In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, scientists
reconstructed the immensely long history of the earth--and the
relatively recent arrival of human life. The geologists of the period,
many of whom were devout believers, agreed about this vast timescale.
But despite this apparent harmony between geology and Genesis, these
scientists still debated a great many questions: Had the earth cooled
from its origin as a fiery ball in space, or had it always been the same
kind of place as it is now? Was prehuman life marked by mass
extinctions, or had fauna and flora changed slowly over time?
The first detailed account of the reconstruction of prehuman geohistory,
Martin J. S. Rudwick's Worlds Before Adam picks up where his
celebrated Bursting the Limits of Time leaves off. Here, Rudwick takes
readers from the post-Napoleonic Restoration in Europe to the early
years of Britain's Victorian age, chronicling the staggering discoveries
geologists made during the period: the unearthing of the first dinosaur
fossils, the glacial theory of the last ice age, and the meaning of
igneous rocks, among others. Ultimately, Rudwick reveals geology to be
the first of the sciences to investigate the historical dimension of
nature, a model that Charles Darwin used in developing his evolutionary
theory.
Featuring an international cast of colorful characters, with Georges
Cuvier and Charles Lyell playing major roles and Darwin appearing as a
young geologist, Worlds Before Adam is a worthy successor to Rudwick's
magisterial first volume. Completing the highly readable narrative of
one of the most momentous changes in human understanding of our place in
the natural world, Worlds Before Adam is a capstone to the career of
one of the world's leading historians of science.
