D Amy IN AND GEOLOGY 349 



DAEWIN AND GEOLOGY ^ 



By Professor JOHN JAMES STEVENSON 



NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 



CHAELES DAEWIN was born in a time of intellectual nnrest. 

 Explorers, students of chemistry and workers in mines had been 

 adding to actual knowledge for nearly one third of a century and thought- 

 ful men had been forced to recognize the worthlessness of many concep- 

 tions which had long passed current. Nowhere was this unrest more 

 manifest than among the younger geologists; but they were compelled 

 to express themselves cautiously, for, fettered by a false chronology, 

 the church dignitaries who controlled the universities rebuked investi- 

 gation and branded as infidels those who recorded obnoxious facts. 

 Little more than a year prior to Darwin's birth, the Geological Society 

 of London had been founded as a protest against subjective study of 

 this globe, but already many adherents to the principles of that society 

 had appeared on the continent, proclaiming that actual knowledge of 

 conditions must precede attempts to explain them. 



The development of opinion was so rapid that before Darwin 

 reached his majority the geological pendulum had made its great swing 

 from the doctrine of cataclysms to that of uniformity; from the belief 

 that this globe is less than 6,000 years old to an abiding faith that its 

 age can not be measured in" years. It was amid such conditions that 

 toward the close of his university studies, he came under the influence 

 of Henslow and Sedgwick, the latter being engaged at that time along 

 with Murchison in an effort to unravel the tangle of Welsh geology. 

 Some have said that these men taught him how to observe; not so; he 

 was already a keen observer and they merely led him into wider fields. 



In 1831, Captain Eitzroy was assigned to command H. M. S. Beagle, 

 a little brig of 240 tons, and was commissioned to complete the coast 

 survey of southern South America as well as to run a line around the 

 globe. When he expressed the wish to be accompanied by a naturalist, 

 Darwin, then only twenty-two years old, promptly volunteered his 

 services, which were accepted, and he was enrolled as a supernumerary 

 member of the staff. The Beagle left England on December 27, 1831, 

 and returned on October 2, 1836, bringing with it Charles Darwin, 

 now grown intellectually to man's stature and bearing a notable cargo 

 of material collections as well as of accumulated observations. There 



^ An address given at the American Museum of Natural History on Feb- 

 ruary 12. 



