ABSTRACT
In his Oxford period Phillips continued to believe that geology needed the aid of the collateral sciences o f not just zoology, botany, and chemistry but also natural philosophy and astronomy. His first lecture course at Oxford began with an account of general data furnished by chemical, mechanical, and astronomical science regarding the mass o f the earth. In his first presidential address to the Geological Society in 1859 he asserted that some o f geology’s highest generalisations were based on astronomy. As president o f the British Association in 1865 he revealed his view o f the natural world as a unified totality: ‘the greater our progress in the study o f the economy of nature, the more she unveils herself as one vast whole; one comprehensive plan; one universal rule, in a yet unexhausted series o f individual peculiarities. Such is the aspect o f this moving, working, living system o f force and law’.1 Such sentiments underlied his belief that the study o f the earth’s past overlapped with terrestrial and cosmical physics, a view not acted on or held by any other o f that small band called heroic geologists. In mid-Victorian Britain Phillips was a unique geologist in that he worked on terrestrial magnetism, meteorology, and especially astronomy, in which he focussed on the physical features o f the moon, Mars, and the sun. He hoped that the observation o f these features would illuminate the history o f the earth and of the solar system. His astronomical contemporaries thought he was an experienced productive observer: in the 1860s one feature o f the moon and two o f Mars were named after him. He brought to astronomy a combination o f skills which in the 1850s and 1860s was unusual among geologists. Like several o f them he was an excellent draughtsman, he had long experience o f detailed surveying and mapping, and his visual imagination enabled him to represent three-dimensional objects and phenomena in both two and three dimensions. But he was unique among geologists in two respects. He was adept in using measuring instruments in geology and physical science, some o f which he had devised and made himself. One o f these, his self-registering maximum thermometer, was commercially successful in the 1860s. Phillips him self enjoyed a long friendship with the well-known telescope-maker, Thomas Cooke, who in 1862 provided for him a suitable instrument for astronomical research, at a time when most geologists used only the established instruments of field work and a few petrologists were beginning to exploit the microscope.
