Heroes of science

by P. Martin Duncan

“My first real field work,” he says, “began under Professor Buckland, who having taken a fancy to me as one of his apt scholars, invited me to visit him at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and attend one or two of his lectures. This was my true launch. Travelling down with him in the Oxford coach, I learned a world of things before we reached the Isis, and, amongst other things, I enjoyed a lecture on crustacea, given whilst he pulled to pieces on his knees, a cold crab, bought at a fishmonger’s shop at Maidenhead, where he usually lunched as the coach stopped.

“On repairing from the Star inn to Buckland’s domicile, I never can forget the scene which awaited me. Having, by direction of the janitor, climbed up a narrow staircase, I entered a long corridor-like room (now all destroyed), which was filled with rocks, shells, and bones in dire confusion, and, in a sort of sanctum at the end was my friend, in his black gown, looking like a necromancer, sitting on the sole rickety chair not covered with some fossils, and cleaning out a fossil bone from the matrix.”

The few days spent at Oxford were memorably pleasant. Buckland’s wit and enthusiasm glowed all his scientific sayings and doings, and he had a rare power of description, by which he could make even a dry enough subject fascinatingly interesting. Murchison heard one or two brilliant lectures from him, but what was of still more importance, he accompanied the merry professor and his students, mounted on Oxford hacks, to Shotover Hill, and for the first time in his life had a landscape geologically dissected before him. From that eminence his eye was taught to recognize the broader features of the succession of the oolitic rocks of England up to the far range of the Chalk Hills, and this not in a dull, text-book fashion, for Buckland, in luminous language, brought the several elements of the landscape into connection with each other, and with a few fundamental principles which have determined the sculpturing of the earth’s surface. His audience came to see merely a rich vale in the midst of fertile England, but before they quitted the ground, the landscape had been made to yield up to them, clear notions of the origin of springs and the principles of drainage. This was the very kind of instruction needed to fan the growing flame of Murchison’s zeal for science. He returned to town burning with desire to put his knowledge to some use by trying to imitate, no matter how feebly, the admirable way in which the Oxford professor had applied the lessons of the lecture-room to the elucidation of the history of hills and valleys.

Murchison started with his wife in the middle of August, on a tour of nine weeks along the south coast, from the Isle of Wight into Devon and Cornwall. Taking a light carriage and a pair of horses, he made the journey in short stages, lingering for days at some of the more interesting or important geological localities. Driving, boating, walking, or scrambling, the enthusiastic pair signalized their first geological tour by a formidable amount of bodily toil.

Mrs. Murchison specially devoted herself to the collection of fossils, and to sketching the more striking geological features of the coast-line, while her husband would push on to make some long and laborious detour. In this way, while she remained quietly working at Lyme Regis, he struck westward for a fortnight into Devon and Cornwall, to make his first acquaintance with the rocks to which, in after years, Sedgwick and he were to give the name by which they are now recognized all over the world. It was in the course of this tour that he met with a man, whom he has the merit of having brought into notice, and who certainly amply requited him by the services rendered in later years. William Lonsdale had served in the Peninsular war, and retired on half-pay to Bath. With the most simple and abstemious habits, his slender income sufficed not only for his wants, but for the purchase of any book or fossil he coveted, and so he spent his time in studying the organic remains, and especially the fossil corals, to be found in his neighbourhood. Murchison met him accidentally in some quarries, “a tall, grave man, with a huge hammer on his shoulder,” and found him so full of information, that he stayed some days at Bath under Lonsdale’s guidance.

With the enlargement of view which so instructive a ramble had given him, Murchison prepared and read to the Geological Society, on 16th December, 1825, his first scientific paper—“A Geological Sketch of the North-western Extremity of Sussex, and the adjoining parts of Hants and Surrey.” This little essay bore manifest evidence of being the result of careful observation of the order of succession of the rocks in the field, followed by as ample examination of their fossils as he could secure, from those best qualified to give an opinion upon them. In these respects it was typical of all his later work. Having shown by this first publication his capacity as observer and describer, and being further recommended by the leisure which his position of independence enabled him to command, he was soon after elected one of the two honorary secretaries of the Geological Society. “Lyell being then a law-student, with chambers in the Temple, could only devote a portion of his time to our science, and was glad to make way as secretary to one who, like myself, had nothing else to do than think and dream of geology, and work hard to get on in my new vocation.”

In the spring of 1826 he was elected into the Royal Society—an honour more easily won then than now, and for which, as the President, his old friend Sir Humphry Davy told him, he was indebted, not to the amount or value of his scientific work, but to the fact that he was an independent gentleman, having a taste for science, with plenty of time, and enough of money to gratify it.

Murchison next investigated, at the instance of Dr. Buckland, the geological age of the Brora coalfield, in Sutherlandshire. Some geologists maintained that the rocks of that district were merely a part of the ordinary coal, or carboniferous system; others held them to be greatly younger, to be, indeed, of the same general age with the lower oolitic strata of Yorkshire. A good observer might readily settle this question; Murchison resolved to try.

Again he prepared himself by reading and study of fossils to understand the evidence he was to collect and interpret, and in order to do full justice to the Scottish tract, he went first to the Yorkshire coast, and made himself master of the succession, and leading characters of the rocks so admirably displayed along that picturesque line of cliffs. The summer had hardly begun before he and his wife broke up their camp in London and were on the move northwards. At York he made the acquaintance of two men, with whom he was destined in after life to have much close intercourse and co-operation—the Rev. William Vernon (afterwards Vernon Harcourt) and Mr. (subsequently Professor) John Phillips.

Murchison’s own record of the meeting is as follows:—“Phillips, then a youth, was engaged in arranging a small museum at York. He recommended Murchison strongly to his uncle, William Smith, who was then living at Scarborough, and had little intercourse with the Geological Society. From the moment I had my first walk with William Smith (then about sixty years old), I felt that he was just the man after my own heart; and he, on his part, seeing that I had, as he said, ‘an eye for a country,’ took to me, and gave me most valuable lessons. Thus he made me thoroughly acquainted with all the strata north and south of Scarborough. He afterwards accompanied me in a boat all along the coast, stopping and sleeping at Robin Hood’s Bay. Not only did I then learn the exact position of the beds of poor coal which crop out in that tract of the eastern moorlands, but collecting with him the characteristic fossils from the calcareous grit down to the lias, I saw how clearly strata must alone be identified by their fossils, inasmuch as here, instead of oolite limestone like those of the south we had sandstones, grits, and shales which, though closely resembling the beds of the old coal, were precise equivalents of the oolitic series of the south. Smith walked about stoutly with me all under the cliffs from Robin Hood’s Bay to Whitby, making me well note the characteristic fossils of each formation.”