British Geology in the 1830s

British science came of age in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was then that associations devoted to this or that particular scientific field began to spring up – the Geological Society, the Zoological Society, and the Linnean Society, to speak only of those closely connected with our subject. These organizations – more like elite clubs than modern academic societies – afforded a meeting place in which learned clerics from Cambridge and Oxford could consult with urbane gentleman scientists such as the lawyer-turned-geologist Charles Lyell. The societies afforded no financial support to their members. They merely received scientific reports from the field – from people such as the field geologist William Smith, for example, whose lack of social standing and wealth precluded him from membership in the Geological Society, even though he was later lionized by it – and then engaged in formal debates about these reports. Institutions like these, and the networks of friendship and animosity they fostered, figure prominently as forums in which the issues raised in this chapter were discussed. They also formed the matrix in which the young Charles Darwin made his mark, first as the protégé of the Cambridge professionals John Henslow and Adam Sedgwick, and then of Lyell.

The decade of the 1830s, during the first half of which Darwin was circumnavigating the globe aboard the Beagle, was an especially important moment in the development of modern British scientific institutions.