the poetics of earth science: ‘romanticism’ and the two cultures

Studies in History

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 36 (2005) 607–617

and Philosophyof Science

www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Essay review

The poetics of earth science: �Romanticism�and the two cultures

Ralph O�Connor

St John�s College, Cambridge CB2 1TP, UK

Romantic rocks, aesthetic geologyNoah Heringman; Cornell University Press, Ithaca & London, 2004, pp. xix+304,

Price $47.50 hardback, ISBN 0-8014-4127-7.

This important book takes as its theme the commerce between geology and Brit-

ish literature in the period 1770–1820. Rejecting the traditional approach of �science-and-literature� studies, whereby a science is revealed �influencing� a canonical poet or

novelist, Heringman aims to uncover the common discourses underpinning both

literary culture and geology during the so-called �Romantic� period. These wereuniquely formative years for geology in Britain, and Heringman shows that the

network of cultural practices which shaped the new science—tourism, land economy,

mining, landscape design, natural history—also shaped the poetry of the period. His

second and more ambitious claim, which makes this book of particular interest to

historians of science, is that such a study can offer �a paradigm for the divergence

of arts and sciences and the formation of modern disciplines� (p. xiii). By 1820,

according to Heringman, specialization had set in, and geology and nature poetry

were speaking very different languages: poetry had become divorced from matter,while geology had become �an abstract discourse of ‘‘classification and generaliza-

tion’’� (p. 210).

0039-3681/$ - see front matter � 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2005.07.004

E-mail address: [email protected] (R.J. O�Connor).

608 R. O�Connor / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 36 (2005) 607–617

Romantic rocks, aesthetic geology is split into two halves, corresponding to the

two parts of its title. The first half examines how primeval-looking landforms or

�romantic rocks� are treated in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley

and William Blake. Their poems are brought into dialogue with the work of early

geologists like John Whitehurst, James Hutton, George Cumberland and HumphryDavy, and Heringman deftly weaves these various writings together to elucidate the

underlying significance of rocks as emblems of the primitive, the �other�, and the

stubborn physicality of matter. In the second half, this �Romantic� aesthetic responseis shown to be inseparable from the emerging economic category of natural re-

sources. Heringman here examines �the literary genres and geographical places in

which literature and geology cohabited most flagrantly� (p. 155), notably the didactic

poetry of Erasmus Darwin and various writings on the Peak District. Here Hering-

man�s historical claims about the separation of the disciplines become more promi-nent, and these claims will be discussed more fully below.

Some words of warning are due to the historian. This book appears in Cornell�s�Literary Criticism� series, and its structure and style bear witness to the separation of

this discipline from that of �history of science� as traditionally understood. For those

unfamiliar with the language of literary theory and the discursive techniques of this

field, Romantic rocks will not be an easy read. The argument is spiral rather than lin-

ear: rather than presenting a narrative, Heringman states his themes at the outset

and takes us on a meandering journey through various texts and contexts, each ofwhich shows his themes in a new light. It is, as he puts it, a set of �illustrations of

aesthetic geology� (p. 245). The overall result is an elegantly nuanced, if sometimes

rather repetitive, account of the significance of rocks in �Romantic� culture. Sign-posts, however, are few and far between; and the Conclusion, far from tying threads

together, simply continues the discussion, spiralling off on the wings of new textual

evidence. Terminology throws up several stumbling-blocks. Some of the �isms� ofold-fashioned history of geology—�catastrophism�, �uniformitarianism�, �diluvial-ism�—occasionally appear as labels, without any preliminary definition: these al-ready problematic terms become a positive hindrance when used incorrectly (A.

