Roderick Murchison
Sir Roderick Impey Murchison, 1st Baronet (born February 19, 1792 in Tarradale , Ross and Cromarty , Scotland , † October 22, 1871 in London ) was a Scottish geologist and paleontologist . He was long-time chairman of the Geological Society of London , the Royal Geographical Society , head of the Geological Survey and one of the leading geologists of his time. His research laid the foundation for geological exploration of England , France , Germany and Russia ; he is one of the founders of today's stratigraphic scale of the Paleozoic Era .
Youth and military
Murchison came from an old Scottish family that can be traced back to at least 1541, when Evin M'Kynnane Murchison burned down Eilean Donan Castle , the fortress of the MacKenzies at the mouth of Loch Duich , along with a few neighbors. His father, Kenneth Murchison, had made a small fortune as a general practitioner in India before returning to Scotland at Tarradale House. When his father fell ill, the family moved to Dorsetshire in the south of England in 1795 . Shortly thereafter, his father died and his widow moved to Edinburgh with Roderick and his brother Kenneth, who would later become Governor of Singapore . There she remarried and followed her husband Colonel Robert Macgregor Murray to Ireland . Roderick could not accompany the couple, and so in 1799, at the age of seven, he was sent to Durham to attend Durham Grammar School for six years - without much success.
Inspired by the example of his stepfather, he initially embarked on a military career. He received his training at the Military College of Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire , so that he could join the 36th Infantry Regiment at the age of 15 . Under Sir Arthur Wellesley , he briefly took part in the Napoleonic Wars on the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 , which ended with the Cintra Convention . In the subsequent campaign under Sir John Moore , Murchison, like all his comrades , endured great hardships while retreating to La Coruña , and Murchison's group narrowly escaped the French .
After the regiment's return home in 1809, Murchison went to Sicily as the aide-de-camp of his uncle, General Roderick Mackenzie, but there was no fighting there. The Napoleonic Wars eventually ended with the Congress of Vienna , and Murchison returned to England after eight years of active service. There he married Charlotte Hugonin (April 8, 1788 - February 9, 1869), daughter of General Hugonin of Nursted House, Hampshire, on August 29, 1816 . A time began for Murchison that he called the "fox-hunting period" of his life: he devoted himself to hunting in various forms in Hampshire, and it took the gentle influence of his wife that he undertook some extensive journeys on the continent. He attended numerous art exhibitions and made extensive notes on everything he saw in public and private collections. His turn to geology was ultimately due to the influence of his wife: she was very interested in scientific and historical topics and brought her husband into contact with Sir Humphry Davy , who recommended the rising science of geology as a suitable field of activity for him.
The early years
The couple moved to London and Murchison, with his own tenacity, began attending various scientific and geological lectures, especially those at the Royal Institution . His financial independence enabled him to pursue his own geological interests completely unhindered by the scientific controversies of his time - the dispute between the Plutonist James Hutton and the Neptunist Abraham Gottlob Werner , who separated the field of geologists into two warring camps, was raging dedicate. In 1825 he joined the Geological Society in and started working in southern England, always accompanied by his wife, the main part of the fossil collecting completed and in 1825 some time with Mary Anning around Lyme Regis went about. In the same year he published his first geological article on northwest Sussex and the adjoining parts of Hants and Surrey . Through this lecture he had proven his skills as a geologist and author, so that a short time later he was elected one of the two secretaries of the Geological Society.
In 1826 he conducted geological studies in the north of England, where he made the acquaintance of William Smith . He showed him the sequence of layers in Yorkshire , and Murchison began to understand the importance of the fossils: each of the individual rock units had its characteristic shapes, which allowed the classification even if the rocks of an outcrop were not formed in a typical way, the outcrop relationships It was difficult to make observations or the connection with other units was not obvious. From Yorkshire he traveled to the Isle of Arran and further north to Sutherlandshire . The rocks were new to him, granite , the Old Red Sandstone , hard limestones , and they were visibly older than the young rocks of southern England, but they fascinated him in a way that would determine his future research. He was able to achieve his real goal, the classification of the coals of Brora , within a very short time - they are from the Jura and not, as previously suspected, from the Carboniferous - and returned to London. The results of the trip were published in 1827.
Inspired by this trip, he went back to the Scottish Highlands with Adam Sedgwick in 1827 . They undertook extensive studies of the ancient rocks, especially the Old Red Sandstone, in which they described the rich fauna of fossil fish, and extended them to rock formations in France , Belgium and Germany in the years that followed . The research found its way into numerous publications. Meanwhile, Murchison's interest in geological conditions outside of England grew, and so he toured the continent in 1828 with his wife and Charles Lyell . After a stay in Paris, where they met with the leading French geologist, including Georges Cuvier , Alexandre Brongniart , Gérard Paul Deshayes , Elie de Beaumont , Nicolas Desmarest , Armand Dufrenoy and Constant Prévost , the journey went to the volcanic areas of the Auvergne in French Massif Central and from there via Nice , Italy and Tyrol to Switzerland . The Alps fascinated him, and in 1829 he ventured into their geological exploration with Sedgwick. Their work, published jointly in 1830, became a standard work in the early geological literature on the Alps, even if, unsurprisingly, they often misinterpreted the complicated and confused geological conditions. The trip not only took them into the mountains, they also visited the Vulkaneifel , the Rhenish Slate Mountains and the Harz Mountains . The next year Murchison traveled to the Alps again, this time only accompanied by his wife, to examine some of the locations more closely. These trips brought him in contact with other European geologists, such as Leopold von Buch , Karl von Oeynhausen and Ernst Heinrich Carl von Dechen in Germany or Jean Baptiste Julien d'Omalius d'Halloy and André Hubert Dumont in Belgium. In 1832 he was with Adam Sedgwick in the Western Alps .
