From Geology to Geography and the Human Sciences

It is not surprising that the Church perceived Galileo’s teachings to be a threat. This split between religion and new sciences was not absolute, however. The modern science of geology, for example, emerged out of a long debate that juxtaposed evidence from religious texts on the one hand, and data gathered by those who made observations about the physical landscape of the earth’s surface. The debate that fostered this discussion revolved around a fundamental question that had long provoked theologians: How old was the earth?

In 1654, James Ussher (1581–1656), the archbishop of Armagh in Ireland, published an account of the earth’s creation, using both biblical and secular sources. Ussher declared that the world had been created on Saturday, October 22, 4004 B.C.E. Often ridiculed as an extreme example of biblical literalism, his estimate differed little from other writers at the time. Ussher’s chronology simply tried to construct a time line for world history that combined observations of the appearance of comets, volcanic eruptions, and solar and lunar eclipses alongside sacred dates. His decision to treat the Bible as one source among many was in fact a significant departure from a purely religious approach, and his desire to divide the history of the earth into “epochs” or “eras” marked an important step toward a more historical approach to the earth’s past.

ANALYZING PRIMARY SOURCES

Galileo on Nature, Scripture, and Truth

One of the clearest statements of Galileo’s convictions about religion and science comes from his 1615 letter to the grand duchess Christina, the mother of Galileo’s patron, Cosimo II de’ Medici, and a powerful figure in her own right. Galileo knew that others objected to his work. The Church had warned him that Copernicanism was inaccurate and impious, that it could be disproved scientifically, and that it contradicted the authority of those who interpreted the Bible. Thoroughly dependent on the Medicis for support, he wrote to the grand duchess to explain his position. In this section of the letter, Galileo sets out his understanding of the parallel but distinct roles of the Church and natural philosophers. He walks a fine line between acknowledging the authority of the Church and standing firm in his convictions.

Possibly because they are disturbed by the known truth of other propositions of mine which differ from those commonly held, and therefore mistrusting their defense so long as they confine themselves to the field of philosophy, these men have resolved to fabricate a shield for their fallacies out of the mantle of pretended religion and the authority of the Bible. . . .

Copernicus never discusses matters of religion or faith, nor does he use arguments that depend in any way upon the authority of sacred writings which he might have interpreted erroneously. He stands always upon physical conclusions pertaining to the celestial motions, and deals with them by astronomical and geometrical demonstrations, founded primarily upon sense experiences and very exact observations. He did not ignore the Bible, but he knew very well that if his doctrine were proved, then it could not contradict the Scriptures when they were rightly understood. . . .

I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense-experiences and necessary demonstrations; for the holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word, the former as the dictate of the Holy Ghost and the latter as the observant executrix of God’s commands. It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men. For that reason it appears that nothing physical which sense-experience sets before our eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us, ought to be called in question (much less condemned) upon the testimony of biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words. For the Bible is not chained in every expression to conditions as strict as those which govern all physical effects; nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible. . . .

Source: Galileo, “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, ed. Stillman Drake (Garden City, NY: 1957), pp. 177–83.

Questions for Analysis

  1. How does Galileo deal with the contradictions between the evidence of his senses and biblical teachings?
  2. For Galileo, what is the relationship between God, man, and nature?
  3. Why did Galileo need to defend his views in a letter to Christina de’ Medici?
An illustration depicts a collection of fossils and specimens inside a room.
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A seventeenth century curiosity collection filled with fossils, minerals, bones, preserved animals, weapons, and tools from non-European cultures hanging from the ceiling and the walls and sitting on shelves. In the center of the room is a sign in Latin.

CABINET OF CURIOSITIES. This illustration was the frontispiece of a book on natural history by a Danish doctor, Ole Wurm, who taught medicine, Latin, and Greek in Copenhagen after studying in Marburg. Wurm was a celebrated collector of objects, ranging from fossils and specimens of animals to artifacts of ethnographic interest. Such collections provided the principal data for those engaged in debates about the origins of fossils and the age of the earth.

