Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

SCIENCEthe historical sciences, how to derive the immense, and apparendyoften capricious variety of individuals in real life, from the operation ofinvariant general laws.The pioneer philologists did not in fact advance very far in explaininglinguistic change, though Bopp himself already propounded a theoryof the origin of grammatical inflections. But they did establish for theIndo-European languages something like a table of genealogy. Theymade a number of inductive generalizations about the relative rates ofchange in different linguistic elements, and a few historical generalizationsof very wide scope, such as 'Grimm's Law' (which showed that allTeutonic languages underwent certain consonantal shifts, and, severalcenturies later, a section of Teutonic dialects underwent another similarshift). However, throughout these pioneering explorations, they neverdoubted that the evolution of language was not merely a matter ofestablishing chronological sequence or recording variation, but oughtto be explained by general linguistic laws, analogous to scientific ones.IVThe biologists and geologists were less lucky. For them too history wasthe major issue, though the study of the earth was (through mining)closely linked with chemistry and the study of life (through medicine)closely with physiology, and (through the crucial discovery that thechemical elements in living things were the same as those in inorganicnature) with chemistry. But for the geologist in any case the mostobvious problems involved history—for instance, how to explain thedistribution of land and water, the mountains, and above all thestrongly marked strata.If the historical problem of geology was how to explain the evolutionof the earth, that of biology was the double one of how toexplain the growth of the individual living thing from egg, seed orspore, and how to explain the evolution of species. Both were linked bythe visible evidence of the fossils, of which a particular selection wereto be found in each rock-stratum and not in others. An English drainageengineer, William Smith, discovered in the 1790s that the historicsuccession of strata could be most conveniently dated by their characteristicfossils, thus illuminating both sciences through the down-toearthoperations of the Industrial Revolution.The problem had been so obvious that attempts to provide theoriesof evolution had already been made; notably, for the world of animals,by the stylish but sometimes slapdash zoologist Comte de Buffon (LesEpoques de la Nature, 1778). In the decade of the French Revolution287