Murchison and the Silurian
Further work saw him again in England over the next few years, and in 1834 he published a short brochure on the geology of Cheltenham , which in 1845 saw a second, considerably expanded edition. During his travels through England, Murchison found William Smith's findings on the sequence of the layers of the secondary (today the rocks of today's Mesozoic Era ) confirmed again and again. However, he had noticed a group of rocks that led to the primary (the name going back to Giovanni Arduino for the old slates and granites under the secondary, today essentially Paleozoic ), about which almost nothing was known. He decided to devote himself to the study of these rocks and chose the border area between England and Wales as the study area, which was inhabited by the Silurian tribe in the early days of England . His goal was to resolve the apparent disorder of the rock sequence and to demonstrate a meaningful stratigraphic sequence. He devoted himself to this goal for five years, occasionally sending brief reports about it to the Geological Society, and finally published his results in 1839 in a monograph on the Silurian system . Murchison divided the system into sub-units, which he named after places in his field of work, and whose names - such as Wenlock or Ludlow - are still partly valid today, and found a rich fauna in the Silurian rocks, including some species of fish and numerous trilobites and Brachiopods , which he used to structure the rock sequence. He believed that he had found some of the earliest evidence of life on earth.
The dispute over the Silurian
While Murchison was studying the Silurian in the Welsh Borderlands, Sedgwick focused on rocks in central Wales. He divided the layers there mainly on the basis of their rock sequence and relied only little on fossils. Based on his results, he suggested the name Cambrian for these layers , after the Latin name for Wales, and regarded it as the older of the two systems. The two jointly published an essay on the Silurian and Cambrian periods in 1835. The delimitation of the two systems proved difficult: the lower part of Murchison's Silurian overlap with the upper part of Sedgwick's Cambrian. Murchison was of the opinion that the fossils of the Cambrian in Wales did not differ significantly from those of the Silurian in his area, and initially assumed that the Upper Cambrian was to be placed in the Silurian. In the years 1842 and 1843 the rift between Murchison and Sedgwick slowly developed. The definition of the Cambrian by fossils turned out to be impossible, despite the intensive work of the geologists of the Geological Survey, and Murchison saw no reason not to go public with this finding. Sedgwick, however, undertook further work in Wales in 1842 and 1843, and discovered that the Silurian Murchison was separated by a discordance into an upper and a lower part. Due to the undisturbed transition of the layers into one another, he added the lower part to his Cambrian. The dispute over this became increasingly bitter, especially after the publication of Murchison's work Siluria in 1854. In this, Murchison even called for the entire system to be added to the Silurian because Sedgwick described the Cambrian as insufficiently precise in his view. The debate was exacerbated by the fact that the mapping geologists of the Geological Survey sided entirely with Murchison and placed the entire area that Sedgwick in Wales had assigned to the Cambrian in the Silurian on the official published maps. Sedgwick sharply opposed this approach in his great work A synopsis of the classification of the British Palaeozoic rocks , published between 1851 and 1855, and attacked Murchison with unusual clarity and frankness . The Geological Society now stood behind Murchison and issued the motto that any suggestion by Sedgwick regarding the naming and classification of Paleozoic rocks should be ignored. The two friends and colleagues fell apart as a result of the argument, until the friendship between them cooled noticeably, even though the two initially remained in constant contact. Sedgwick withdrew more and more. At the end of the 1850s he reacted very coldly to Murchison's letters and finally withdrew from Murchison and the Geological Society entirely. Murchison was very upset by Sedgwick's rejection.
Only after long years of research had enough knowledge been gained about the age sequence and characteristics of the fossils in the relevant rock layers, so that after the death of the two Charles Lapworth in 1879, the dispute, which also divided the geological world, was able to end the dispute, which also divided the geological world, by placing it in the area of the overlapping layers between Cambrian and Silurian there was a new system - the Ordovician .
King of Siluria
In 1849, both Murchison's and his wife's health were compromised, and both spent their time on various medical regimens. Receiving the Copley Medal from the Royal Society lifted his generally depressed mood a little, and he made plans for his next trips. It was not until later that year that he was restored to such an extent that he could actively participate in social and scientific life. A relapse in the summer resulted in the decision to take another regimen and the couple visited Vichy . Murchison's spirits reawakened and he toured the Auvergne volcanoes a second time. He returned to England and, in the summer of 1850, went to Scotland with Sedgwick for the last time. After Sedgwick returned home, Murchison traveled alone to the Highlands, and was able to show that some of the heavily disturbed and twisted rock masses led to Scotland's Silurian fossils.