G. Werner, for instance, should not be considered a �diluvialist�, while �actualist�methodology was not confined to �uniformitarians�). Though Heringman is more

careful than most literary critics to avoid putting poets in scientific pigeonholes

(skirting old chestnuts like �was Wordsworth a Neptunist?�), he adds little to our

appreciation of Shelley�s verse drama Prometheus unbound when he tells us that

�Shelley uses actualism just as impressively as catastrophism in the image of Prome-

theus chained to his rock� (p. 184). More seriously for the historian, Heringman iswriting for readers steeped in literary theory who know from the outset exactly what

he means by �materiality�, �textuality�, �the aesthetic�, �otherness�, �Romantic/-ism� andindeed �literary�. These complex and difficult concepts, so central to his argument, are

not defined so much as explored and handed around, becoming more and more

semantically capacious as the book proceeds. This, too, can become frustrating in

the absence of a clear conclusion.

Nevertheless, I would strongly urge the historian to persevere. Despite its evident

generic allegiances vis-a-vis today�s academic disciplines, and despite its author�s

R. O�Connor / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 36 (2005) 607–617 609

unfailing courtesy towards his scholarly predecessors,1 Romantic rocks marks some-

thing of a breakthrough in studies of geology�s relations to literature. Hitherto,

accounts of these relations have tended to be relatively lacking in one of two things:

close literary-critical readings of scientific texts, or sustained attention to the histori-

cal particularities of geological practice. Heringman, however, not only shows White-hurst and Hutton participating in the same broad literary culture as Wordsworth and

Blake, but also attends closely to the history of economic geology. It is unusual, to say

the least, to find William Smith�s geological tables and sections being compared with

the visionary account of �the secrets of the earth�s deep heart� in Prometheus unbound,

but such unexpected juxtapositions are characteristic of Heringman�s approach.

Whether or not one agrees with his explanations, he does historians and literary critics

a great service in drawing attention to these congruences. Smith and Shelley were,

after all, both engaged in �reading� the history of the earth in its mineral remains.The practices surrounding and constituting early geology—collecting, mining,

landscape improvement—have been treated in depth by scholars like Hugh Torrens

(2002) and Simon Knell (2000), whose work foregrounds the historical importance of

material culture in British geology. Literary critics who touch on geology are not

usually noted for their interest in such matters; but Heringman is able to capitalize

on this kind of history in support of his wider literary and philosophical arguments

concerning what he calls the �materiality� of rocks and landforms in �Romantic�thought. This linkage allows him to mount a persuasive alternative to a dominantstrand in scholarship on eighteenth-century aesthetics, which downplays the role

of the aesthetic object in favour of uncovering hidden political and psychological

narratives within aesthetic theories (e.g. De Bolla, 1989). Looking outside the realm

of aesthetic theory per se, Heringman reveals the importance of rocks and land-

forms—real, physical objects, with histories of their own—for shaping aesthetic cat-

egories in the public sphere. In so doing he restores earth science to its (rightfully)

central place within �Romantic� thought, disposing very neatly of claims to the con-

trary (e.g. Shortland, 1994). To quote the final sentence of his Introduction (p. 29):

1 HoWyatt�Heringculturabroade

‘‘Nature’’ and ‘‘the aesthetic’’ are both protean and highly disputed discursiveentities; by recovering the geological content of these terms, I hope also torecover some of their power to describe the outside world, a sphere that ismerely physical and yet more than human.

Although I would have appreciated more liberal quotation from the poems dis-

cussed, Heringman�s close readings are sensitive and often original. The chapter

on Erasmus Darwin is particularly effective in this respect: it is refreshing tofind Darwin�s verse being treated seriously alongside more canonical figures like

Wordsworth. Here Heringman ably demonstrates �the historical importance of

wever, Heringman appears to have misunderstood the import of his closest predecessor, Johns Wordsworth and the geologists (1995). This book is not about �Romanticism� as defined byman (i.e. 1770–1820), nor is it primarily a study of a poet�s �influence� upon a science: it is about thel values shared by Wordsworth and certain geologists in the later years of that poet�s life, and ther significance of geology for these figures.


poetry in explaining the natural world� (p. 210, his italics). He also takes greater care

than many of his scholarly predecessors in teasing out the ways in which poets of this

period internalized scientific language. Instead of trying to demonstrate a poet�sallegiance to a particular geologist or geological theory, Heringman digs deeper.

