modern geognosy, prairie talk borrowed from von Humboldt

NEW FIND

Alexander von Humbodt's Cosmos is the source for the dialogue on geology in the August 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border":

C.  "... I have found in the rugged hill-side food for thought at least;—the impression of a sea-shell in primitive limestone;—this, at the top, or rather at the base of the Rock Mountains, (for this South Pass, 60 miles wide, has not the characteristics of a mountain, is merely the highest steppe of the continent,) is a fruitful subject for paleontological research, if such be not without the pale of your practical system .'"

F.  "Bah! your modern geognosy is a humbug! or, too deep at least, for a wandering dragoon. Now. would you go about determining the age of the formation from your knowledge of the shell? or give it physiological gradation from your profound knowledge of superposition of strata?"

C. "The former, if I only knew it. You will allow me at least, on your own recommendation to note the fact in my journal?"

F.  "Of course; but with becoming modesty. It is enough to ruffle one, to have such a long word thrust at him, of a pleasant summer evening, and a thousand miles from a library."

C. "But, good heavens! do not condemn a word for its length. Paleontology is an almost poetical triumph, which throws an attractive grace over the sterility of geognostic investigations and symbols on the human tombs, which throw beams of startling light over the obscurity of fabulous antiquity,—so when we discover the traces or remains of existing, or the extinct life of the old world, their natural tombs—the fossil rocks—are monuments on which Time thus records their relative ages. It is a beautiful chronometry of the earth's surface!"

F.  "Allow me then a few years of devotion to the study of the analysis of primitive zoology and botany, and I will then, if possible, give you my speculations with all the boldness of poetical science upon the formation and age of the continent—all by the light of your chronological, fossiliferous, infernal shell!"

-- Southern Literary Messenger 18 - August 1852

The dialogue above appears with interesting revisions in the 1857 book version Scenes and Adventures in the Army (359-60), where the sentence with "chronometry" is deleted.  Both magazine and book versions derive from Humboldt, as shown below in the relevant passages from

Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos (New York:  Harper & Brothers, 1850):

"Modern geognosy, the mineral portion of terrestrial physics, has made no slight advance in having investigated this connection of phenomena."(203)

"The order of succession, and the relative age of the different formations, may be recognized by the superposition of the sedimentary, metamorphic, and conglomerate strata; by the nature of the formations traversed by the erupted masses, and —with the greatest certainty—by the presence of organic remains and the differences of their structure. The application of botanical and zoological evidence to determine the relative age of rocks—this chronometry of the earth's surface, which was already present to the lofty mind of Hooke—indicates one of the most glorious epochs of modern geognosy, which has finally, on the Continent at least, been emancipated from the sway of Semitic doctrines. Palaeontological investigations have imparted a vivifying breath of grace and diversity to the science of the solid structure of the earth."

"The fossiliferous strata contain, entombed within them, the floras and faunas of by gone ages. We ascend the stream of time, as in our study of the relations of superposition we descend deeper and deeper through the different strata, in which lies revealed before us a past world of animal and vegetable life."  (270)

"The dependence of physiological gradation upon the age of the formations...is most regularly manifested in vertebrated animals."  (273)

At sea chronometry is done by marine chronometer, a clock that navigators use to keep precise time--and, as the editors of the Longman critical edition of Moby-Dick point out, "a major metaphor in Pierre" (117).