Ussher, like other early seventeenth-century writers, assumed that the earth’s history and human history covered roughly the same length of time: following the story of Genesis, they assumed that humans appeared on earth soon after its creation. They also assumed that the stories told in the Bible—including the story of Noah and the Flood—had some basis in historical fact. A German Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), suggested that the Flood story could be analyzed historically, and he attempted to calculate the amount of water that would have been required to cover the earth’s mountains. He assumed that the physical landscape of the earth would have been transformed as the floodwaters drained away. Only later did natural philosophers realize the vast expanse of earth’s history that predated human society, but they were already beginning to imagine that this history was accessible to human knowledge through observation.

Such speculation was fueled by natural philosophers who wondered about the fossils found in the European countryside. As interest in natural philosophy developed, scholars assembled collections of what they called “curiosities”—forms of animals and plants found in stones and seashells collected on mountaintops far from the ocean, as well as the bones of animals both recognizable and unknown. A Danish physician, Niels Stensen (Latin name: Nicolas Steno), compiled this evidence in ways that lay the foundation for the science of geology. In 1667 Steno demonstrated that shark’s teeth, obtained from a recently caught animal, were structurally similar, though smaller in size, to petrified teeth encased in stone on land far from the sea. Steno believed that the physical landscape of Tuscany (where he was living at the time) constituted a visible record of a historical sequence that could be reconstructed through observation. He noted a tendency of broken hillsides to reveal strata of different stones, as if one layer had been laid down over the previous one. An English natural philosopher, Robert Hooke, writing at the same time in England, came to the same conclusion, asserting that the rocks and fossils were “documents” to be read in the book of nature.

ANALYZING PRIMARY SOURCES

Human Diversity during the Scientific Revolution

François Bernier (1620–1688) was a French doctor who served as a physician at the court of the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb in Agra, a city in northern India, for eight years before returning to Paris and reporting on Indian society to the French royal government. In this essay, published in the journal of the French Academy of Sciences, he suggested that the human populations of the earth could be subdivided into four or five “races” or “species.” Historians now recognize this as the first attempt to define the word race in European history according to the standards of scientific practice that were emerging in Europe in the seventeenth century. Although this use of the term did not immediately replace older usages of race to describe the lineage of prized animals or aristocratic families, Bernier’s idea was subsequently picked up by other authors who helped to develop the human and social sciences during the Enlightenment (see Ch. 18).

Up to now, geographers have only divided the Earth by different countries or regions [. . .]. Observations that I have made about men during my long and frequent Voyages have led me to divide the Earth differently. Although men are almost all different from one another according to the exterior form of the body and the face, [. . .] I have nevertheless remarked that there are above all four or five Species or Races of men whose differences are so notable that they may be used to create a new division of the Earth.

I include in the first species [the residents of] France, Spain, England, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and generally all of Europe. One could also add a small part of Africa, including the Realms of Fez and Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, up to the Nile, and also a good portion of Asia, such as the Empire of the Great Sultan [the Ottoman Empire] with the three Arabys, all of Persia, the Mughal Empire, the Kingdom of Golconda, that of Visapur, the Maldives and a part of the Kingdoms of Arakan, Pegu, Siam, Sumatra, Banten and Borneo. Because though the Egyptians, for example, and the Indians are very black, or rather brown, this color is only accidental to them, coming only from their exposure to the Sun; since those who protect themselves from it, and who are not obliged to expose themselves are not more black than many Spaniards. It is true that the majority of Indians have something rather different from us in the shape of the face and in their color which tends toward yellow, but that does not seem sufficient to make of them a particular species, because we would then also have to do the same with Spaniards, Germans, and several other Peoples of Europe.

In the second species I put all of Africa except for the coasts that I have already mentioned. We call them a different species because of (1) their thick lips and their flat nose, few of them possessing an aquiline nose and lips of a medium thickness. (2) their blackness which is essential to them, and which is not caused by the Sun, as some think, because when one transports a black man and a black woman to a colder country their children remain black unless they marry with a white woman. We must thus see the cause [of their color] in some particular aspect of their bodies, in their semen or blood, which are nevertheless the same color as everywhere else. (3) Their skin which is oily, smooth, and polished except in places that are roasted by the Sun. (4) Their thin beards. (5) Their hair which is not really hair but rather a kind of wool [. . .] and finally their whiter teeth, their tongues and the inside of their mouths which are as red as Coral.