As he puts it in his Preface, �a range of discourses combine the empirical observationand aesthetic response that later become the separate provinces of earth science and

‘‘nature poetry’’ . . . Romanticism and geology spring from a common source, land-

scape aesthetics� (pp. xiv–xv).For the historian, the most important part of Heringman�s argument is his claim

that this �broad literary vernacular� (p. 136) was, by the turn of the century, already

fragmenting. To use his own words:

By the early to middle nineteenth century, what we consider literary forms,especially descriptive poetry, absorbed the spectacular style of description asso-ciated with aesthetic geology as modern geology became increasingly empiricaland positivistic . . . (p. 156)

Elsewhere Heringman presents the process as more or less complete by 1811:

The style produced by literary descriptions of rocks and landforms in allregisters is an essential vehicle of the scientific content of earth science, whicherects a new disciplinary framework around the content and eventually aban-dons the style to local poems such as The giants� causeway [William Drum-mond, 1811]. (p. 230, his italics)

These are far-reaching claims, and they demand close attention. I believe Heringman

is right to insist that fundamental changes took place early in the nineteenth century

as to the kind of writing felt by different groups to be appropriate to �science� or �nat-ural philosophy�. However, his particular account of these changes seems to me to

oversimplify and foreshorten a process which was (and still is) complex, drawn out,

and found in very different forms depending on whose �science� is being talked about.Despite the dustjacket�s claim that Heringman is �equally interested in the initial

surge of curiosity about the earth and the ensuing process of specialization�, his the-ory of a pre-Victorian split between �geology� and �spectacular description� is backedup by only a few pieces of actual evidence, compared with the wealth of documen-

tation he produces for the earlier phase. Heringman is persuasive on the subject of

poetry�s gradual retreat from full-scale geological theorizing as the discipline of �geol-ogy� gained in definition and authority: these issues are pointed up most effectively by

his comparison of Darwin�s geological poetry with that of Drummond (Chapter 5).On the other side of the question, geology�s retreat from literary spectacle, Hering-

man is less convincing, mainly because he does not devote nearly enough space to

making his case. The evidence he does provide seems somewhat ambivalent: James

Parkinson�s Organic remains of a former world (1804–1811), for instance, is deemed

to consist �mainly of dry anatomical recitative� despite �its dramatic title and appa-

rent literary potential� (p. 159), but later on Heringman cites this very work as

evidence that geology�s �dramatic� and �poetic� qualities could be used as a �sellingpoint� (pp. 178, 182–184).


Here Heringman tantalizingly skirts the question of scientific popularization, a

phenomenon which proved central to relations between science and aesthetics in

the era of cheap print and useful knowledge. Readers familiar with the work of Mar-

tin Rudwick (1992) and James A. Secord (2000), in which the romantic and specta-

cular aspects of Victorian geology are clearly set forth, will be disappointed to findthat Heringman does not even sketch out what happened in geological writing after

1820, let alone forge any causal or historical links between the two periods� differingapproaches to literary spectacle. All we are told is that the science had become, by

then, a purely �abstract discourse� (p. 210). Where �the lexicon of the sublime� doespersist, as he acknowledges it does in the writing of Charles Lyell, Heringman seems

to dismiss it as a �lingering presence� rather than an energizing factor in the science�snew complexion (pp. 8, xiv).

Nevertheless, Heringman usefully flags up the momentous shifts in scientific rhet-oric which were taking place around this time. The early nineteenth century was

marked by a new emphasis upon empiricism and objectivity in earth science: the

Geological Society of London was formed in 1807 as a conscious attempt to redefine

a term conventionally associated with the grand cosmological theorizing which had

