Published in: History of Geology, v. 1, no. 1, 1982, p. 29-31

Fenneman And Bucher: The Early Maturity Of Geological Science

Gerald Prager

Texaco, USA

Offshore Exploration Division

New Orleans, Louisiana 70160

ABSTRACT

The time that elapsed between the arrival of Nevin Fenneman at the University of Cincinnati in 1907 and the departure of Walter Bucher from Cincinnati to Columbia University in 1940 marks a transitional period of intense and fruitful activity in the history of geology. By the 1930's terminology had become largely standardized, various statistical and instrumental techniques were widely and increasingly available, and enough data had been accumulated to permit the development of more sophisticated syntheses of geological concepts.

Fenneman and Bucher figured significantly in this early flowering of geological synthesis. There were many parallels in their careers: both were born in northern Ohio towns, both served as chairman of the Geology and Geography Department at the University of Cincinnati and as president of the Geological Society of America, and both gained international stature and wide acclaim. The reasons for their success were also similar, inasmuch as both were innovative synthesizers who, during the 1930's, wrote highly influential texts in their respective fields.

In some ways, the thinking of those times was surprisingly modern, and some of the problems addressed by Fenneman and Bucher remain unresolved today. As men whose ideas both molded and were molded by their age, their careers offer instructive insights for a pivotal period in the development of the geological sciences.

INTRODUCTION

Few departments of geology have had the good fortune to assemble, at one time, a group of geologists as distinguished as that at the University of Cincinnati during much of the first half of this century. Professors such as Behre, von Schlichten, Rich, and Barbour helped raise the department's reputation to the first rank. Two men in particular, however, stand out as major influences in the geologic community of the time: Nevin M. Fenneman and Walter H. Bucher. In fact, the development of geology at Cincinnati traces back to the' arrival of Fenneman in 1907, and his building of the department from a one-man, two-course operation to a major center of teaching and research in little over a decade. The arrival of Walter Bucher in 1913, shortly after obtaining his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg, marked the beg inning of a remarkably productive association between the two.

BACKGROUNDS

There are some striking parallels in the lives and careers of the two men, despite the 23-year difference in their ages. Both were born in northern Ohio towns, both were descendants of 19th -century German immigrants, both became department heads at Cincinnati and presidents of the Geological Society of America, both were unusually dedicated and capable educators, both authored widely read textbooks, and both attained an international reputation in their fields.

There were some significant differences between them, of course, notably in certain aspects of their personalities. Fenneman was a demanding taskmaster and a rigorous logician who expected a high level of intellectual and emotional maturity from his students. He expected even more from his faculty, including more or less frequent strokes of genius. He instilled awe (and occasionally fear) in both groups, and the eminence of the department under his guidance attests to his efficiency in having his high standards met.

Fortunately for all concerned, he had qualities that tempered the sterner traits. His numerous nontechnical writings reveal an unrelenting dry wit and convey a strong sense of compassion and understanding. Popularity, as the word is generally used, was never an objective for him, but numerous anecdotes that have survived the years attest to his attainment of a respectful variant of popularity despite himself. One of these concerns a young female student who had the temerity (in view of Fenneman's well known rather puritanical views on dress) to show up for a field trip in shorts. There was a long and painful silence, marked by a cessation of oxygen intake among the assembled, while Fenneman eyed her narrowly. Finally he looked up and stated, “You have pretty knees.” The field trip carried on. Bucher was a different sort of man: affable, outwardly more easygoing, more worldly and less rigidly idealistic; of unquestioned integrity but with an understanding of the sort of compromise that is desirable in dealing with university administrations. It is said that Fenneman's personal sense of integrity constrained him to return some small portion of the department's financial allotment each year, unspent, to the university. Each year, the administration 's predictable response was reflected in the subsequent year 's departmental budget. It is likely that the department is still recovering from the principled restraint of its former head. Bucher, fortunately, was a man of more highly developed political instincts.

CONTRIBUTIONS

In one especially important respect, concerning scientific outlook and philosophy, Fenneman and Bucher were entirely similar: an overriding effort to generalize from data to discover central, integrating concepts. This characteristic is of great interest to the history of geology, because of its effect on the thinking of an important period. As Bucher (1933) stated it:

This, then, is the essence of all geologic work: ... not to be satisfied with the accumulation of facts alone, but to draw from them, at every opportunity, all possible generalizations. In other words, to search for the general properties, the 'specific laws' in the reality with which we deal, and ultimately for such 'general laws' as can be safely formulated.

A few years earlier, Fenneman (1929) had written: There is a place for exact statement of details of concrete facts, sometimes by way of illustration, sometimes to support an argument, but all such specified details taken together are only a drop in the bucket. The original number of observations is: almost infinite. They mean little until generalized. Science, discussion, and argument deal with generalization.

The outlook expressed by these statements was a keynote of the vigorous growth of geologic thinking in the early 1930's. Although previous attempts at large scale synthesis had been carried out before, notably those of Edward Suess in the decades around the turn of the century, and of course the early drift ideas of Wegener shortly thereafter, the 1930's offered theretofore unique opportunities for creative geoscientists. Decades of field work and laboratory studies had yielded a data base from which generalization could be realistically and convincingly done, and advances in such basic areas as physical chemistry and atomic physics had given this data base new perspectives.

