ABSTRACT

About the mid-nineteenth century it is sometimes difficult to decide whether a geologist belongs to the school of Ramsay, Lyell, or Hopkins. The sea formed the basis of all three theories and the sole distinguishing principle concerned the manner in which the sea acted or had acted upon the land. It was easy for geologists to put forward theories which embraced the ideas of all three ‘marine’ schools. The view of Hopkins and of the structuralists generally differed fundamentally from that of the other two schools in that it considered the present topography to be an event of the past, over and done with, whereas both Ramsay and Lyell followed Hutton in viewing topography as a temporary stage in a series of stages. Ramsay and the marine planationists in turn differed from Lyell and the marine dissectionists in some essentials. Ramsay’s physical machine, as we have just discussed, involved a stable or sinking landmass across which the main body of the sea was massively and slowly slicing off an almost level plane, leaving protuberances upstanding where islands had never been submerged beneath the waves. In Lyell’s conceptions, the sea actually cut out the inequalities or patterns in the rocks by the usual process of eroding cliffs and inlets and islands, and these as the landmass was raised above sea level stood out as escarpments, valleys and hills.