On the occasion of the annual meeting of the British Association in Birmingham in September 1850, Murchison was crowned King of Siluria by the Bishop of Oxford, half in earnest, among the scholars present . In the course of his previous studies, Murchison had investigated the Silurian not only in England, but also in other areas of Europe. In the Urals it was about the Silurian, among other things, and in 1846 he had traveled with de Verneuil to Scandinavia, where they examined the Silurian of Öland , Gotland , Småland and Skåne .
Murchison came up with the plan to summarize the knowledge that has meanwhile been gained in abundance since the publication of his Silurian system in 1839 and to supplement it with new, own research. He began by revisiting his original study area in the Welsh Borderland in the summer of 1851 and from there on to Wales and Ireland. The next year he found little time to work in the fields, but in 1853 he resumed work in Ireland and Wales, examining new and old outcrops. The second half of the year he went to Germany again, this time with John Morris , traveling up the Rhine, from there via Kassel to Leipzig, through the Thuringian Forest to Freiberg and from there to Prague. On the return journey via Frankfurt and the Taunus, the two of them examined the Rhenish Slate Mountains again, the rocks of which they classified correctly this time in the Devonian ( see below ), and returned to England via Belgium. All of this work served to clarify the similarities and differences between the geological conditions of the continent and those of England.
In 1854 Murchison published Siluria , the summary of his research over the past three years. In contrast to the Silurian system , it was no longer just my own observations, but above all the findings of other scientists that flowed into the book. The work went through numerous editions in which Murchison incorporated more and more details on the stratigraphy and paleontology of the Silurian, as it had been researched in England and elsewhere.
Further research trips were planned for 1854, especially to Germany, since Murchison was of the opinion that many points still needed further clarification here. The focus of his research should be in the Harz, where he wanted to investigate the Silurian of the Lower Harz with Roemer, and south of Breslau in the Rotliegend. However, the war between Russia and Turkey, in which England and France soon intervened, delayed his plans. In addition, his brother Kenneth, who was two years his junior and died in early August 1854, fell ill. Murchison was hard hit by his death, but on the advice of his doctor he set off for Germany with John Morris. In the Harz Mountains and in the Thuringian Forest, they continued their research from the previous year, and Murchison finally regained his usual elasticity. Back in England, however, he soon fell ill and did not recover until the end of the year.
Murchison and the Devonian
The Devonian of England
In their investigations of the Old Red Sandstone in northern England and Scotland, Murchison and Sedgwick had contributed much to the knowledge of this series, which is characterized by red sandstones and conglomerates . Murchison was already so impressed by these rocks during his research in the Silurian that he had already proposed in his Silurian system that the Old Red Sandstone should be elevated to the rank of a geological system in view of its thickness of almost 3000 m there. As early as 1831 Sedgwick and Murchison had started to study these rocks in southern England and Wales, where they are excellently exposed along the south coast of Pembrokeshire . They were also in the coal mines of the region is of high relevance as the lower limit of the coal camp and well known. The two managed to prove that the Old Red Sandstone was older than the coal layers.
In 1836 they resumed the research and it turned out that the geology in Devon was not as simple as on the South Welsh coast. There they found heavily disturbed and folded layers, which consisted to a large extent of greywacke and slate. First of all, the two identified the rocks according to the system they already knew with the Cambrian and Silurian of Wales. Problems caused them large masses of limestone, which did not occur in Wales, and the fossils could not be brought into agreement with them, as other investigators had already established: they showed similarities with the Middle and Upper Cambrian as well as with the carbon of the coal deposits on, but were clearly independent. This referred, among other things, to the fish fossils, which the two had already noticed in Scotland, and which had been worked on in detail by Hugh Miller from Cromartyshire .
The Devonian in France, Belgium and Germany
In the winter of 1838/1839 Murchison and Sedgwick, together with James de Carle Sowerby and William Lonsdale , tried to bring order to the fossils from Devon. They came to the conviction that there really had to be an independent system between the Silurian and Carboniferous. A heated discussion at a Geological Society meeting in April 1839 convinced the numerous opponents of this theory, and two weeks later they completed an essay suggesting the name Devon for the rocks in question, including the Old Red Sandstone. They also extended their proposal to the rocks in Wales, suggesting that the new system was also widespread across the continent, without having been able to prove it. Murchison urged his friend to take a trip through Belgium, Ardennes , Eifel , Taunus, and Harz mountains to provide the evidence.
