geological societies

geological societies The variety of geological societies in various parts of the world is wide indeed, and the following notes provide no more than a few selected snapshots.

Societies concerned specifically with geology did not exist until early in the nineteenth century. The Geological Society of London, established in 1807—in the middle of the ‘Heroic Age of Geology’—was the first, and in many respects typical, providing a forum for scientific discussion, publishing journals, and maintaining a library. Its founder members included prominent members of the short-lived British Mineralogical Society (founded in 1799), who decided to transfer their activities to the more comprehensive science of geology. Before this, the emerging geological sciences in western Europe were under the umbrella of the general scientific societies and national academies, such as the Royal Society of London and the Académie des Sciences in Paris. In England, for example, the Royal Society had included geological topics in its meetings and publications (a paper on ‘a peculiar lead-ore of Germany’ appeared in the first issue of its Philosophical Transactions in the 1660s, and important papers on such subjects as volcanism and vertebrate palaeontology were to follow). The Society had also assembled a collection of geological specimens. The Society of Arts, founded in 1754, had promoted mineralogical maps and had supported William Smith financially. At a later stage, the Royal Institution (founded in 1791) also played a significant role. Outside London, geology featured in the activities of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which flourished in the 1770s. Further north, the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, founded in 1793, had concerned itself with geology, and especially with mining; and many geological papers appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

The Geological Society of London was granted a Royal Charter in 1825 (but apparently never sought royal patronage). Its founding members were a group of ‘gentleman amateurs’: the professionalization of science was, of course, a later development. Like other scientific societies of the time, its meetings were social as well as scientific occasions. Members would dine first and then, fortified with bumpers of claret, would move on to the reading and discussion of papers. (In later years the sequence was reversed. Whether the quality of the discussion was thereby enhanced or diminished remains a matter for speculation.) Until it was reconstructed in the 1970s the Society's meeting room was notable for the ‘parliamentary’ arrangement of its seating, with two sets of benches facing each other: an appropriate setting, perhaps, for the great debates that took place there in the nineteenth century. (Some of the Fellows of that time were in fact also Members of Parliament.)

The relatively small number of active members at that early period have been described as a family or an élite. If a family, it was one without women. Lady guests were first admitted to the Society's meetings in 1860, but this arrangement lasted only until 1862. The first paper by a female author ( Maria Graham) was published in 1824, but it was not until 1907 that women were admitted as Associates, and they had to wait until 1919 before they could become Fellows of the Society in their own right.

Publication of papers read before the Society began in 1811 with the first volume of the Transactions of the Geological Society, which appeared in quarto. The Proceedings followed in 1827 and the Quarterly Journal in 1845. Delays in publication and disappointing sales led to the abandonment of the Transactions, of which the last part appeared in 1856.

Like the Royal Society before it, the Geological Society built up a collection of mineral specimens and fossils. The expenses of curation, the need for space for the library, and the realization that it was no longer necessary for the Society to maintain a collection of its own, resulted in the disposal of the specimens to the Museum of Practical Geology in 1911.

The Geological Society of London did not remain alone on the stage for long. In the British Isles, the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall was founded in 1814, and its Transactions first appeared in 1818. That Society, which has concerned itself very much with mining and mineralogy, is still in existence and has retained its collections and museum. A singular, but ephemeral, development was the formation of the Wernerian Natural History Society of Edinburgh, which broke away from the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1808 but atrophied in the 1830s as the theories of A. G. Werner became discredited. (Most of the initial members of the Geological Society of London were in fact Wernerians, but the London Society did not have the fatal disadvantages of having nailed its colours to any particular doctrinal mast.)

Outside Britain, geological societies soon sprang up. Russia was quick off the mark. The foundations had been laid in the eighteenth century by Catherine the Great, who had invited many foreign scientists, including geologists, to visit Russia. The Mineralogical Society that was set up in St Petersburg in 1817 covered geology in the wider sense as well as mineralogy, and played an important part in the development of the geological sciences in Russia. In western Europe, the Société Géologique de France was founded in 1830 and the Deutsche Geologische Gesellschaft in 1848. Across the Atlantic, the Geological Society of America was founded in 1888. The pattern of the modern scientific society with its own publications and its own premises (in many instances housing a library as well as offices), with a salaried staff working under the direction of honorary officers and committees, was quickly established. Today there are geological societies in practically every developed country, and in most of the developing countries.

Developments in Russia and China were, not surprisingly, rather different. In 1918 Lenin took over the Academy of Sciences that had been set up by Peter the Great in 1725 and reorganized it in sections, of which a Geological– Geographical Section was one. Under Lenin's reorganization the Academy combined the functions of a scientific society with the direction of research, the emphasis being heavily on the latter activity. Centralization is also evident in China, where the learned scientific societies belong to the All-China Federation of Scientific Societies. The Geological Society of China, based on the Library of Geology in Beijing, was founded in 1922. The Chinese societies for palaeontology, oceanography and limnology, and geophysics are later creations, dating from the late 1940s.

Once what may be termed the general geological societies were established it was not long before more specialized ones appeared. An early arrival was the Palaeontographical Society, set up in 1847 to publish plates of fossils from British formations. The Palaeontological Association, with wider aims, did not emerge until over a century later, in 1957. Mineralogy provided a focus for numerous societies, some of which combined mineralogy with related subjects such as petrology. The Mineralogical Society was set up in London in 1876; the Société Minéralogique de France in 1878.

The applied aspects of the Earth sciences were another fruitful field, which flourished as the various areas of the subject became increasingly professional: the Royal Meteorological Society (1850) and the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy (1892) can be instanced here. The main development was in the twentieth century, when such areas as exploration geophysics and petroleum geology became of great economic importance. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists, founded in 1917, has in fact become the world's largest geological association.

The American Geophysical Union, founded in 1919, looked after the ‘pure’ aspects of geophysics and had established itself as the leading society in that field. The Society of Exploration Geophysicists, also based in the USA, was formed in 1930 and became numerically a very large society, even by American standards. In the UK, both the Geological Society and the Royal Astronomical Society (founded in 1820) had legitimate concerns with geophysics. The unseemly prospect of having two learned societies competing for the same territory was avoided by the formation in the late 1970s of the Joint Association for Geophysics, in which both societies participate.

In some countries geological societies (sensu lato) have taken on such functions as the validation of qualifications and the establishment of codes of conduct for their members. In the UK, for example, the Geological Society has since 1990, when it merged with the Institute of Geologists, functioned as a professional body as well as a learned society and has awarded the titled Chartered Geologist to Fellows with suitable qualifications and experience. Elsewhere, as for instance in France, specific organizations, such as the Union Française des Géologues and the corresponding French regional organizations, all formed in the 1960s, have been created for these purposes. Similar functions are performed in the USA by the American Institute of Professional Geologists (the AIPG).

A further twentieth-century development has been the formation of supranational bodies such as the European Union of Geosciences. Its biennial meetings in Strasbourg are major events in the geological calendar and the programmes include papers on most aspects of the Earth sciences, including palaeontology. On the professional side, there is the European Federation of Geologists, which was formed in 1980 with the object of facilitating free movement of professional geologists within the European Community. The Federation represents more than 70 000 geologists in sixteen countries and awards the title European Geologist (EurGeol) to members of national associations who have reached a high level of training and experience. It maintains working groups on education and training, environmental engineering, mineral resources, and land-use planning.

The final word on all these activities will perhaps one day be pronounced by the History of Earth Sciences Society, founded in 1981.

B. Wilcock