A gap has existed in Darwin scholarship that, until now, has—surprisingly—remained unfilled. Charles Darwin, Geologist provides a crucial missing link in our understanding of a preeminent Victorian thinker and his revolutionary achievement.
Sandra Herbert is well regarded among what she terms “an informal band of scholars working on Charles Darwin” (xviii), having served as editor of The Red Notebook of Charles Darwin (Ithaca, NY, 1980) and coeditor of Charles Darwin's Notebooks, 1836–1844 (Ithaca, NY, 1987). Charles Darwin, Geologist builds upon her earlier essay studies and decades of careful research of archived manuscripts and published primary sources; it represents a tour de force that synthesizes and expands upon such gems as her well-known chapter, “Darwin the Young Geologist,” in The Darwinian Heritage, edited by David Kohn (Princeton, NJ, 1985). Janet Browne, author of the acclaimed two-volume Charles Darwin (Princeton, NJ, 2003), leads the informal band's enthusiastic endorsements of Herbert's book appearing on the back side of its dustcover. Essentially, Herbert argues for the centrality of geology in orienting Darwin to his evolutionary theory. Although this is not a new insight, Herbert's monograph provides the first comprehensive, in-depth analysis of that orientation and demonstrates its significance.
Herbert accomplishes this feat in three notable ways. First, she correctly repositions Darwin within an early Victorian intellectual context and reclaims the geologist identity by which he was principally regarded by himself and his scientific intimates. This is a matter both of historical accuracy and proper contextualization. Herbert counters the distortion created after the publication of Darwin's “long argument” on evolution, On the Origin of Species (1859), when his “reputation as a biologist superseded his renown as a geologist” (xvi). We might add the prefix “mythical” if we consider the Victorian social context further. The issue of intellectual identity was entangled in the century-long transformation of Victorian intellectual life into professional fields, with “biology” beginning to coalesce as a distinct discipline—the title “biologist” itself uncommonly used—only during the final years of Darwin's life. Opening and closing her narrative with Darwin's 1838 self-identification, “I a geologist” (1, 2, and 358), Herbert meticulously details the scope of his geological identity: the naturalist “geologising” in the field; the voyager shipping carefully wrapped, labeled, and cataloged specimens to systematists back home; the prolific author writing the three-volume Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1842–46) and thus establishing his views on the formation of coral reefs, volcanic islands, and the South American Cordillera; and the celebrated recipient of the Geological Society of London's highest honor, the Wollaston Medal. Although Herbert's story concludes, essentially, with the Origin's publication, she identifies a few glimmers of his continuing geological interests and work, including a two-day field trip in Southampton in the summer of 1874 and a substantial rewriting of the first volume of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle (The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs) for its second edition, published, also, in 1874.
Second, she rightly emphasizes Darwin's authorial strategies and engagement in geological discourse outside of publication—in a field he found to be “at present very oral” (142). Here is a most fascinating side to Herbert's story, the frequency and intensity with which Darwin exchanged geological ideas outside of publication and in preparation for it. Sometimes his own notebooks served as his sounding board; we learn that, in theoretical content, his geological notes rivaled those of other eminent geologists, including Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Impey Murchison. Darwin just as characteristically developed his ideas through correspondence and discussion, for many years his most important confidante being Charles Lyell (240–44). But Darwin's publications brought him into key debates as well, most notably the controversy concerning Louis Agassiz's glacialism. Despite, ironically, Darwin's own low opinion of his books—“which are not read even by geologists” (142)—Herbert shows how writers invoked his South American observations to support and, sometimes, to mar Agassiz's hypothesis.
Third, and most important, Herbert skillfully unravels the character and extent of Darwin's geological reasoning, showing its significance to the field of geology and to the development of his evolutionary views. She offers a fundamental view of Darwin as working on the periphery of Victorian geography's “core paradigm” of stratigraphy, which enabled him to attack an unusually broad range of topics and to maintain theoretical flexibility. Her view provides for a realistic, often contradictory, Darwin: one who could favor a “simple” geology of gradual crustal elevation and subsidence and yet concede to “catastrophic” explanations like glacial action. She demonstrates that his work on discrete topics like coral atolls and the “parallel roads” of Glen Roy in Scotland were intimately connected to his larger theoretical project in which he worked “tooth and nail” to produce a grand narrative—albeit unrealized—“the Geology” (176). Heeding Darwin's own awareness of his propensity to create “geological castles in the air” (152), Herbert stresses his deductive approach to the study of nature. In telling the story of his acceptance of glacialism, she illustrates the importance of his being predisposed to certain ways of “seeing” the natural world for developing his “powers of discrimination” (283). Signs of glacial action on the cirque-shaped Cwn Idwal in North Wales, for example, eluded him when he first visited the site; as he admitted, they would have continued to do so “if not pointed out” (283). By giving serious consideration to a competing theory and by patiently observing nature, upon his second visit “every thing … was palpably clear” (283). Herbert similarly emphasizes this feature of Darwin's encounters with nature in the critical context of his observations of the Galápagos species; she convincingly argues that he learned about the distribution of differently shaped tortoises on the islands from a colonial administrator, providing a “trigger” that enabled him to later discriminate between the Galápagos mockingbirds as varying according to their island of origin—a crucial observation that seemed to “undermine the stability of Species” (317) in Darwin's mind. The “noble science of Geology” (356) inspired him to theorize on the grandest of scales and provoked him toward natural selection, a theory most universal in scope.
Sometimes treating technical subjects too compactly, Charles Darwin, Geologist is rich with sharp and original insights. Filling a major lacuna, the monograph is a triumph of scholarship.