Sedgwick was concerned about his health, and so Murchison set out on his own in the spring of 1839, defended the idea of a Devonian system at a meeting of the Société géologique de France in Paris (he was now a member of the newly founded association in 1830), and then traveled to Germany. Via Trier , Idar-Oberstein , Bad Kreuznach and Bingen he reached Frankfurt am Main , bought a carriage there and began his journey north on the right bank of the Rhine . In June he reached Meschede and from there wrote to his wife about the rocks he had examined:
“I do not believe there is a Silurian bed among them, and I am more than disposed to think that the whole is Devonian, except, perhaps, the westward flanks. [...] The limestones are undistinguishable from those of Plymouth and North Devon, and the organic remains are all of the same classes which occur in those rocks - Goniatites , large Spirifers , etc. ”
“I do not think there is a Silurian layer below them, and I am more inclined to believe that it is all Devonian in age, except perhaps on the western bank. […] The limestone is indistinguishable from those in Plymouth and North Devon, and the organic remains are all of the same class as in the rocks there - goniatites , great spirifers , etc. "
From Meschede he continued his journey via Arnsberg to Düsseldorf , in order to visit the mining area of the Ruhr area en route , and from there to Cologne and Bonn . In Bonn he met Sedgwick, and after showing him his results and the key points, the two of them continued their journey to the Harz Mountains, where they visited the Lautenthal , the Okertal and the Bodetal , and then continued into the Fichtelgebirge . They did not find Silurian anywhere, only Devonian and some carbon. The travelers returned to the Rhenish Slate Mountains, drove geology in Nassau along the Lahn , and examined the outcrops on the Rhine between Bingen and Koblenz on foot, by carriage or by boat. In Bad Ems they found rocks that they classified as Silurian based on their fossils and their appearance (despite their similarity to the Silurian rocks, they belong to the Siegen and Ems level of the Lower Devonian ). After a brief excursion to the Eifel, Murchison had to return to England in August 1839 in his role as Secretary of the Geological Society and left Sedgwick in Trier. In September he returned to Germany with Édouard de Verneuil and met Sedgwick in Bonn. The company drove up the Rhine to Limburg an der Lahn , from where they reached the town of Dillenburg via the Westerwald , and from there they traveled back down the river to Limburg. De Verneuil left the two of them, and after another detour to the Eifel, they too drove down the Rhine via Düsseldorf to Rotterdam to return to England.
The results of the trip were published in 1840 and the main features of the Rhenish Slate Mountains described, even if the two did not fully agree: Murchison placed all the rocks encountered in the Devonian, while Sedgwick tended to place them more in the Upper Silurian. This is also reflected in the geological map attached to her work from 1840 and the accompanying profile, in which large areas of the Rhenish Slate Mountains are entered as the Silurian.
The Devonian of Russia
Murchison had heard again and again that in north-eastern Europe the layers of the primary, which were so disturbed and folded in England and Central Europe, lay largely undisturbed and essentially horizontal. Moreover, the fossils in these strata are the same as those found in the ancient strata in Wales and on the continent. He made the plan to visit these areas and in May 1840 went on a trip with de Verneuil. After a short stay in Berlin, where the two met, among others, Alexander von Humboldt , Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg and Gustav Rose , before continuing to St. Petersburg . Accompanied by a tour group that included Count Alexander Keyserling , their route took them via Arkhangelsk , up the Dvina , west to Nizhny Novgorod and the Volga valley to Moscow . Despite the almost complete cover with gravel , sand and clay , the travelers succeeded in determining the general sequence of the rocks of the Paleozoic Era. A more or less complete series from the Silurian to the Carboniferous followed over a crystalline basement . The rocks were poorly consolidated and the soft clays and brittle limestones did not resemble the image of hard slate and limestone known from England and Wales. The fossils, however, were the same, and their discovery that the fish of the Old Red Sandstone were found here together with the clams of the Devonian finally proved the same age of the so different layers of Devonian (slate, sandstone and limestone) and Scotland (Old Red Sandstone ). Murchison returned to England in time for the British Association meeting in Glasgow in September and reported on his success. In recognition of his services to Russia, the Russian tsar presented him with a magnificent vase from the Kolyvan stone cutting workshop , cut from a large piece of Belorezk quartzite .
Murchison and the Permian
It had become clear to Murchison that geological exploration of Russia could not be accomplished in a year and without thorough preparation. The Russian authorities and Tsar Nicholas guaranteed him extensive support, and in the spring of 1841 he and de Verneuil set out for Russia again, where they were received by their travel companion, Count Alexander Keyserling, and his large group of geologists and staff. Several crossings of the southern and central provinces as well as an exploration of the Ural Mountains were planned . The group set out from Moscow and reached the Urals via Vladimir , Kazan and Perm . From the edge of the Siberian steppe, the group turned south to explore the Urals to Orsk . There the journey went west again, via Orenburg and Sarepta to the Sea of Azov and finally north again via Moscow to St. Petersburg.
On the first part of this journey via Nizhny Novgorod to Kazan , the travelers repeatedly encountered predominantly red conglomerates, sandstones and claystones, with which Murchison could not do much at first; they even drove him to the brink of despair. Above all, he was unsure whether he could equate it with the Newer Red Sandstone , which in England lies above the coal-bearing strata of the carbon. These rocks accompanied them through the entire province of Perm , and Murchison compared them both with the Red Deadly in the Harz region and with the Nagelfluh in the Alps. Eventually he decided that they represented a separate system between the Carboniferous and Triassic , and named this Permian , after the province in which they were so common. He sent his proposal from Moscow to the Royal Society in October 1841, where it was published in the Philosophical Magazine in December 1841 . The description was based primarily on the rocks he had encountered in the vicinity of Kazan, Perm and Orenburg after his visit to Vyazniki : marine sediments such as shell limestone, gypsum , rock salt and copper-containing sandstones. He had already encountered such sequences in the Magnesian Limestone in England and on his travels in Germany in the Zechstein . The fossils in it had a character that mediated between Carboniferous and Triassic: the marine mollusks resembled those of the Carboniferous, and the plants to those of the Triassic. Murchison and de Verneuil initially left the age of the red marl and sandstones - Permian or Trias (red sandstone ) - open, but assigned them to Permian in 1845.