(some thought) brought France to its knees, and to reclaim it as an empirical disci-

pline independent from theoretical controversy. As Heringman puts it, the new sci-

ence had to �declare its independence from an unscientific past of armchair theories

and sensational narratives� (p. 7).2 Certain literary forms inevitably fell by the way-side as vehicles for serious contributions to the discipline. Parkinson, one of the Geo-

logical Society�s founders, had in 1804 cast the first volume of his Organic remains in

the time-honoured form of letters between fictionalized characters; by the time Vol-

umes 2 and 3 appeared in 1807 and 1811 respectively, this format was unobtrusively

dropped, as were his theories about the Deluge. Other time-honoured forms of sci-

entific writing, such as fictionalized dialogues between characters, stylized �conversa-tions� and didactic or narrative verse, were generally used after 1820 only for

addressing non-specialists, especially women and children (Myers 1989). The newbreed of gentlemanly empiricists in the Geological Society adopted unadorned prose

as the most suitable form for scientific exposition to take, because it was �objective�and �disinterested�. As Heringman observes, this objectivity underpinned their claims

to philosophical integrity.

Yet from this growing sense of disciplinary independence, and these shifts in rhe-

torical convention, it does not necessarily follow that �literature� no longer incorpo-

rated �science�. Central to Heringman�s account is the work of Jon Klancher, who has

asserted that the word literature

2 Th

meant one thing in 1780—the whole array of educated genres from natural phi-losophy and history to poetry and drama—and something very different after1820 (the restricted category of imaginary genres we know today) . . . (Klancher,1994, p. 524, quoted on p. 7 n. 10)

e founding of the Geological Society is examined by Rudwick (1963) and Porter (1977).


The period 1780–1820 was undoubtedly crucial in reconfiguring relations between

various literary genres: earlier work by Klancher (1987) and more recent work by

Clifford Siskin (1998) have usefully drawn our attention to the increasing importance

of imaginative or aesthetic appeal as a qualification for a text�s �literary� status. ButKlancher�s and Heringman�s terminus post quem of 1820 overstates the finality anduniversality of what they see as a uniquely �Romantic� redefinition of �literature�.The question must be, to whom did this term �mean something very different� in 1820?

No answers are forthcoming from the OED, whose first citation of this

restricted sense of �literature� is a comment by the American philosopher Ralph

Waldo Emerson in English traits (1856): �there is no department of literature, of

science, or of useful art, in which they [the English] have not produced a first rate

book�, indicating that he did not consider scientific or practical books as �litera-ture�. The first British example of �literature� in this restricted sense is dated1887. Before that, we are given Mark Pattison�s comment in 1845 that �history,almost more than any other branch of literature, varies with the age that produces

it�, and Henry Buckle�s 1857 statement that �literature . . . is simply the form in

which the knowledge of a country is registered�.3 These citations hint at a more

inclusive meaning for �literature� in some circles, a possibility borne out by the fact

that historical and scientific books continued to be reviewed in numerous all-

purpose �literary� periodicals well into the second half of the century. In the

1870s a popular compendium entitled The book of authors was published, claimingon its title-page to contain �Personal Descriptions, Etc . . . Wholly Referring to Eng-

lish Men of Letters in Every Age of English Literature� (Russell, n.d.).4 There are

plenty of figures in here whose contribution to fictional or poetic forms was neg-

ligible or non-existent, and who are included on the strength of their biographical,

philosophical or political writings, such as Henry Brougham and John Forster.

They are mixed in with poets and novelists, in chronological order of birth, to give

a composite portrait of �the literary character of their times� (p. iv). They are, in

short, presented as part of a single, if multifaceted, literary culture.This is not to say that nineteenth-century readers recognized no generic divisions

or hierarchies within this culture. On the contrary, the subtitles of their �literary� peri-odicals often draw the reader�s attention to the different branches of literary knowl-

edge they cover, such as the Monthly Literary Register, and Review of the Fine Arts,

Sciences and Belles Lettres (London, 1822). Sometimes, indeed, a distinction does

seem to be drawn between �literary� and other forms of writing, as in the Literary

Emporium; A Compendium of Religious, Literary, and Philosophical Knowledge

(New York, 1845): here the subtitle uses the term in a more restricted sense thanthe title does. Far from meaning �one thing� in 1780 and �something very different�after 1820, the slippery term literature could clearly mean different things not only

for different people or in different publishing contexts, but even on the same

title-page. Semantic change is rooted in historical particularities: the growth and

3 OED, s.v. literature 3a.4 My copy is undated, but must have been published between 1870 and 1873: Charles Dickens�s death

(1870) is noticed but Edward Bulwer-Lytton�s (1873) is not.


professionalization of literary culture in this period may have given greater currency

to the more �restricted� meaning of �literature� after 1820, but Klancher�s generaliza-tion is too sweeping to be historically viable.

