CATASTROPHISM IN GEOLOGY

Scientific American, Vol. XXXVII.—No. 2. [New Series.], July 14, 1877 by Various, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. CATASTROPHISM IN GEOLOGY.

CATASTROPHISM IN GEOLOGY.

Mr. Clarence King was probably not a little surprised to learn from the Tribune that in his most suggestive address on "Catastrophism and the Evolution of Environment," he had turned the guns of Geology upon Biology; and that in calling attention to the influence of periods of accelerated change in environment upon exposed types of life he had swept away the "fundamental doctrines upon which has been built the scheme of development by natural selection and the survival of the fittest." Certainly nothing in the address betrays any consciousness of possible effects of that sort. And it is quite probable also that Mr. King will have to suffer some annoyance from seeing his name set up at gaze, like Joshua's moon in Ajalon, by the unscientific press generally, as that of the newest champion of orthodoxy against the leaders of modern scientific thought: a penalty which scientific men always have to pay for emphasizing neglected truths.

Mr. King certainly deals some telling blows against the position of the stricter school of Uniformitarians in geology, and brings into prominence a much neglected element in the struggle for existence; but there is no scientific revolution threatened, nor are any crumbs of comfort spread for those endeavoring to arrest the natural drift of scientific progress.

The issue between Mr. King and the sticklers for uniformity in rates of geological change is simply this: In the reaction against the sweeping cataclysms, the sudden wipings out of whole creations and the sudden introductions of new worlds of life believed in by earlier geologists, the modern English school has come to look upon time and the slower modifications of the earth's surface, now observable, with the struggle for existence under easy conditions, as the chief factors in geological change and its accompanying variations in the forms of life. Mr. King, on the other hand, insists that in so doing they have taken too little account of catastrophic changes, that is, widespread and sudden movements of sea and land. In other words, he raises rapid change of environment from the subordinate place it has hitherto occupied in the scheme of historical development, and gives special emphasis to the grand geologic movements which have to do with such changes.

In this Mr. King has unquestionably rendered good service to the science he has done so much to extend and honor in the field; while the illustrations from American geology which he brings to bear on the subject are as likely as his sturdy opinions to attract attention. Yet we are inclined to think that in some things he has allowed his enthusiasm to run away with him. The stolid self-confidence of extreme Uniformitarians has tempted him to exaggerate the periodic accelerations of geologic and biologic movement, and to overstate their effects quite as much as others have underestimated them; and when he charges the followers of Lyell with intellectual near-sightedness and a lack of "the very mechanism of imagination," they may possibly be able to retort not unjustifiably that he has mistaken the natural foreshortening of the geological vista due to distance for actual brevity; and that his belief in the abruptness and suddenness of the great changes which the earth's strata record, may be due to his own lack of sustained imaginative power for grasping and interpreting all the evidences of the enormous time really involved. But this is a question not of imaginative capacity but of logical deduction from observed facts; and however abrupt the beginning of some of the great geologic movements may have been, their subsequent progress cannot in all cases have been so rapid as to allow of their being called catastrophic in any ordinary acceptation of the term.

Take, for example, the alleged catastrophe which marked the close of the mesozoic age in the West. Of this movement Mr. King remarks: "In a quasi-uniformitarian way, 20,000 or 30,000 feet of sediment had accumulated in the Pacific and 14,000 in the [American] mediterranean sea; when these regions, which, during the reception of sediment, had been areas of subsidence, suddenly upheaved, the doming up of the middle of the continent quite obliterating the mediterranean sea and uniting the two land masses into one. The catastrophe which removed this sea resulted in the folding up of mountain ranges 20,000 and 40,000 feet in height, thereby essentially changing the whole climate of the continent."

That this great change occurred, and was attended with an obliteration of the wonderful reptilian and avian fauna of the mesozoic age, is most true: that it occurred suddenly does not appear. On the contrary, there is evidence to show that the prodigious folding up of mountain ranges involved could not have proceeded with sufficient rapidity to turn the course of a stream of water. It happened that one of those folds—one which, had no denudation been going on meanwhile, would have lifted its crest higher than the highest peak of the Himalayas—lay directly across the course of the Colorado river. The river held its course uninterruptedly, sawing its way through the uplift until six vertical miles of rocky strata had risen past it. At no time, therefore, could the rapidity of motion in the bulging strata have exceeded the capacity of the river to wear away the obstruction, and the bulge was fifty miles across! We do not know how rapidly a river may sink its channel through such a rising barrier; but we do know that a process of that nature cannot legitimately be described as swift or sudden. And surely it requires not less intellectual far-sightedness and imaginative faculty to carry the mind across the enormous stretch of time involved in such a change slowly wrought—a period during which at least three vertical miles of the rising mountain fold was worn down by rain and atmospheric abrasion—as to mass the continental doming, the mountain folding, and the attendant life changes together as a convulsive "catastrophe."

Mr. King, however, is not a Catastrophist of a very violent sort. He shelves among the errors of the past the belief in such cataclysms as Cuvier believed in, involving world-wide destruction of all life—"the mere survival of a prehistoric terror, backed up by breaks in the palæontological record and protected within those safe cities of refuge, the Cosmogonies;" though he rejects as equally unsatisfactory the mild affirmations of the Uniformitarians, that existing rates of change and indefinite time are enough to account for all the geological record. With our present light, he holds, geological history seems to be a dovetailing together of the two ideas. "The ages have had their periods of geological serenity, when change progressed in the still, unnoticeable way, and life through vast lapses of time followed the stately flow of years; drifting on by insensible gradations through higher and higher forms, and then all at once a part of the earth suffered short, sharp, destructive revolution unheralded as an earthquake or volcanic eruptions." Thus stated, his position does not seem to be radically different from that of the broader Uniformitarians, except that he marks the periods of accelerated physical change, and not those of comparative quiescence, as the dominant ones in their influence on life-change. He takes high and strong ground, too, in insisting that it is the business of geology not simply to decipher and map out the changes which have taken place in the configuration of the globe and in its climatic conditions, but also to investigate and fix the rates of change. And when the evolution of environment takes form as a distinct branch of geology, he expects to witness a marked modification in the dominant views of biologists. Its few broad laws will include "neither the absolute uniformitarianism of Lyell and Hutton, Darwin and Haeckel, nor the universal catastrophism of Cuvier and the majority of teleogists." "Huxley alone among prominent evolutionists opens the door for a union of the residue of truth in the two schools, fusing them in his proposed evolutional geology."

So, on looking back over a trail of thirty thousand miles of geological travel, Mr. King is impelled to say that Mr. Huxley's far-sighted view perfectly satisfies his interpretation of the broad facts of the American continent.

Of Mr. King's observations in regard to plasticity of physical structure in connection with rapidly changing environment and the struggle for existence, we propose to speak at another time.

The great stone monuments of England, like Stonehenge, are supposed, by Mr. James Fergusson, to be military trophies, erected in the time of King Arthur on the battle fields by the victorious armies.

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