The society finally reached the Urals and, despite the largely missing topographical maps , succeeded in clearing up the main features of its geological structure. After geological work on several crossings of the Urals, the researchers finally examined the geology of the coal layers in the Donets Basin in order to reach St. Petersburg again at the beginning of October. Murchison finally arrived back in London in early November.
Further trips to the continent
Shortly before setting off on his expedition to Russia, Murchison was elected to his second term as President of the Geological Society and enjoyed great influence because of his geological achievements. At the same time, his wife's recently vacated inheritance ensured him complete financial independence. Murchison enjoyed social life and accepted numerous social responsibilities. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1842, he found the time to undertake an excursion through England with Count Keyserling to examine British geology once more so that the comparison with the conditions in Russia could be put on a more solid footing. One of the themes on this trip was Louis Agassiz's theory that the landscapes of Scotland, Northern England and Ireland were shaped by glaciers , just as he had demonstrated in the Alps. Murchison vehemently opposed this notion.
In 1843 the presidency of the Geological Society was handed over to Henry Warburton . Relieved of his duties, Murchison went on another trip to the continent, initially to Germany with his wife. She stayed there in Baden , and he traveled on to Poland and visited the Carpathian Mountains. From there it went over the Giant and Ore Mountains to Prague , where he met Joachim Barrande . On the basis of Murchison's Silurian system, Barrande had investigated the Paleozoic around Prague, which was later named after him ( Barrandian ). The two became friends, a friendship that lasted until Murchison's death. Murchison traveled on to Berlin, and from there to Saxony for further geological explorations. Back in England, he went on an excursion to the Paleozoic of Ireland for the meeting of the British Association in Cork. There he examined the rocks between the mouth of the Shannon and Bantry Bay for several weeks before he returned to London to continue working on the report on the results of his expeditions to Russia.
Murchison spent the summer in Denmark and Sweden before traveling to St. Petersburg via the Baltic Islands. Here, too, he found numerous testimonies to the activity of glaciers, and again Murchison rejected the theory of continent-wide glaciation. On his trip he met many of the geological authorities of Scandinavia and was summoned repeatedly to the Prussian and Russian courts due to his growing fame. After returning to London, he worked hard with de Verneuil and von Kayserling to complete their report on Russia, which finally appeared in 1845. The significance of the work lies in the first complete description of the geology of Russia, at the same time it represents the culmination of Murchison's geological work.
Murchison and the Alps
In 1847 Murchison sought new geological challenges, and since his wife's health was compromised, they planned a long journey south. After a winter in Rome, the trip was to go to Naples next spring , and from there to the central Alps. During the annual meeting of the British Association, Murchison handed over the presidency of the Association to his successor and traveled to Homburg in July to meet his wife, who had traveled ahead of him. The continuation of the journey to Venice took a whole month, as the route led via Vienna and then in a zigzag over the Eastern Alps , where Murchison, together with de Verneuil and von Keyserling, recorded numerous geological profiles. In Innsbruck he met his wife and Leopold von Buch, whom he had often met in Berlin and with whom he had a long-standing friendship. In September the group arrived in Venice to take part in the meeting of the Scienziati Italiani . Murchison and his wife traveled on to Rome, where they spent the winter. There he waited impatiently for the spring to carry out the planned studies of the volcanic surroundings of Naples. When he got there, however, the increasingly uncertain political situation forced him to leave for Rome after a short time. Rome was also in turmoil, but Murchison nonetheless found an opportunity to geologically explore the area around Rome.
In early May 1848 the Murchisons left Rome and traveled north. The main part of the next five months has been dedicated to the study of the geology of the alpine Murchison crossed the Swiss Alps several times: first in the West in the area of Geneva , then Courmayeur to Aosta and the Great St. Bernard back to Martigny , across the Bernese Oberland and around Lake Lucerne and the Säntis to Bregenz and Sonthofen . From Basel they finally embarked down the Rhine to return to England. Murchison published his results in an extensive work on the geology of the Alps, Carpathians and Apennines. In this work, he brought together his own observations and those of his numerous colleagues and demonstrated that the tertiary is widespread in the Alps. This was the first time with this clarity, and yet the pioneering work had a weakness: even now, despite the numerous evidence of extensive glaciation in the Alps, Murchison was not prepared to accept this theory.
Murchison and the Old Red Sandstone
In 1855, Henry De la Beche , the director general of the British Geological Survey, died. De la Beche had developed the survey from its beginnings around 1830 as an additional division of the Ordnance Survey into an independent organization. In 1855 the survey consisted of a museum and two geological departments, one for England and one for Ireland, each headed by a director and employing a number of geologists and other scientists. The Director General was not only responsible for chairing and administering the survey, but also for assessing mineral resources and overseeing the geological exploration of the British colonies . De la Beche's death came at a time when various previously independent institutions were to be merged into one government organization, the Department of Science and Art . The selection of the new director general for the Geological Survey and its affiliated departments was therefore a delicate matter because the new director would have to have not only scientific but also political skills. The choice finally fell on Murchison, who took office in May 1855. Although he had previously worked completely independently and was now forced into a more or less fixed daily routine, he enjoyed the position and threw himself into the work with ardor. His personal assessment of the first three months made him very happy, but he soon began to miss the geological field work. The British Association held its annual meeting in Glasgow in 1855, and so he decided to travel on to the Highlands from there.