It would therefore seem rash to exclude scientific exposition from the ambit of

�Victorian literature�, even if such writing is to be seen as less �aesthetic� than, say,a poem. In fact, matters are complicated still further by the semantic broadening

which the term poetry itself was undergoing in some circles during the late eighteenth

and early nineteenth centuries. Lord Byron�s phrase �Ye stars, which are the poetry

of heaven� may have been intended metaphorically, but many commentators held

that stars were indeed as �poetic� as Childe Harold�s pilgrimage, if not more so, be-

cause they inspired a similar quality of rapture (e.g. Anon., 1834, p. 117). This

emphasis upon subjective response over the nature of the vehicle ushered in many

new forms of non-verbal poetry, such as the �symphonic poem� invented in the1840s by Ferenc Liszt and the �poetic� apocalypse paintings of John Martin. The nat-

ural world, of course, was the greatest �poem� of them all, and all mortal poets were

but faint types of the Creator. Modern geology�s position as the key to the history of

creation made this science, for a time, unparalleled as a �poetic discipline� (Wyatt,

1995, p. 169). The novelist Honore de Balzac exclaimed in 1831 that the French pal-

aeontologist Georges Cuvier was �the greatest poet of our century� (Balzac, n.d.[1831], pp. 24–26), and Cuvier�s British successors were accorded similar accolades

during the century which followed.What Heringman�s account appears to imply is that the process of discipline-

forming which earth science had undergone by the year 1820 sealed the demise of

�aesthetic geology�. In fact, that process ensured this phenomenon�s greatest flower-ing, in both old and new forms. To begin with, certainly, the gentlemen of the Geo-

logical Society positioned their science against theory and literary showmanship in

order to win respect as a science of �facts�. But the Geological Society did not repre-

sent the totality of British geological practice—neither then, nor at any time since. In

the 1810s and 1820s, while the new elite were steadily gaining in self-confidence,operational efficiency and political clout, many other writers maintained the older

model of scientific practice and continued to promote their own theories of the earth.

Such cosmologies drew upon the new science but were often rooted in a relatively

literal form of Biblical exegesis, an approach which members of the Geological Soci-

ety called �the Mosaic geology� or �Scriptural geology�. These theories display the

same interest in landscape aesthetics as many of the earlier writings examined by

Heringman. To take one example, the poet Thomas Rodd�s anonymous Defence

of the veracity of Moses (1820) begins with accounts of the Creation and the Deluge,and concludes with a lengthy chapter on the geology of �the Caverns in the Peak of

Derby�, whose speculative and spectacular prose moves easily into descriptive poetry

on the �terrible abyss� and its �wild waters, thundering as they flow� ([Rodd], 1820,

pp. 104–105).

Meanwhile, the metropolitan gentlemen were enjoying a poetic revival of a less

public nature, in the after-dinner songs and privately-circulated manuscript poems

with which they both entertained themselves and tested out ways of presenting

their science imaginatively. Fossils not only provided (as Heringman observes) a


stratigraphic key which could unlock the nation�s mineral resources; they also served

as witnesses to a succession of worlds before man, now emerging in higher �resolu-tion� and promising a much stronger poetic appeal than mere accounts of mineral

deposits. The 1820s thus saw the new science gaining both in economic and aesthetic

potential. As such its proponents were able ultimately to lift the long-held embargoon speculation and imaginative rhetoric. Indeed, they had to go public sooner or la-

ter, as literalist geologies were becoming more numerous and widely read by the

year. The new elite needed publicly to assert their own �expert� authority over earth

history, and in so doing, to make that ambivalent word geology their own.

