Geochemistry and the Biosphere. Vladimir I. Vernadsky
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and other elements needed by the plant.5
At the same time chemists did other studies on the minerals, waters, gases, and rocks surrounding us. Many scientists, especially chemists, considered mineralogy to be “the chemistry of the Earth’s crust,” as I. J. Bercelius called it. Gradually, precise research on the nature of minerals amassed an enormous amount of material. At the same time, by the end of the nineteenth century, the chemical analysis of rock formations, the research on waters, and the chemical study of fossil minerals gave a solid basis for empirical generalizations, for the creation of biochemistry.
Now we can see (it was remembered in 1931–1932) that different people understood the process being in progress quite clearly, and that the notion and the word “geochemistry” had already been created by that time. It was done in the 1830s and early 1840s by an original scientist from Basel – C. F. Schoenbein (1799–1868). His ideas were forgotten, but a historian of thought cannot forget the real influence of such an outstanding and brilliant personality as Schoenbein, who discovered ozone and worked in his own peculiar way. Schoenbein was not alone; he exerted a great influence on his surroundings. His articles and, as we can see now, his letters, are full of ideas and research that went beyond the limits of the science of his day; these were partly echoes of the past and partly anticipations of the future. Apparently, a friend of Schoenbein’s, M. Faraday (1771–1867), was not indifferent to his geochemical interests; his life was closely connected with that of Humphrey Davy whose significance for geochemistry I have already mentioned.
In 1842 Schoenbein wrote: “A few years ago I had already put forward the idea that we must have geochemistry before speaking about a real geological science that pays at least as much attention to the chemical nature of the matter comprising the Earth, and to their origin, as to the relative antiquity of these formations and the fossils of antediluvian plants and animals buried there. Of course, we can be sure that the geologists will at last cease to follow the trend they are supporting now. In order to broaden the limits of their science, they will have to look for new auxiliary means as soon as fossils fail to satisfy them. They will undoubtedly introduce mineralogy and chemistry into geology then. The time for this to happen does not seem to me very far from now….”6 Now these words seem prophetic to us. Schoenbein was mistaken regarding one point though: the time for his ideas came only in the twentieth century, decades after his death; then the word he had created was reborn and embodied by a new geological science.
By 1850, namely during the period of 1847–1849, brilliant and outstanding geochemical generalizations were published in scientific works that had collected an enormous amount of exact facts, which thereby entered general scientific thought and influenced it. This was done by three prominent naturalists who worked independently from each other, and whose works complement one another. None of them could cover the whole field of geochemistry by one synthesis but, as we see now, the results of their extended works which appeared almost simultaneously, presented a general outline for our new science. Nevertheless, their contemporaries did not see it – they noticed only contradictions and could not perceive them as part of one and the same whole.
These three naturalists were: Prof. K. Bischof (Bonn), who published in 1847 the first volume of his Lehrbuch der Chemischen und Physikalischen Geologie;7 Prof. Elie de Beaumont (Paris) who published in Bulletin de le Societe Geologique de Paris a brilliant memoir about volcanic phenomena,8 which was not understood by his contemporaries; and Prof. J. Breithaupt (Freiberg), who synthesized in 1849 the century-long work of the Freiberg mineralogy school in his book Paragenesis der Mineralen.9 In these works we already have clear and solid roots for the main data of geochemistry. If somebody at that time, for instance in 1850, could have embraced all that material at once, we would have had geochemistry in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it was formed only in the twentieth century.
No one was able to embrace all this material due to the peculiar atmosphere of geological work at that time. It was the time of the argument between neptunists and plutonists, which was dying away but had not been finished yet, and which had involved three generations of scientists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One party, the neptunists, considered surrounding terrestrial nature to have been created by the forces of water and formed at normal temperature and pressure. Life, which was closely connected to water, occupied its honorable place in the creation of nature. According to the neptunists, life was a great force, not an accidental phenomenon in the history of the planet. The other party – the plutonists – paid no special attention to the forces and phenomena of the Earth’s surface. They believed that the great forces inside the planet, which they thought to be still in a state of incandescent magma, were creating the nature of the Earth. Life, in all its variety and apparent importance, was just an insignificant peculiarity that did not reflect the main phenomena of the planet. The forces, whose activity manifested themselves in volcanoes, geysers, earthquakes, and thermal springs, formed all the principal features of the Earth’s surface and influenced the formation of mountains, rocks, and conglomerations of water and gases.
These two opposite concepts of our planet really concerned the main features of a worldview. The choice between them, once taken, led to opposite conclusions, which had great vital significance for the importance of life in the structure of the cosmos. The meaning of these old arguments, in the mental life of that time, can be understood from the creative work of the great naturalist and poet – a brilliant and passionate neptunist – J. W. Goethe. The second volume of his “Faust,” which embodied his lifelong efforts to express his concepts of the future and the tasks of human life, is permeated by reflections and echoes of this argument.
K. G. H. Bischof (1792–1870) became a neptunist having realized the significance of the Earth’s surface for the history of the planet through long speculation and experimentation; in the early years of his scientific life he had been a plutonist. This revolution in his views affected his whole work. He proved the importance of water, collected an enormous quantity of facts, gave clear pictures of the history of many chemical elements, and eventually showed that in the phenomena of inert matter, their history could be reduced to cyclical processes that, in the first part of his paper, he considered a typical feature of organogenic elements. For organogenic elements this picture had already been given by Dumas, Boussingault, and Liebig. In this connection, the phenomena of life in the chemical processes of the Earth were put at the forefront in his paper. The influence of his work was immense not only on the continent, but also in English-speaking countries; Bischof himself was connected with English scientific circles.
Unlike Bischof, Elie de Beaumont (1798–1874) was a plutonist, who put forward that the connections between chemical elements and the regulations of their locations are consequences of magmatic and volcanic processes. For a long time, the brilliant work of Elie de Beaumont attracted little attention outside France, partly because of the domination of neptunic ideas and partly due to his unsuccessful hypotheses about the formation of mountain chains. But long after his death the truth of his generalizations was confirmed by exact observation, and became an indispensable part of geochemical work.
The exact empiricist, J. Breithaupt (1791–1873), also followed an independent route. Using the experience of mining, he put forward correlations between elements that are situated together – and which went beyond the schemes of pure neptunists and plutonists. The processes studied by Breithaupt did not fit into their simple schemes, and he discovered new phenomena of our planet that had been one-sidedly described both by Elie de Beaumont and by Bischof. Breithaupt was not alone; exact empiricists, observers of ore deposits amongst whom were both neptunists and plutonists, were following the same route at that time. The most outstanding investigations were those of J. Durocher (1817–1860), J. Fournet (1801–1870) and W. Hennwood. New properties of water were found, and the influence of the high temperature of lower geospheres became clear. The investigation of these processes from the standpoint of ore deposits – mainly metals – inevitably made the scientists study the history of chemical elements in the Earth’s crust.
As both plutonic and neptunic schemes were disappearing, the scientific work of the second half of the nineteenth century continued in all these directions. Geology soon left the old schemes and covered the complexity of nature with more diverse theories. At the same time, the chemical mind was distracted from geochemical problems; in the history of chemical