In the years since his travels with Sedgwick, some advances had been made in deciphering the geology of the Scottish Highlands. The occurrence of mica schist and gneiss in large areas of the Highlands was known. These rocks were previously regarded as the fossil-free basement of the Paleozoic strata. Occasionally, however, fossils had been found that occurred in rocks that stretched across the northern highlands to northwestern Sutherland and showed strong similarities with the Old Red Sandstone. Apparently they were covered by quartzites with limestone deposits and gneiss. The red sandstones were placed in the Devonian by their workers, a classification that turned the findings of Sedgwick and Murchison upside down: they had proven that the gneisses around the Moray Firth and in southern Scotland the Old Red Sandstone they were working on subordinate, i.e. older. Murchison's first visit to the outcrop in question in 1855 brought no new information due to the shortness of the time, but he stuck to his opinion that the red sandstones were to be assigned to the Old Red Sandstone.
Murchison's professional duties initially deterred him from further excursions to Scotland, and it was only three years later that he found time to devote himself to the problem of the gneiss over the sandstones. In the meantime, the discovery of further fossils had shown that the quartzites and limestones were to be placed above the sandstones in the Lower Silurian. The fossils showed strong similarities with the Silurian fossils of North America and Canada . In addition, employees of the Geological Survey had extensively mapped the quartz-rich rock formations, and showed that they were everywhere discordant on the red sandstones. Murchison traveled north to the Moray Firth again in 1858 and from there extended his investigations to the Shetland and Orkney Islands , which also have extensive outcrops of Old Red Sandstone. From there it went south again to Cape Wrath and on to West Sutherland, where Murchison took another look at the outcrops and their surroundings that were visited in 1855. He found the situation confirmed that the sandstones were under the quartzites and gneiss, and was forced to no longer assign them to the Old Red Sandstone, but to grant them a higher age. He was strengthened by the fact that also in Wales there are red sandstones with conglomerates that were safely below his Silurian, even if they were not separated from it by a discordance. But how were the gneisses to be classified? Since they were above the rocks now classified into the Cambrian and Ordovician, he assigned them a Silurian age - and was wrong in this classification: as we know today, the parent rocks of the Lewisian gneiss were formed as early as the Neoproterozoic and later via the Cambrian pushed.
In 1859 and 1860 he continued his studies of the Old Red Sandstone in the Highlands and worked out the basics of its stratification throughout Scotland. In addition, he brought a certain order to the slate and gneiss of the central highlands and was able to show that they can be divided into similar, recurring rock groups even without fossils. Murchison presented the results of his work in the Highlands in a series of publications. He divided the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland into three sections, namely Lower, Middle and Upper Old Red Sandstone (Lower, Middle and Upper ORS), and placed the entire group in the Devonian. He mistakenly assumed that rocks of the Lower Old Red Sandstone occurred only south of the Grampian Mountains . Today it is known that the Old Red Sandstone was deposited in the period from the Silurian to the Lower Carboniferous, and that it also occurs in the north of Scotland. Murchison was correct in his statement that the Middle Old Red Sandstone is restricted to the Orcadian Basin in the north of the central Highlands, and that the Upper Old Red Sandstone in Scotland, with the exception of the Orcadian Basin, lies discordantly on older rocks everywhere.
The Scottish surveys were Murchison's last major fieldwork, completing a geological fieldwork that spanned more than thirty years.
From the Geological Society to the Geographical Society
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Murchison began to take an active part in its social life soon after the establishment of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, and was first elected its president in 1843. In the early summer of 1844 he gave the first of his later famous speeches as President, in which he outlined the progress of geography and highlighted the achievements and merits of numerous geographers from various nations.
In 1851 Murchison was re-elected President of the Geographical Society. He held the presidency for eight years before handing it over to Lord Ashburton in 1859 . However, this had a weak constitution, so that Murchison continued to exert a great influence on the work of the Society. In 1863 Murchison took over the chairmanship again at the urging of his colleagues, and kept it until his last year. This second period as chairman of the Geographical Society made him known to the wider public as a promoter of progress in geography, who took an active part in the fate of researchers. There were three areas in particular that captured the interest of the Geographical Society: the interior of Africa , that of Australia , and the waters and countries around the North Pole . Murchison showed keen sympathy for the fate of the researchers, and counted Burton , Speke , Grant , Baker and above all Livingstone among his friends, whose return from Africa he firmly believed - although he no longer lived to see them: the news of Henry Morton met Stanley arrived in London six days after Murchison's death. He showed the same steadfastness with regard to the expedition of John Franklin , who was looking for a way across the Northwest Passage. Murchison repeatedly unsuccessfully requested the sending of a rescue expedition. When Franklin's death in 1859 became known, he campaigned for the support of his widow Lady Jane Griffin , who had used almost all of her fortune on several search expeditions. Sir Bartle Frere summarized Murchison's services to geography as follows:
“It is no exaggeration to say that during the past thirty years no geographical expedition of any consequence has been undertaken in our own or, I believe I might say, in any other country, without some previous reference to him for advice and suggestion, often entailing laborious research and correspondence. "
“It is no exaggeration to say that in the past thirty years no geographic expedition of major importance has been undertaken in our, or as I believe I can say, in any other country without first consulting him for advice or suggestions. which often led to busy research and correspondence. "
The late years
Murchison now devoted himself almost entirely to his duties in London. His tasks in connection with the Geological Survey included, in addition to representative functions, above all correspondence and occasional visits to the geologists working in the area. One of his main concerns was to increase the number of geologists working for the survey. The geological fieldwork turned more and more to the details as knowledge increased, so that the rate of progress in the geological survey of England declined progressively. More attention has now also been paid to the superficial deposits. The employed geologists were barely able to fulfill these tasks, especially outside of the English core areas. There were only two geologists working for Scotland in the 1850s. Murchison campaigned for more geologists until the Geological Survey was reorganized in 1866: the number of geologists rose from 35 to 75 and the departments were increased to three: in addition to the department responsible for England and Wales, there was an Irish and one scottish branch.
