The 'Mining Chronicle' cartoons of Henry De la Beche FRS are a valuable resource in understanding nineteenth-century geology, as Virginia Mills explains.
91TV proudly celebrates its historic and ongoing role in setting the highest standards in scientific publishing, including the pioneering introduction of peer review for our flagship Philosophical Transactions journal in 1831.
For this article, however, I wanted to turn my attention to a much less formal side of science writing, inspired by a spoof newspaper I came across in our archive: The Mining Chronicle, penned by geologist and serial satirist (1796-1855).
The Mining Chronicle, by Henry De la Beche, 2 February 1837 ()
De la Beche’s most infamous satire critiqued the by fellow geologist , newly printed in 1830, which suggested that geological change was cyclical. A vocal naysayer of this proposition, De la Beche – like any good humourist – extrapolated this into the ridiculous. He cast Lyell as Professor Ichthyosaur, holding forth to an audience of the marine reptiles geologically recycled into learned students of human remains, now found only in a fossil state. It should be noted that scientific satire is not always a straightforward attack on individual scientists or on their principles – Lyell and De la Beche were sometimes antagonists but were also frequent correspondents engaged with one another’s ideas.
Ichthyosaurs attending a lecture on a fossilised human skull: lithograph by Henry De la Beche, 1830, after his drawing. Licence: . Source: , Reference 296i
The pages of The Mining Chronicle are found in the papers of the Fox family (). De la Beche’s friend (1789-1877) was a Quaker, another geologist, and a luminary of the mining industry, and it is this industry and Fox’s most famous experiments that were humorously reinterpreted by De la Beche and sent to Fox with comical illustrations.
Fox’s scientific papers establishing geothermal gradient (proving that temperature increases as you descend deeper into the Earth) were based on 40 years of precise measurements taken in deep Cornish mines. In The Mining Chronicle the gauge becomes miners lowered into a shaft – as human thermometers:
‘each miner being clothed in the same manner, the miners are then let down the shaft and they are told that when they feel they have too much clothing on, they are to take off as much as will render them comfortable … by these means it is found that the heat in mines gradually increases with the depth … We cannot sufficiently admire this beautiful experiment, proper repetition of which must lead to the most extended views.’
De la Beche’s cartoon is reminiscent of a ‘’, a lift designed by around this time in response to a prize offered for a better system of transporting miners in and out of deep mines. The prize was offered by the , established by the Fox family.
The front-page image from The Mining Chronicle is of an ‘experiment extraordinary’ in which miners are pulled from a ladder and stuck by their backsides to the side of the ‘Copper Bottom’ mineshaft. It is a pastiche of Fox’s work on magnetism, which was and developed in further papers.
In-jokes aside, there is another reading of these cartoons as reflecting a dismissive attitude to the practical, experimental approach to geology and to . In the mid-nineteenth century, geology was being established in a professional capacity and there were distinct approaches to its practice. The outcome-focused fieldwork of De la Beche and Fox, carried out directly in connection with industry and education, was a contrast to the general theorising of Lyell, as invoked clearly by the title of his magnum opus Principles of Geology, which sought to explain the formation of the Earth through natural laws. By contrast, De la Beche was the Director of the and author of .
Museum of Practical Geology, Jermyn Street, London. Source:
De la Beche had begun to receive income from inherited family plantations in Jamaica, worked by enslaved people, when he turned 21, setting him up with the means to pursue his geological career. On the abolition of slavery in the West Indian colonies in 1833, he received none of the compensation handed out as standard to the plantation owners, having already mortgaged the properties. This pushed him towards a career as a professional geologist to earn his living, leading to his appointment as director of the new Geological Survey of Great Britain in 1835.
This marked a new phase in De la Beche’s acceptance in London scientific circles. He and Fox both hailed from the West Country, and had faced initial rejection as ‘outsiders’ by the London-centric establishment. We can speculate that his cartoons to Fox reflect their shared experience of this dismissal, poking fun at their tribulations by using the absurd to expose such snobbery as ridiculous. De la Beche used similar tactics in a row with (1792-1871) over fossil dating, employing satire to .
Portrait of Henry De la Beche, 1848. Engraving by William Walker after Henry Pierce Bone ()
The Mining Chronicle also features a jibe at the solid carbonic acid engine – a speculative dry ice-powered machine that was often an explosive failure, and an expensive one too. (1769-1849) spent over £15,000 attempting to develop this alternative to the steam engine from 1823 to 1833 and is likely the target of De la Beche’s lampoon, an ad for an engineer skilled in its use from the ‘British-Irish-American-Australian-Polynesian Mining Association’. Fox took out patents on improvements to the steam engine but (as far as I could discover) did not investigate a carbon dioxide alternative, so this seems aimed at the potential rival technology and its proponents.
I’ll leave (almost) the last word to the self-endorsements of The Mining Chronicle, which invite the wrath of the labouring classes and gentleman scientists alike:
‘It is scarcely fair to the miner as it leaves nothing to be learned from him … decidedly the most important work since Newton’s Principia’.
It may not be the Principia, but The Mining Chronicle and the satirical cartoons of De la Beche and others are a valuable source in understanding how nineteenth-century science operated. While the editors of the Philosophical Transactions were formalising peer review in the 1830s, these private squibs give us an altogether different and very human insight into the practices of the newly dubbed ‘scientists’.
