The Bottom Line
- Precise scholarship leavened with soft wit
- Illustrations chosen and reproduced well
- Many ideas for visits and pilgrimages
- Readers should be geology lovers for best results
- Emphasis on Trinity College is either colorful charm or homeboy tubthumping
- Portrait on back cover is not the author but Arthur Holmes
Description
- A study of deep time with the focus on geology
- Places the age question in the changing contexts of scientific history
- Well balanced between personalities and ideas
Guide Review - Wyse Jackson--The Chronologers' Quest: The Search for the Age of the Earth
Martin Gorst's "Measuring Eternity" treads similar ground, but where Gorst treats the history of the entire universe, Wyse Jackson has a more modest subject in this deeply sourced account of the ages of our planet. And make no mistake, the churchmen and the geologists have given Earth many different ages from the scriptural 6000 years to the 7-billion-plus years once proposed by sedimentologists—uncannily like the ancient Hindus.
Wyse Jackson enlivens his account with homely biographical details, more like the curious stones favored by curators than the factoids Gorst, a TV producer, offers. (In the case of the geologist Rev. William Buckland, for instance, Wyse Jackson notes his studies of fossil turds or coprolites; Gorst tells us he cooked mice.) So many of these are related to Trinity College Dublin that it amounts to a running gag.
The chronologers' story ranges across many nations, but Wyse Jackson digs deepest in the British Isles where, more than in any other country, geology arose and thrived. "The Chronologers' Quest" is not for idle readers but is best suited to students of geologists as well as of rocks. For me this book's most lasting value is to whet my appetite for the museums of Britain where relics of geology's originators, from their gravesites to their fossil collections and papers, are cherished.