Despite his duties, he found a month or more of free time to travel in England every year; rarely did he manage to travel to France or Germany. The main goal was still Scotland and the areas with Silurian rocks, where he gathered more geological building blocks here and there to fill the last gaps in his research. His geological activity in these years was otherwise limited to the writing of numerous geological essays and the preparation of further editions of his book Siluria , which saw a total of four editions in 13 years. He still showed a certain stubbornness with regard to the theory that Scotland, England, Ireland and other areas of Europe were covered by glaciers, and vehemently opposed it: in 1864 he left a pamphlet with the title On the Relative at his own expense Powers of Glaciers and Icebergs floating printing, the position of the Ice-Men ( Iceman moved) in doubt. He also strictly rejected Darwin's theory of evolution , even if he only expressed this in a small group or in a letter.
Lady Murchison's health had not been particularly stable for a long time. In late 1862 she had been so seriously ill for the first time that Murchison feared her death. This was repeated several times before she died on February 9, 1869. Murchison only recovered from this loss by continuing his numerous daily chores. Among the activities after his wife's death was the establishment of a chair in geology at the University of Edinburgh in 1871 of geological interest, which he encouraged and supported with 6000 pounds .
On November 21, 1870, Murchison suffered a stroke from which he recovered only moderately and after which he was dependent on a wheelchair. He gave the chairmanship of the Geographical Society to Henry Creswicke Rawlinson and resigned from the other offices. His condition worsened as the year progressed, and on October 22, 1871, Murchison died of bronchitis . On October 27, he was buried next to his wife in Brompton Cemetery . Since he left no sons, his baronet title expired on his death.
Honors
Murchison was a patient collector of data and wrote in a sober style almost exclusively on geological and geographical subjects. His great influence came not only from his social position, but also from his personality: according to statements by his contemporary witnesses, despite inexhaustible energy, he was patient, polite and very tactful.
In 1826 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society . Murchison was one of the founding fathers of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830 and was president on several occasions. In 1840 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , 1841 President of the Geological Society, 1844 Member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris, 1845 Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and 1846 Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg . After his return from Russia he was beaten on February 11, 1846 to the Knight Bachelor . In 1855 he succeeded Sir Henry Thomas de la Bèche as director general of the Geological Survey of Great Britain - a position he held until his death - and became director of the Museum of Practical Geology . In 1849 he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society and in 1864 the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London . In 1860 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina , and in 1865 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences . He was a member of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Doctors . On February 3, 1863 he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath , and on January 22, 1866 he was raised to the hereditary Baronet , of London. In 1871 Murchison donated the Murchison Medal in his will , which has since been awarded by the Geological Society to deserving geologists. The Royal Geographical Society has given him the Murchison Award for Outstanding Geographic Publications since 1882 .
Because of his great commitment to geography, numerous geographic objects are named after him, such as the Murchison River in Western Australia, the Murchison Falls in Uganda , Mount Murchison and the Murchison Cirque in Antarctica and the Murchison Crater on the moon .
The building of the main Scottish branch of the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh is called Murchison House .
Fonts
- 1825: Geological Sketch of the North-Western Extremity of Sussex, and the adjoining parts of Hants and Surrey . In: Transactions of the Geological Society London, Second Series . tape 97 .
- 1830: with A. Sedgwick: A Sketch of the Structure of the Austrian Alps . In: Transactions of the Geological Society London, Secon Series . tape 2 , no. 3 , p. 301-424 .
- 1834: Outline of the Geology of the Neighborhood of Cheltenham . Cheltenham (2nd edition 1845, together with J. Buckman and HE Strickland).
- 1835: On the Silurian and Cambrian Systems, Exhibiting the Order in which the Older Sedimentary Strata Succeed each other in England and Wales . In: British Association for the Advancement of Science Report . 5th meeting, 1835 (with Adam Sedgwick ).
- 1839: The Silurian System . John Murray, London.
- 1839: with A. Sedgwick: On the Classification of the older stratified deposits of Devonshire and Cornwall . In: Philosophical Magazine, Series 3 . tape 14 , p. 241-260 .
- 1841: First sketch of the principal results of a second geological survey of Russia . In: Philosophical Magazine, Series 3 . tape 19 , no. 126 , p. 417-422 .
