III A Century of Geology — Steps of Progress in the Interpretation of Land Forms
The essence of physiography is the belief that land forms represent merely a stage in the orderly development of the earth’s surface features; that the various dynamic agents perform their characteristic work throughout all geologic time. The formulation of principle and processes of earth sculpture was, therefore, impossible on the hypothesis of a ready-made earth whose features were substantially unchangeable, except when modified by catastrophic processes. In 1821, J. W. Wilson wrote in the Journal: “Is it not the best theory of the earth, that the Creator, in the beginning, at least at the general deluge, formed it with all its present grand characteristic features?”4 If so, a search for causes is futile, and the study of the work performed by streams and glaciers and wind is unprofitable. The belief in the Deluge as the one great geological event in the history of the earth has brought it about that the speculations of Aristotle, Herodotus, Strabo, and Ovid, and the illustrious Arab, Avicenna (980–1037), unchecked by appeal to facts but also unopposed by priesthood or popular prejudice, are nearer to the truth than the intolerant controversial writings of the intellectual leaders whose touchstone was orthodoxy. A few thinkers of the sixteenth century revolted against the interminable repetition of error, and Peter Severinus (1571) advised his students: “Burn up your books... buy yourselves stout shoes, get away to the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the shores of the seas.... In this way and no other will you arrive at a knowledge of things.” But the thoroughgoing “diluvialist” who believed that a million species of animals could occupy a 450–foot Ark, but not that pebbles weathered from rock or that rivers erode, had no use for his powers of observation.
Sporadic germs of a science of land forms scattered through the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found an unfavorable environment and produced inconspicuous growths. Even their sponsors did little to cultivate them. Steno (1631–1687) mildly suggested that surface sculpturing, particularly on a small scale, is largely the work of running water, and Guettard (1715–1786), a truly great mind, grasped the fundamental principles of denudation and successfully entombed his views as well as his reputation in scores of books and volumes of cumbrous diffuse writing.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century a sufficient body of principles had been established to justify the recognition of an earth science, geology, and the 195 volumes of the Journal thus far published carry a large part of the material which has won approval for the new science and given prominence to American thought. From the pages in the Journal, the progress of geology may be illustrated by tracing the fluctuation in the development of fact and theory as relates to valleys and glacial features, the subjects to which this chapter is devoted.