Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane Read Free Book Online

was geology’s vital contribution to the common imagination.

    How did this geological revolution affect the way mountains were imagined? Once the geologists had shown the earth to be millions of years old and subject to immense and ongoing change, mountains could never be looked at in the same way again. Suddenly, these effigies of permanence had acquired an exciting, baffling mutability. Mountains, which seemed so durable, so eternal, had in actuality been formed, deformed and reformed over countless millennia: their current appearance was merely a phase in the perpetual cycles of erosion and uplift which determined the configuration of the earth.
    A new generation of mountain-goers was drawn to the hills by the ghostly landscapes which had suddenly opened up under the scrutiny of geology. ‘What I really saw as never before,’ wrote Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in the 1780s, ‘was the skeleton of all those great peaks whose connection and real structure I had so often wanted to comprehend.’ Geology provided a reason and an excuse – scientific inquiry – for travelling to the mountains. ‘A sentiment of curiosity, exceedingly natural, induces travellers from all parts of Europe to visit Mont Blanc, the highest point of the old world, and to examine the surrounding glaciers,’ observed an English journalist in 1801. ‘These places have recently acquired a new degree of interest – the geologue, the mineralogist, and mere amateur repair thither with avidity; and even women are amply indemnified for the fatigue of the journey by the pleasure arising from the view of objects entirely new to them.’ To look at mountains was now also to look
into
them: to imagine their past. The English scientist Humphry Davy put it well in 1805:
    To the geological enquirer, every mountain chain offers striking monuments of the great alterations that the globe has undergone. The most sublime speculations are awakened, the present is disregarded, past ages crowd upon the fancy, and the mind is lost in admiration of the designs of that great power who has established order which at first view appears as confusion.

    ‘Strata Types’, frontispiece to Humphry Davy’s
Elements of Agricultural Chemistry
(1813), showing the different rock layers which geology had made visible.
    Here then was another vertigo – the giddiness inspired by deep time – to add to the more familiar and immediate kind one might feel on a steep mountainside. The experience of going to the mountains had become, as Burnet had suggested a century earlier, one not only of moving upwards in space, but also backwards through time.

    James Hutton might have fathered geology, but he was by no means its most stylish exponent. Aside from its resonant final lines, Hutton’s
Theory
was written in a prose as uniformly impenetrable as the Old Red Sandstone of which he was so fond. It would take thirty years and another legendary geologist to make truly popular geology’s rapid advances and staggering exposés, and to entice even more people into the mountains. Far more than Burnet or even Hutton, itwas the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell who was responsible for educating the nineteenth century in the language and the imagination of geology.
    Charles Lyell was a lawyer before he was a geologist, and his forensic training had equipped him with a writing style of extreme clarity and elegance. Between 1830 and 1833 he published in three volumes
The Principles of Geology: an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation
, a work which carefully and beautifully laid out the arguments behind the Uniformitarian view that the study of the present was the key to the past.
Principles
quickly became required reading for the chattering classes of its day and was widely translated: eleven revised editions had been published by 1872.
    Lyell’s brilliance lay primarily in his marshalling of detail. As Charles Darwin would do