- 1841: On the Geological Structure of the Northern and Central Regions of Russia in Europe . Richard & John E. Taylor, London (with E. de Verneuil and A. von Keyserling. Online version at archive.org ).
- 1842: with A. Sedgwick: On the Classification and Distribution of the Older or Paleozoic Rocks of the North of Germany and Belgium, and Their Comparison with Formations of the same Age in the British Isles . In: Transactions of the Geological Society, 2d series . tape 6 , p. 221–301 (published in 1844 in Stuttgart in German translation: About the older or paleozoic formations in the north of Germany and Belgium (compared with formations of the same age in Great Britain) with a geognostic overview map ).
- 1845: The Geology of Russia in Europe and the Ural Mountains . 2 volumes. J. Murray (Vol. 1) / P. Bertrand (vol. 2), London / Paris (with É. De Verneuil and A. von Keyserling).
- 1848: On the Geological Structure of the Alps, Apennines, and Carpathians, more especially to prove a transition from Secondary to Tertiary Eocks, and the development of Eocene deposits in Southern Europe., With plate of sections . In: Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society . tape 157 , p. 157-312 .
- 1854: Siluria: The history of the oldest known rocks containing organic remains, with a brief sketch of the distribution of gold over the earth . John Murray, London ( online version at archive.org ).
literature
- Archibald Geikie : Life of Sir Roderick I. Murchison, Bart .; KCB, FRS; sometime director-general of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom . J. Murray, London 1875 (online version at archive.org: Volume I , Volume II ).
- Robert A. Stafford: Scientist of the Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison; Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism . Cambridge University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-521-52867-4 .
- Obituary Notices of Fellows Deceased . In: Proceedings of the Royal Society of London . tape 20 , 1871, p. xxx – xxxiii , doi : 10.1098 / rspl.1871.0003 .
- Michael Collie and John Diemer: Murchison's Wanderings in Russia. His Geological Exploration of Russia in Europe and the Ural Mountains, 1840 and 1841 . Keyworth: British Geological Survey, 2004, ISBN 0-85272-467-5 .
- David R. Oldroyd : The Highlands Controversy. Constructing Geological Knowledge through Fieldwork in Nineteenth-Century Britain. University of Chicago Press 1990.
Web links
- Piotr Krzywiec: Sir Murchison is visiting Poland. Państwowy Instytut Geologiczny, Warsaw.
References and comments
- ↑ Geikie 1875, p. 3
- ↑ Geikie, p. 14 f.
- ↑ a b Obituary, p. Xxx
- ↑ Geikie 1875, Volume 2, p. 334
- ^ On the Coal-field of Brora, in Sutherlandshire, and some other stratified deposits in the north of Scotland . In: Transactions of the Geological Society, 2d series . ii, 1827, pp. 293 .
- ↑ Karl Alfred von Zittel : History of geology and paleontology . In: History of the Sciences in Germany. Modern times . 23rd volume. R. Oldenbourg, Munich Leipzig 1899, p. 589 ( online version ).
- ↑ Geikie, Volume 2, pp. 313ff
- ^ JC Thackray: Geological controversies: The Murchison-Sedgwick controversy . In: Journal of the Geological Society . tape 132 , no. 4 , p. 367–372 ( online abstract ).
- ^ Geikie, p. 286
- ^ Sabine Rath: The history of exploration of the Eifel geology - 200 years a classic area of geological research . 2003 (Dissertation RWTH Aachen University . Online version ).
- ^ Geikie, p. 327
- ↑ a b Murchison in Russia. Palaeobiology and Biodiversity Research Group, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol , accessed January 6, 2010 .
- ↑ Geikie 1875, Volume 2, pp. 192f
- ↑ This only became understandable with the breakthrough of the theory of plate tectonics : this part of Scotland was once part of the North American - Greenlandic - Siberian continent Laurentia .
- ↑ The sandstones and the overlying quartz rocks and limestones are placed today in the Cambrian and Ordovician. The overlying gneisses belong to the so-called Locheil Group and are not in their original order, but were pushed over large stretches over the Cambrian and Ordovician rocks by a large overthrust , the Moine Thrust , during the Caledonian mountain formation . S. Brown 2002, map in Fig. 1, p. 3
- ^ MAE Brown, RA Smith, AM Aitken: Stratigraphical framework for the Devonian (Old Red Sandstone) rocks of Scotland south of a line from Fort William to Aberdeen . Ed .: British Geological Survey. Keyword, Nottingham 2002, p. 1 .
- ↑ Geikie 1875, Vol. 2, pp. 298f
- ↑ Geikie 1875, Volume 2, 315ff
- ^ List of members since 1666: Letter M. Académie des sciences, accessed on January 26, 2020 (French).
- ↑ Copley archive winners 1899 - 1800. (No longer available online.) The Royal Society, archived from the original on September 29, 2012 ; Retrieved December 21, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Members of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Doctors 1857
- ↑ Medals & Awards. (PDF file; 36 kB) Royal Geographical Society, accessed January 13, 2010 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Murchison, Roderick |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Murchison, Sir Roderick Impey, 1st Baronet |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Scottish geologist and paleontologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 19, 1792 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Tarradale , Ross and Cromarty , Scotland |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 22, 1871 |
| Place of death | London |