Chambers (see portrait) liked to push good old Scots and new Victorian self-improvement in his publications, and, as a young, struggling freelance journalist, Hugh Miller for one was grateful for his encouragement. Although Chambers avoided Millerís religious admixture, he was keen on science. He became something of an amateur geologist, though no doubt it helped to own the firm which published Ancient Sea-Margins in 1848. This book is only briefly mentioned in Gordon Daviesí classic history of geomorphology, The Earth in Decay. No wonder! Most geologists had yet to accept Louis Agassizís newfangled idea of a huge glacial icecap, and stuck to the old understanding that the Pleistocene landforms of Scotland were formed by the erosive effects of marine inundations by an iceberg-laden sea. 

Chambers, with glorious overenthusiasm, counted no less than 57 recognisable marine erosional terraces in the British Isles up to 1340 feet above sea level. He went on to assert the ëperfect equabilityí of these levels not just across Britain but globally, invoking purely sea-level changes without any role for land uplift and sinking, and he ruled out differential warpage of the land. As Miller pointed out gently but firmly in his review in The Witness (reprinted as Miller, 1891), there was plenty of evidence for such differential warpage. And why were there no fossil sea-caves behind supposed raised beaches other than the lowest (i. e. that above the present-day shore), even in hard rocks such as the ëgranite gneissí of the Sutors of Cromarty? Chambers had already been roughly handled at the British Association meeting in the previous year when he presented his ideas - but the scientists had other reasons not to be pleased with him (Secord 2000).

The Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh seems to have been where Auld Reekieís scientists met most easily - people such as Hugh Miller, Charles Peach, and Edward Forbes, and youngsters such as Archibald Geikie. Chambersís Presidential address in November 1856 stressed the importance of the Society as a place to encourage learners and novices, and the exclusion of selfish and controversial motives (Chambers [1857], p. 175):

... I consider myself here chiefly in the capacity of a learner. I come here because I love science, and, from sympathy, like to be among its cultivators; also with the view of communicating any novelty in nature that may occur to my observation; but even in a greater degree, because I feel myself to be but slightly informed on most subjects, and wish to be more largely and more accurately informed on all. 

In Vestiges, Chambers tackled ëlife, the Universe and everythingí, from the creation of the Solar System onwards right down to biological and human evolution. This was a simplicistic, progressionist view of evolution in which the cosmos was programmed to unfold without further divine intervention, much as Babbageís Engine could be - though to speak of it ëbooting upí might be a little too anachronistic! He left many hostages to critics in his errors, and laid bets on some promising scientific horses that promptly dropped dead, the cold fusions of their day - my favourite being the electrically generated mites. But these are the occupational hazards of any science writer, and it is missing the point to dismiss it as scientifically fourth-rate. It was a popular book, superbly written with just the right degree of speculation. 

Chambers thus let the evolutionary cat out of the bag, updating Lamarckian evolution to suit the Victorian middle classes, who found themselves presented as the acme of creation. The anti-evolutionists were horrified, especially when Vestiges came out in a cheap edition. Some, especially aristocratic Tories, opposed evolution as a nasty French democratic innovation that heralded the collapse of society. Others such as Miller found it incompatible with their deeply held religious views, leading not only to social collapse but also personal damnation, though Miller was also very unhappy with the science. He got in some telling blows in books such as the pointedly titled Footprints of the Creator (1849) by asking, for example, why his (apparently) early Old Red Sandstone fishes didnít fit well with Chambersís model.

Vestiges may be almost forgotten today, but it inspired Alfred Russel Wallace to go and hunt the evidence for evolution in tropical jungles, whence one day he wrote the famous letter which levered Charles Darwin out of the closet with On the Origin of Species. In no way did Vestiges have the depth and scientific credibility of that book, but it had gone before, drawing much waiting flak and getting the world used to the idea of evolution, however superficially, from Punch cartoons to Tennysonian poetry. It was Chambers, too, who persuaded Thomas Henry Huxley to change his mind about attending the famous meeting in the Oxford University Museum where he, apocryphally, debated with Bishop Wilberforce the relative merits of apes and Anglican ecclesiastics as grandparents.

With Vestiges, Chambers, that astute journalist, had smelt a huge story about which the public wanted to know, but which the scientists didnít have the guts to tackle in the face of opposition. If I were to draw a nice neat Victorian moral, it would be that science isnít just what happens in laboratories, field parties and learned journals, and that we are wise today to put great emphasis on the public understanding of science.

References and further reading

Chambers, R. 1848. Ancient Sea-Margins, as memorials of changes in the relative level of sea and land. W. & R. Chambers.

Chambers, R. [1857]. [Opening address.] Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh, Vol. 1, pp. 171-175.

Chambers, R. 1994 [1844]. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and other writings [with introduction by J. A. Secord]. University of Chicago Press. 

Chambers, W. 1872. Memoir of William and Robert Chambers (later editions after about 1884 or so include the Vestiges story). 

Miller, H. 1891. Ancient sea-margins, pp. 125-133 in Edinburgh and its neighbourhood, geological and historical; with the geology of the Bass Rock. Nimmo, Hay and Mitchell.

Secord, J. A. 2000. Victorian Sensation. The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. University of Chicago Press.

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Figure 1: The house in Peebles where the Chambers brothers were born (from Chambers, 1872)

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Figure 2: Portrait of Robert Chambers
(from Chambers, 1872)

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Figure 3: Chambers's enthusiastic identification of old marine terraces in Edinburgh from the shore right up to the Castle!
(from Chambers, 1848)

 

Figure 4: Still more terraces, this time in the Eildon Hills
(from Chambers, 1848)

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