Lyell�s rallying-cry to the British intelligentsia in the Quarterly Review for 1827 set

the tone for this elite�s renewed publicity drive, dismissing the literalists as ignorant

and bigoted meddlers (a caricature which survives to this day).5 The true �geologist�,Lyell promised, would soon be able to �restore to our imagination the picture succes-sively presented at remote periods, by the earth�s surface and its inhabitants�. His stu-

dents would be able to follow him into a vanished antiquity,

5 Litestablicentur

as Dante in his sublime vision followed the footsteps of his master, and beheld,with mingled admiration and fear, in the subterranean circles environing thedeep abyss, the shades of beings who once walked the surface in the light ofday, and who still, changed as they were, and unconscious of the present, coulddraw the veil from the mysteries of the future, and recal from oblivion thesecrets of the past. ([Lyell], 1827, p. 473)

One could hardly wish for a stronger statement of modern geology�s claims to literary

and imaginative power, yoked as it is to a clear image of the expert geologist as �mas-

ter� and sole mediator of these �visions�. Heringman points to the �lingering presence ofsublime rhetoric in Lyell� (p. xiv), but this was no afterglow of a defunct literary tra-

dition. When Lyell brought out his three-volume Principles of geology in 1830–1833,

he opened the floodgates for a tidal wave of �aesthetic geology� in its new capacity as

the means by which a gentlemanly science could be promoted among the uninitiated(Secord, 1997). Poetic techniques, having formerly been outlawed as �unscientific�,were now readmitted and employed with a new self-consciousness. Quotations from

modern poetry appeared all over British scientific treatises, while the dream-vision—a

fictional form which had proved useful over the centuries in navigating the border-

lands between truth and untruth—was revived in a spectacular new guise, framing

miniature time-travel narratives into which pieces of geological exposition might sud-

denly swerve (O�Connor, 2003a,b). Hugh Miller was especially good at these:

We have entered the Coal Measures. For seven formations together,—from theLower Silurian to the Upper Old Red Sandstone,—our course has lain overoceans without a visible shore . . .. The water is fast shallowing. Yonder passesa broken branch, with the leaves still unwithered; and there floats a tuft of fern.

eralist geologists, and other writers who resisted the authority-claims of the new scientificshment, continued to produce their own theories of the earth well into the second half of they.


Land, from the mast-head! land! land!—a low shore thickly covered with veg-etation. Huge trees of wonderful form stand out far into the water . . .. We nearthe coast, and now enter the opening of the stream. (Miller, 1841, pp. 269–270)

Such forays into fiction were designed to show that �the realities of Geology far exceed

the fictions of romance� (Mantell, 1827, p. 78). As Miller would later put it, �in an age

like the present—considerably more scientific than poetical—science substitutes for

the smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth� (Miller, [1859] 1889, p. 80).

The ploy worked: one reviewer in 1841 declared that geology�s great popularity owedmost of all to �what may be called the literature of the science� (Anon., 1841–1842,p. 211, italics original). Geology�s spectacular dimension—whether displayed via

texts, museums or television screens—remains central to its public prestige today.

Yet in advertising the capacity of a science to afford aesthetic pleasure, these

claims also signal the need to bridge a perceived gap between two categories or

�two cultures�—a gap which, as Heringman has shown us, can be traced back in

its shifting manifestations through the poetry of Darwin and into the seventeenth

century. As Heringman notes, �specialist discourses have relied from the beginning

on the literary as a category against which the scientific may be set off� (p. 271).If, as the palaeontologist Richard Fortey has put it, �the past is always a fiction� (For-tey, 1997, p. 253), then those engaged in trying to reconstruct some aspect of the

earth�s past can expect to be accused (by those who disagree with them) of putting

narrative appeal before scientific �truth�, or of allowing their own rhetoric to carry

