I have recently started contributing articles to York Mix, a website covering what's going on in York, and what's being talked about. This is my latest piece, about the pioneering geologist John Phillips, who spent much of his career in the city.
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| John Phillips, as immortalized at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. |
A couple of weeks ago, I waded into an argument about a
powerful historic figure who wanted to be buried in York Minster, but
isn’t going to be. This time, I want to tell a much more
interesting tale, about a man who was unequivocally both good and
important, who is buried in York, and who rarely attracts any
publicity. A man who also had his fair share of Minster-based
disagreements.
To set the scene, we must first
contemplate the age of the Earth.
Just how old is the planet we live on,
and how do we figure it out? Since the onset of radiometric dating,
it has become relatively straightforward. By measuring the abundance
of different elements, and using their known decomposition rates, we
can be remarkably exact about the timings of different geological
events. But what about before such techniques were possible?
One of the first people to begin
building the scientific framework was a canal surveyor named William Smith.
From digging his way around England, he realized there was a
systematic pattern by which fossils appeared in the rocks. They
didn’t just occur randomly, but in an order that was repeated right
across the country. Smith understood that he could use them to
produce a predictive model of how the rocks were stacked.
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| William Smith's 1815 geological map of Britain. |
Having founded the science of
stratigraphy,
William Smith went on to draw the first geological map of Britain,
and revolutionize the stuffy world of 19th Century
science. This was an extraordinary achievement for the self-taught
son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith.
Stratigraphy only gives you a relative
age, though. It tells you which rock is older or younger than
another, but it doesn’t tell you when they formed. Calculating
absolute ages is another challenge entirely. Geological aptitude was
in the family genes, thankfully, and the task was taken up by Smith’s
equally remarkable nephew, John Phillips,
the hero of our story.
Like the car park king, Phillips wasn't
born in Yorkshire, nor did he die here, but he did succeed with his
request to be interred here. He resides in York Cemetery, though
you'd be hard-pushed to find him without expert help. Luckily, I was
shown round last week by David Poole, of the York Cemetery Trust.
Via a few curiosities, including erroneously dated headstones (at
least two people are recorded as having died on April 31st),
David led me to Phillips' simple grave.
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| The grave of John and Anne Phillips in York Cemetery. |
Ostentatiousness is not a common
feature of the cemetery, but Phillips – who is buried with his
sister Anne – has a particularly unassuming memorial. This fits
well with contemporary accounts of his personality, but rather less
so with his status, for this is the man who helped found the BritishScience Association,
has craters on the Moon and Mars named after him, and who invented
geological time.
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| Map of the Planum Australe on Mars, showing Phillips Crater to the top-left. |
Being orphaned as a young child can
hardly be regarded as fortunate, but the deaths of his parents are
probably what inadvertently made Phillips the scientist he became.
He and Anne moved in with Smith, and living with his uncle exposed
Phillips to a new world of collecting, describing and classifying
rocks and fossils.
This was not a lucrative business for a
person of humble means, and in 1819, when Phillips was still a
teenager, Smith was thrown into a debtors' prison. Released shortly
afterwards, he fled London with his wife, nephew and niece, to try
his luck in Yorkshire and become, as Phillips later wrote, 'a
wanderer in the North of England.'
By 1824, Smith's luck had begun to
improve, and his wanderings brought him to York, to teach geology to
the recently established Yorkshire Philosophical Society.
Phillips came with him, and showed such ability that, shortly
afterwards, he was appointed the first keeper of the Yorkshire
Museum.
The museum had been established
primarily to conserve and display the revelatory fossils of KirkdaleCave,
and in 1830, to better show these collections off, it moved to its
present location in the abbey gardens. Phillips must have felt a
particular affinity with the new building, for it was built from
sandstone quarried at the Hackness Estate,
near Scarborough, where his uncle now lived.
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| The Yorkshire Museum, York. |
York was a hotbed of early–mid 19th
Century geological endeavour, and the year after the museum was
opened, YPS stalwart and local minister William Harcourt
established the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
The inaugural meeting was held in York, and Phillips became the
assistant secretary, a post he held for the next three decades.
