When Charles Darwin joined the crew of the Beagle in 1832, one of his first stops was the island of St. Jago in Cape Verde. There, he confronted one of his first major scientific puzzles: a band of white rock that lay high above the shoreline. To explain its formation, he would have to wade into a major geological dispute.
Some accounts of Darwin’s life—including his own autobiography—downplayed his geological prowess. But in Darwin’s early notes and correspondence, historian James Secord sees “one of the best-trained men of his age in Great Britain.”
Geology “was in great flux” at the time, Secord writes. The origins of strata, layers of rock like that at St. Jago, were under dispute. Abraham Werner had theorized that “strata had been precipitated from a universal ocean,” Secord writes. James Hutton, in contrast, proposed that rock layers formed through internal heating and molten rock.
At Edinburgh, Darwin took classes from Robert Jameson, a staunch Wernerian. Darwin found him dull, describing him as “that old brown, dry stick,” Secord reports. But in Darwin’s annotated textbook, Secord sees “an active listener and reader” who rapidly acquired knowledge of strata and minerals. It was also in this course that Darwin learned about fossils.
Chemistry professor Charles Hope was a Huttonian with a different scientific approach. “Like other Huttonians,” Secord writes, “Hope presented science as an enquiry into causal processes.” This included teaching about James Hall’s experiments with lava, which took on different properties when cooled slowly or rapidly.
“Students relished in the spectacle of the controversy,” Secord writes. The impact on enrollment, he explains, guaranteed “the maintenance of Wernerian–Huttonian warfare.” Darwin gleaned something from both. From Jameson, he gained foundational knowledge and skills for field geology. In the “sublime spectacle of Hope’s lectures,” Secord writes, Darwin found a desire to seek out causal explanations. He gained field experience by mapping rock strata in Wales, and in 1831, Darwin wrote to a friend that he was “mad about Geology.”
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He was also reading Alexander von Humboldt’s account of South America and spending time in Cambridge’s botanical hothouse. When captain Robert Fitzroy sought a geologist to join the crew of the Beagle on a voyage to the tropics, Darwin seized the opportunity. It was on the Beagle that Darwin read Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which took on immense importance to him.
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Lyell argued that observable causes acting over time created geological change. Darwin used this perspective to interpret the white rock at St. Jago. After entertaining and rejecting the idea that the sea level had lowered, Secord writes, Darwin settled on the Lyellian explanation ”that the land had in fact been raised very gradually” before subsiding. On St. Jago and Quail Island, he found more evidence for subsidence, building his confidence.
Secord believes this experience shaped Darwin’s scientific identity. Geology “allowed the pleasures of entering imaginatively into past time,” he writes, “of reconstructing sublime views of the ancient world, and of contributing to theoretical debates at the highest level.”
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