The third species includes a part of the Kingdoms of Arakan and of Siam, of the Island of Sumatra and Borneo, the Philippines, Japan, and the Kingdom of Pegu, Tonkin, Cochinchina, China, Tartary which lies between China, the Ganges, and Muscovy, Uzbekistan, Turkistan [. . .]. The inhabitants of all these countries are veritably white; but they have large shoulders, flat faces, little flat noses, small eyes like pigs, and very thin beards.

The Lapps compose the 4th species. These are little people with thick legs, large shoulders, short necks, a face I cannot describe except as extremely frightening, and which resembles a Bear. I have only seen two in Danzig, but according to the portraits I have seen, and the description given to me by people who have been in this country, they are nasty animals.

As for the Americans, they are in truth in large part olive, and their faces are shaped in a different manner than our own, but I do not find here a large enough difference to call them a particular species or different from our own.

Source: François Bernier, “Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races d’hommes qui l’habitent, envoyée par un fameux Voyageur à M. l’Abbé de la ***** à peu près en ces termes,” Journal des sçavans, 24 April 1684, pp. 133–36. Translated from the original by Joshua Cole.

Questions for Analysis

  1. Does Bernier offer a clear definition of what he means by “race” in these passages?
  2. Who does Bernier include alongside the Europeans in his first racial category? What distinguishes this first group from Africans or Asians? Is he consistent in his arguments about the connections between skin color and his racial classifications?
  3. Bernier admitted that he had only seen two individual Lapps. In what way can we understand his claim that the Lapps constitute a separate “race” as a “scientific” argument? What does his essay reveal about the kinds of arguments that were acceptable in a scientific publication in seventeenth-century France?

These new secular claims about the history of the earth and the origins of fossils were soon followed by claims about the secular history of human populations. In 1684, a doctor named François Bernier published an article based on observations he made during twelve years of travel to Egypt, the Arabian peninsula, and northern India (see Analyzing Primary Sources on pages 558–59). This article included the first scientific use of the term race to describe distinct groups among human populations according to their physical characteristics. Bernier’s article proposed a “New Division of the Earth” into four or five “races of men”: Europeans, Africans, Asians, and the Samoed people of Lapland (a region of northern Finland). Bernier’s criteria for distinguishing between races were subjective, but he presented these new categories of people as a scientific innovation. In the next century, Bernier’s use of “race” as a synonym for species was picked up by other influential authors (see Ch. 18). The word race in French had already been in use for over 200 years to describe desirable traits in breeding animals, and it was also adopted to speak about the perceived superior qualities of high-ranking aristocratic families, but it did not refer to a division of humans into distinct groups.

The line from Steno and Hooke to modern geological research is direct, but the connections between Bernier’s work to modern claims about the existence of human “races” is more complicated. Nevertheless, the natural philosophers’ decision to extend the realm of their scientific observations from material objects (stones, planets, and stars) to human beings was significant. The evolution of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century indicated new possibilities for a scientific understanding of the terrestrial environment, but it also contained powerful ideas about the allegedly “natural” division of humanity into distinct groups, with different capacities and roles.

A painting titled Voyage de Francois Bernier by Paul Maret.
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An engraving depicts the court of the Mughal empire in North India. The King sits on his throne in his court at the center with few members in front of him. Two elephants with howdah and a few members are on horseback in front of his court. The text ‘La Cour deGrand Mogol’ is on the top right of the painting.

THE COURT OF THE GREAT MUGHAL. French traveler François Bernier served as a court physician in Agra, a city in northern India, during his long travels through the Middle East and South Asia. Upon his return to France, Bernier wrote an essay claiming that the human populations of the world could be divided into four or five races, the first use of this term in European scientific literature to divide humanity into distinct groups arranged by their physical characteristics.

Glossary

James Ussher
(1581–1656) An Irish archbishop who attempted to reconcile natural and biblical events in a later discredited chronology of the world.
Nicolas Steno
Danish scientist whose studies of rock layers and fossils was foundational to the development of geological sciences.