Ebook Download | Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution | This enormous book (well over 700 large pages) tells the story of the origins of geology in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The term "geology" gets invented, by de Luc, about halfway through. The main theme of the book is that the development of the field was complex and personal, not a conflict between emerging "science" and sourly reactionary "religion." In fact, some of the main contributors, including de Luc, were highly religious, to the point of seeking geological proof of Noah's flood. Rudwick repeats on every possible occasion that religion was not a fundamentalist reactionary force. (The message certainly is needed, but this and many, many other repetitions of points get slightly wearisome.)
So why am I, an anthropologist specializing in traditional uses of plants and animals, reading a geology book? Basically, because this is one of the best books I've ever seen on how people develop concepts of the natural world. It shows how people thrashed around, made false starts, mixed brilliant insights with sad errors, slowly came to imagine the unimaginable, argued over silly points. Rudwick avoids like the plague, and routinely denounces and disproves, the simplistic history-of-science fairy tales we all know too well: the Lone Genius, the Evil Opponents, the Triumph of Truth, the Superiority of My Country's Science Over Yours, and so on. Geology developed more slowly and with more false starts than many sciences, and many people had a hand in it; none had a monopoly on right answers or on wrong ones.
Much of Rudwick's narrative has the fascination of a mystery novel. Slowly building throughout the book, for example, is the recognition of geological evidence that something unimaginably strange happened to Europe not long ago. The geologically sophisticated reader will know that it was the Ice Age--those vast successive glaciations. The geologists of the early 19th century simply could not imagine that. They were more and more mystified by evidence of a vast "catastrophe" unlike anything ever seen in history, but they were unable to conceive of the appalling reality. Rudwick promises a second huge volume; hopefully it will get us to the arguments over vast glaciations. I don't know how geologists or historians of science will see this book, but I do know that any anthropologist, psychologist or phenomenological philosopher interested in how people think about time, rocks, and the natural world should give it a look.
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