Pushing the boundaries of accepted
wisdom is the only way to advance science, and Phillips, Harcourt and
their colleagues certainly did that. Phillips' 1829 book
Illustrations of the Geology of Yorkshire gave the first
comprehensive account of the county's rocks, with an accompanying
geological map and description of the fossils. In 1837, he stated
that the age of the Earth was 'too great to comprehend' and coined
the concept of geological time.
Four years later, Phillips argued that
there had been three great eras of life on our planet: the Palaeozoic
('old life'), Mesozoic ('middle life'), and Kainozoic ('new life'), the latter two of which were terms of his own invention.
The Palaeozoic was the age of fishes, the Mesozoic the age of reptiles, and the Kainozoic (now often spelled Cenozoic) the age of mammals, all of which were proven by the sequential
appearance of fossils in the rocks, and described using his uncle's
stratigraphic principles.
Unfortunately, one of the major
supporters of the museum and the YPS was Sir William Cockburn
(1773-1858), Dean of York, who was a devotedly scriptural*
interpreter of time. He disagreed vehemently with the notion of a
truly ancient Earth and, according to one 19th Century
report, took delight in 'insulting geologists from the pulpit of York
Minster'.
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| Are there any irreligious geologists in here? |
Phillips was a religious man, but his
studies of the rocks of Yorkshire had made him certain that a 6,000
year-old figure for the age of the Earth could not be literally true.
Knowing he had support from Harcourt, and many others, Phillips
decided the most sensible policy was to simply ignore Sir William.
He did not ignore his research though,
and carried on teaching, writing, and exploring Yorkshire's geology.
His success led to a series of prestigious posts, first at King's
College, London, then Trinity College, Dublin, and then the British
Geological Survey. Throughout this time, he kept his house in York,
only leaving the city in the mid-1850s when Oxford University offered
him a job.
Despite having no academic training, by
1860 Phillips had been appointed professor of geology there. That
same year, provoked by Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, with
which he disagreed, Phillips finally came up with a number for the
age of the Earth, based on how fast he thought sedimentary rocks
could have accumulated.
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| The Weald of South-east England, which Darwin suggested took 300 million years to form. |
Whether the recent death of Sir William
Cockburn had emboldened Phillips is unclear, but he suggested the
planet was between 38 and 96 million years old. Helpfully, this was
a time range broadly supported by the great physicist, William
Thomson (later Lord Kelvin),
who calculated similar figures using the rate at which it would have
taken a molten Earth to cool to its present temperature.
Many others disagreed, but Phillips was
a highly respected figure and few of his colleagues argued with the
broad idea that the Earth really had to be millions of years old.
When he died in 1874, scores of Phillips' fellow academics
accompanied his hearse to the station, and when it arrived in York,
the bells of the Minster rang for an hour and a half to lament his
passing.
Time waits for no man, of course.
Neither Phillips (nor indeed Lord Kelvin) knew about plate tectonics
or radioactivity, the discoveries of which would completely overhaul
our understanding of the Earth’s age. It is now known to be
between 4.4 and 4.6 billion years old (despite what some latter day
Cockburns might like to have you believe).
How a resurrected John Phillips would
react to being told the Earth is so staggeringly ancient, I don't
know, but I’m sure he’d be proud to see modern geochronology resting
on the foundations that he helped build.
The York museum man
who explored deep time may not be as well-known as he should be, but
his extraordinary contributions to science certainly are.
*Or
perhaps I should say Ussherian, since the Bible didn’t give an
exact number, and it was Archbishop James Ussher
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ussher)
who calculated that the Earth had been created on October 23rd,
4004 BC.
Further reading:
John Phillips and the Business ofVictorian Science, by Jack Morell (2005), is the only detailed biography of the man.
Rocky Road's online biography of John Phillips can be found here.
The Map That Changed The World, Simon Winchester's excellent biography of William Smith
is well worth a read.
John Phillips' "Illustrations of the Geology of
Yorkshire" are available online at the Oxford Digital Library.
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