Darwin and the Barnacle by Rebecca Stott

Author:Rebecca Stott [Rebecca Stott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571317790
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2015-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

Speculation was very much on his mind in 1850, in more ways than one. It was to anchor his speculative mind in fact that he had embarked on this barnacle research, and yet the barnacle facts that he had collected from every corner of the Earth were pushing his mind into even more large-scale speculation. In March Charles Henry Lardner Woodd, then twenty-nine, a distant relative and Fellow of the Geological Society, wrote to him from Oughtershaw Hall, a manor house in a tiny hamlet in the Yorkshire Dales, with a paper and a list of pressing large-scale questions about whether masses of metamorphic rock, when heated, would crumple or bow. Darwin tried to answer but ended by transforming the young man’s questions into a new set of his own and then writing in exasperation: ‘how awfully complicated the Phenomenon is’. Woodd’s questions reminded him of his own youth and propensity to unempirical speculation. How to reply? Should he caution Woodd against speculation of this kind or encourage him in this vein? In the end he felt he had to find a way of telling Woodd tactfully to do some careful fact-collecting, to turn his head to tangible evidence, not abstract hypothesizing:

All young geologists have a great turn for speculation; I have burned my fingers pretty sharply in that way & am now perhaps become over cautious; & feel inclined to cavil at speculation when the direct & immediate effect of a cause in question cannot be shown – How neatly you draw your diagrams; I wish you would turn your attention to real sections of the earths crust, & then speculate to your hearts content on them; I can have no doubt that speculative men, with a curb on make far the best observers.16

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.