EDUCATOR’S CORNER
Changing Face of Geology Textbooks
Rasoul Sorkhabi, Ph.D., CPG-11981
Dr. Rasoul Sorkhabi is a professor at the University of Utah’s Energy & Geoscience Institute, Salt Lake City. Email:
rsorkhabi@egi.utah.edu
College and university textbooks are the first tools in the training of geologists, geochemists and geophysicists. Research on the history and evolution of geology textbooks is scarce; although, such studies would show how and why the text- books have changed through time and how this knowledge can improve the writing and publication of future textbooks in geology, and hence the quality of geology education. This article is a small effort along this line of thought.
From Charles Lyell to Arthur Holmes
The term “geology” (geologie in French and German, and geologia in Italian) as the name of a new branch of natural science appeared in 1778-79 in the writings of J. A. De Luc and H. B. de Saussure. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, geology emerged as an independent field out of what was previ- ously called natural philosophy, natural history, and mining. James Hutton, who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of geology, entitled his 1788 book The Theory of the Earth, and it was so hard to read that his friend John Playfair decided to popularize it in a new book, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802).
Although several books using “geology” in their titles appeared in the early 19th century, it was Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology that dominated the discourse and remained the most influential geology textbook throughout the 19th century. First published in 1830-33 (by John Murray in London) in three volumes, Lyell’s Principles of Geology went through twelve editions. The last edition in 1875 (in two volumes) was published posthumously. Indeed, very few geol- ogy textbooks have enjoyed such a long-standing presence in academia. Lyell’s textbook even influenced public thinking and popularized geology. Lyell wrote his book mainly to articulate and argue for the principle of uniformitarianism – the idea that the processes we observe today also occurred in the past so much so that the past history of Earth can be interpreted by the present processes and observations (“the present is the key to the past”). Indeed, the subtitle of Lyell’s book read: “Being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface by reference to causes now in operation.” This was an extension of Hutton’s and Playfair’s thinking and writings.
Lyell also wrote a more educational and manual text-
book, Elements of Geology, first published in 1938 (also by John Murray) with a seventh-edition in 1871. However, his Principles of Geology remains a classic and has even been published in our time by Penguin Classics (abridged edition in 1997) and Yale University Press (all three volumes, 2009).
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One reason for the popularity of Lyell’s book was his vivid, accessible, and narrative style of its prose. The same is also true for Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, but is still read as a classic in science. (Darwin, by his own confession, was influenced by Lyell and carried a copy of Principles of Geology on his voyage on the Beagle.) This style of writing is largely absent from the current textbooks.
Moreover, what sets apart Lyell’s textbook from many of the current geology textbooks is that its author was himself a pioneering and world-known geologist and that his book did not simply offer a standard knowledge-base of geology but also incorporated Lyell’s own observations and research, and reported on research results of other geologists. This style of writing was also true for some other popular geology textbooks in the 19th century: For example, Archibald Geikie’s 990-page Text-Book of Geology, which resulted from his lectures at the University of Edinburgh and was first published in 1882 (by Macmillan) with a third edition in 1893. Perhaps this style of writing could only be used in the 19th century when geology was an infant science. Nevertheless, in the 20th century, one of the few geology textbooks (so far as I know) that followed Lyell’s suit was Arthur Holmes’ Principles of Physical Geology, whose title was also inspired by Lyell’s book. Holmes published the first edition of his book in 1944; its second edition came out in 1965 (the year he died); the third edition in 1978 (revised by his wife Doris Reynolds Holmes); and the fourth edition in 1993 (rewritten by Donald Duff). In the 1944 edition of his textbook, Holmes included a chapter on continental drift (a taboo at that time) and discussed his idea of how a continent may break up by the mantle convection currents and a new ocean would form between the two drifting continental blocks. This notion was later rediscovered as sea-floor spreading in the 1960s. Indeed, few geology textbooks today would offer such original and new thoughts.
American Response
Textbooks by Lyell, Geikie, and Holmes, all written and published in the UK, were used in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. An American counterpart to Lyell’s textbook, in statute and popularity, was James Dwight Dana’s Manual of Mineralogy, first published in 1848, and its later editions were published even after Dana’s death in 1895, by his geolo- gist son Edward Dana, and later by W.E. Ford, C.S. Hurlbut, and lately by Cornelis Kelin who released its 23rd edition in 2007! Dana also wrote Manual of Geology (1863, third edition in 1880) with a subtitle, “Treating of the Principles of the Science
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