them away. Consequently, if the accuser is himself attempting to engage the reader�senthusiasm for his own ideas, then �imaginative� or �poetic� discourse can appear in

both negative and positive senses under the same pen. Thus Thomas Burnet�s Sacredtheory of the earth (1684–1690) dismisses an earlier theory as emanating from a mere�Oratour� (Burnet, 1965, pp. 90–91), then proceeds to exert his own rhetorical bril-

liance in narrating the earth�s formation and final dissolution. Burnet�s Theory and

similar narratives were dismissed by John Playfair in 1811 as the products of �imag-

ination� and �mental derangement� ([Playfair], 1811, p. 207); but Playfair also adver-

tised the power of Hutton�s geology to unhinge the mind, recalling with pleasure how

�the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time� (Playfair,1805, p. 73). For the geologist John Murray, it was Playfair�s own �visionary� theorieswhich seemed too smoothly narrated to be true (see Heringman, pp. 270–271). Lyellportrayed numerous earlier writers as deluded visionaries while himself indulging (as

we have seen) in visionary rhetoric. In the memorable climax to Volume 1 of his

Principles, he shows up the falsity of one �poetic� view by raising another poet, Lord

Byron, to the status of a philosopher:

But it is time that the geologist should in some degree overcome those first andnatural impressions which induced the poets of old to select the rock as theemblem of firmness—the sea as the image of inconstancy. Our modern poet,in a more philosophical spirit, saw in the latter �The image of Eternity,� andhas finely contrasted the fleeting existence of the successive empires which haveflourished and fallen, on the borders of the ocean, with its own unchangedstability.

6 It iscience


——Their decayHas dried up realms to deserts:—not so thou,Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves� play:Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow;Such as creation�s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.CHILDEHILDE HAROLDAROLD, Canto iv. (Lyell, 1830–1833, I, p. 459)

And so on, right up to Richard Dawkins�s more recent polemics about the deceptive

�poetic appeal� of Stephen Jay Gould�s evolutionary theories (Dawkins, 1998, p. 209),

and the debates about the �prostituting� of palaeontology prompted by the 1999 BBCdocumentary series Walking with dinosaurs (see Benton, 2001).

Such accusations are inevitable: any discipline founded upon the concept of strict

objectivity must maintain a constant suspicion of aesthetic appeal, whether visual or

verbal. Yet such appeal is often what draws individual practitioners into the science

in the first place.6 Moreover, when a science appears in public, as palaeontology has

generally had to in order to attract sufficient funding, its promoters must be able to

flag up both its authoritative objectivity and its aesthetic appeal. Ever since the earth�spast became the subject of study, visions of earth history have sprung up within a fer-tile but perilous no-man�s-land between �science� and the �imagination�. Heringman

calls the Playfair–Murray debate a �late stage in the transition from ‘‘letters’’ to

‘‘science’’ as the cultural rubric for study of the natural world� (p. 271), but this dia-lectic would seem rather to be a cultural constant, just as compelling (in its different

forms) in the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries as in the early nineteenth.

To write a full history of the scientific �imagination�, even in a single period, would

of course be a mammoth undertaking. If mammoths and other fossil wonders do not

loom large enough in Heringman�s account, his more rock-centred approach doesenable him to explore these imagined landscapes in depth and with subtlety. Roman-

tic rocks not only provides the literary scholar with new ways of looking at the rela-

tions between science, poetry and the landscape, but it also provides historians with a

powerful precedent. Too often, we have tended to sideline literary criticism and aes-

thetics as irrelevant to our purposes, relegating them to a merely decorative function.

Heringman has now shown that his own discipline can furnish us with a valuable

tool for unlocking the meanings of science within culture.

References

Anon (1834). Montgomery�s lectures on poetry. Presbyterian Review, 5, 114–124.

Anon. (1841–1842). Miller�s Old red sandstone. Presbyterian Review, 14, 208–217.

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the poetics of earth science: ‘romanticism’ and the two cultures

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