Geology and Religious Sentiment: The Effect of Geological Discoveries on English Society and Literature between 1829 and 1859

Geology and Religious Sentiment: The Effect of Geological Discoveries on English Society and Literature between 1829 and 1859, byj. M. I. Klaver; pp. xvi + 215. Leiden: Brill, 1997, Nlg. 133.00, $83.25.

If the late-nineteenth-century, post-Darwinian era was the Age of Biology, then the end of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century was the Age of Geology. As Jan M. Ivo Klaver demonstrates in Geology and Religious Sentiment, the burgeoning science of geology posed revolutionary questions about the history and formation of the earth and the accuracy of the Mosaic account of Creation. Many clergymen and intellectuals in England (and on the Continent, although Klaver concentrates on the former) were avid followers of geological theories despite the theological implications. The gradual recognition of the earth's extreme antiquity was a major paradigm shift for science and the humanities alike, and it is one that has been receiving ever more attention in the wake of such authors as Marjorie Nicolson, Roy Porter, and Nicholas Rupke. Klaver's Geology and Religious Sentiment is a fine and well-researched addition to the study of the exchanges between early geology and the humanities.

Klaver focuses specifically on geology's implications for religion as they were perceived in England during the years between the publication of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830), and the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). The first date in Klaver's title, 1829, refers to the year of publication of Andrew Ure's New System of Geology, in which the...