The influence of ideas has been closely associated with clarity, conciseness, and attractiveness of presentation. Hutton is known through Playfair, Agassiz’s contributions to glacial geology are known to every student, while Venetz, Charpentier, and Hugi are only names. Cuvier’s discourses on dynamical geology were reprinted and translated into English and German, but Lamarck’s “Hydrogéologie” is known only to book collectors. The verbose works of Guettard, although carrying the same message as Playfair’s “Illustrations” and Desmarest’s “Memoirs,” are practically unknown, as is also Horace H. Hayden’s treatise (1821) on the drift of eastern North America. It has been well said that the world-wide influence of American physiographic teaching is due in no small part to the masterly presentations of Gilbert and Davis.
It is surprising to note the delays, the backward steps, and the duplication of effort resulting from lack of familiarity with the work of the pioneers. Sabine says in 1864:[[77]]
“It often happens, not unnaturally, that those who are most occupied with the questions of the day in an advancing science retain but an imperfect recollection of the obligations due to those who laid the first foundations of our subsequent knowledge.”
The product of intellectual effort appears to be conditioned by time of planting and character of soil as well as by quantity of seed. For example: Erosion by rivers was as clearly shown by Desmarest as by Dana and Newberry 50 years later. Criteria for the recognition of ancient fluviatile deposits were established by James Deane in 1847 in a study of the Connecticut Valley Triassic. Agassiz’s proof that ice is an essential factor in the formation of till is substantially a duplication of Dobson’s observations (1826).
The volumes of the Journal with their very large number of articles and reviews dealing with geology show that the interpretation of land forms as products of subaërial erosion began in France and French Switzerland during the later part of the eighteenth century as a phase of the intellectual emancipation following the Revolution. Scotland and England assumed the leadership for the first half of the nineteenth century, and the first 100 volumes of the Journal show the profound influence of English and French teaching. In America, independent thinking, early exercised by the few, became general with the establishment of the Federal survey, the increase in university departments, geological societies and periodicals, and has given to Americans the responsibilities of teachers.
Bibliography.
(In the following list “this Journal” refers to the American Journal of Science.)
[4]. Wilson, J. W., Bursting of lakes through mountains, this Journal, 3, 253, 1821.
[5]. Whitney, J. D., Progress of the Geological Survey of California, this Journal, 38, 263–264, 1864.
[6]. Playfair, John, Illustrations of the Huttonian theory of the earth, Edinburgh, 1802.