soup
- Bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The ancients: early chronologies
- 2 Biblical calculations
- 3 Models of Aristotelian infinity and sacred theories of the Earth
- 4 Falling stones, salty oceans, and evaporating waters: early empirical measurements of the age of the Earth
- 5 Thinking in layers: early ideas in stratigraphy
- 6 An infinite and cyclical Earth and religious orthodoxy
- 7 The cooling Earth
- 8 Stratigraphical laws, uniformitarianism and the development of the geological column
- 9 ‘Formed stones’ and their subsequent role in biostratigraphy and evolutionary theory
- 10 The hour-glass of accumulated or denuded sediments
- 11 Thermodynamics and the cooling Earth revisited
- 12 Oceanic salination reconsidered
- 13 Radioactivity: invisible geochronometers
- 14 The Universal problem and Duck Soup
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Geologists have been much censured
for vainly endeavouring to assign measures of time
to the seemingly vague and shadowy ages
of the Trilobites and Belemnites.
John Phillips (1800–1874), Life on the Earth, its Origin and Succession (1860)Some drill and bore
The solid earth and from the strata there
Extract a register, by which we learn
That He who made it and reveal'd its date
To Moses, was mistaken in its age.
William Cowper (1731–1800), The Task (1785)I have two main reasons for writing this book, and both have their origins in family matters. A few years ago I spent a fortnight with my wife and two young daughters on holiday on the Dingle Peninsula, in southwest Ireland. This area of immense scenic beauty and cultural significance is also an area of ‘classic’ geology. As an undergraduate student I had followed in the footsteps of geologists such as George Victor Du Noyer, a noted antiquarian and watercolourist, and Joseph Beete Juke, his boss in the Geological Survey of Ireland, in mapping some Silurian and Devonian sediments that formed the backbone of the peninsula. I doubt I produced a fuller and more accurate map than did these early pioneers. I recalled with feeling, during the first three damp, rain-sodden days of our holiday, the remark of Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, one-time Director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, who declared, having endured two weeks of such weather, that ‘there was nothing of interest in Irish geology’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Chronologers' QuestThe Search for the Age of the Earth, pp. xi - xvPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006