The German Genius

at the end of the seventeenth century, but were outgunned when the Germans set up enterprises at Vienna, Höchst, and Nymphenberg, not to mention Berlin and Meissen. It was soon understood that kaolin, China clay, was the crucial ingredient, and so began the search for deposits of this new precious substance. By 1710, the Meissen works, founded by Friedrich August I of Saxony, was manufacturing porcelain, helped by the discoveries of J. F. Böttger (1682–1719), the first director, who showed that certain fluxes (alabaster, marble, or feldspar) made kaolin fusible. This discovery remained a closely guarded state secret, despite no fewer than 30,000 experiments being mounted. 4 In this way, mining and chemistry became intimately related and helped determine the pre-eminence of German mineralogy.
    The German universities, which had a bias in favor of the humanities, were not regarded as the best places to encourage very technical matters, and as the eighteenth century wore on, the princes began to realize that technical institutes were called for. The mining academy at Freiberg was established in 1765 and Werner was appointed ten years later.
    Today, Werner is best known for his advocacy of the “Neptunist” version of the earth’s history, contrasted with the “Vulcanist” or “Plutonist” account, rival versions that were intimately bound up with religious beliefs. In the Neptunist account, the surface of the earth was formed by rocks deposited out of a giant primeval ocean, which had originally covered the earth. There were serious problems with this theory. It did not even begin to explain why some types of rock that, according to Werner, were more recent than other types, were often found situated below them. Still more problematic was the sheer totality of water that would have been needed to hold all the land of the earth in solution. It would have to have been a flood many miles deep, and in turn provoked an even bigger question: what had happened to all that water when it receded?
    The chief rival to Werner, though nowhere near as influential to begin with, was the Scotsman James Hutton, and his theory of Vulcanism, named for the god of fire. 5 Hutton looked around him and concluded that weathering and erosion are even today laying down a fine silt of sandstone, limestone, clay, and pebbles on the bed of the ocean near river estuaries. He then asked what could have transformed these silts into the solid rock that is everywhere about us: his answer was that it could only have been heat. Where did this heat come from? Hutton believed it came from inside the earth and was expressed by volcanic action.
    There was no question but that Hutton’s Vulcanism fitted the facts better than Werner’s Neptunism. Many critics resisted it, however, because Vulcanism implied vast tracts of geological time, “inconceivable ages that went far beyond what anyone had envisaged before.”
    Recent scholarship has credited Werner with a second and more important idea, one that has fundamentally shaped modern geology and, unlike Neptunism, stood the test of time. This is the linking of rock stratification and elapsed time. The most influential view to begin with was that advocated by Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811), who identified primary, secondary, and tertiary sequences. On this account, all mountains were constructed in the same way. There were crystalline rocks that formed the center—the core—and went all the way up to their peaks. On their flanks were sedimentary rocks (limestones, marls, and shales), and finally, on the outside, lower down, looser deposits containing organic remains. These ideas were built on in Germany by J. C. Fuchsel, who identified specific stratigraphic formations, each layer having a characteristic fossil content. From this grew the idea of “formation suites,” layers in predictable sequences that were similar from location to location. 6
    According to modern scholars such as Alex Ospovat at Oklahoma State University, it was Werner, living in Germany amid the rise of historicism and of evolutionism, who grasped that the essential difference between rocks was not mineralogy or chemistry but the “mode and time of formation,” that rock formation was the basic process in geology. 7 Werner understood that there were only twenty to thirty of these “universal formations” and that they therefore reduced the chaos of mineralogy to “very distinct and determinable” proportions. It was