Although both Fenneman and Bucher consistently aimed for generalization from data and the formulation of integrating concepts, Bucher is probably better known for it. Much of Bucher's reputation in this regard results from his book entitled: The Deformation of the Earth's Crust. An Inductive Approach ·to the Problems of Diastrophism, published 1n 1933. The core of this work was the distillation of the results of many decades of field work by many fine geologists in orogenic belts throughout the world to derive a relatively small number of sets of common qualities which we would today call elements of tectonic style. The various tectonic styles were then linked by Bucher to the mechanics of deformation by what he called laws - “laws of crustal deformation.”

Bucher’s approach met with some scepticism at that time and since, and his sensitivity to that scepticism is shown in his presidential address to the Ohio Academy of Science in 1936. In this address he defended his use of the term “laws,” and went on to make it clear that he intended his set of laws not as an immutable end in itself, but rather as a stage in an ongoing process, from which further refinement and abstraction might even lead eventually to elegant mathematical expression. In this respect Bucher's thinking was well in advance of his time, and he would have been comfortable in the vanguard of today's quantitative plate tectonics theory (although neither he nor Fenneman were able to accept continental drift as explicated in the 1930's).

Fenneman has more the reputation of a scholarly compiler than a synthesist of concepts, although he was also strongly motivated toward guiding principles and the structural coherence of data. The preface of one of his most widely read works, Physiography of Eastern United States, published in 1938, is revealing:

It has been the hope of the author to produce something more than a mere compilation from the vast field of geologic literature … The aim has been to establish order rather than to describe the United States. It seems regrettable that so large a proportion of the total text should be occupied by descriptive material ... The ultimate justification of any description except the briefest is its evidential value in the interpretation of physiographic history.

It is highly possible, in fact, that Fenneman may have provided much of the inspiration for Bucher's better-known orientation toward synthesis. Fenneman's great influence on his faculty and his strong role in Bucher's development as a geologist, attested to by Bucher himself (Walters, 1945), suggest this. Their essential Similarity of views is reflected in numerous quotations, well illustrated by several showing their insistence on basing any meaningful synthesis on a wealth of hard empirical fact. In Bucher's above-mentioned address (1936) we read:

... uncontrolled speculation still too often takes the place of the systematic searching for an adequate foundation for understanding which is needed … Speculation that does not lead directly to further search for facts and laws is idle. The joy of understanding arises from reasoning, not guessing; from the purposeful grouping of general facts not from the mere play of the imagination. This may be compared to a passage on examinations in Fenneman's “Notes to Advanced Students” (circa 1929): “Both professors and students ... may not carry in mind all the details and illustrations mentioned … but this does not apply to principles. Even with the latter, it must be remembered that unless we know a lot of concrete facts, generalizations are not worth very much.” It is evident that the impulse to synthesize was tempered by a determination to ensure that the synthesis was realistic and informed by the available evidence. For both men, an invalid generalization was considered as pernicious as the mere recitation of detail was barren.

It is apparent that the objections of Bucher and Fenneman to the ideas of continental drift in their earlier form did not result from a lack of creativity, but were based on the fact that, no matter how inspired, the development of those ideas had not at that time conformed to the process of rigorous scientific induction from empirical data that they demanded. It was their mode of thinking, as much as any specific conclusion it may have produced, that had such an influence on the geologists of the period. The 1930's were ripe for such an influence -- they were a time of ferment of ideas and a perceived need for integrating concepts that marked the beginning of a new maturity in the history of geology. The kind of disciplined synthesis sought by Fenneman and Bucher was recognized as the way to further advancement of a science that was hungry for such advancement and its attendant heightened respectability. They were in the right place at the right time, with the right scientific outlook to maximize their influence; in a sense, they were exemplars of the period in being both its products and its leaders.

After a period of slower development in the 1940's and early 1950's, the thrust that had gained momentum in the 1930's combined with an access to more data (especially oceanographic) to produce the major syntheses related to plate tectonics theory. Bucher himself seemed to sense this when he wrote, in 1936: “But in the larger aspects of geology the final synthesis which is to give us a satisfying, logically consistent and coherent picture of the earth and the forces that have formed and are forming it, is a hope for the future. It will be brought about by a growth of a tendency which is taking form now.” Fenneman and Bucher find a place in the hi story of geology as contributors to the initiation of methodologies that opened the way to plate tectonics and beyond.

EPILOGUE

Nevin Fenneman retired in 1937 after 30 years as head of the department, to be succeeded in that capacity by Bucher. Even in retirement he remained very active, both at the University and in such organizations as Cincinnati's Literary Club. He died in 1945, and since Bucher was no longer there, his death brought a memorable era in Cincinnati geology to an end.

Walter Bucher left Cincinnati for Columbia University in 1940. He served as department head at Columbia and gained an impressive array of honors in his career there, including the American Geophysical Union's Bowie Medal, the Deutsche Geologische Gesellschaft's Buch Medal, and the Geological Society of America's Penrose Medal. Like Fenneman, he remained active after retirement, and as late as 1963 published an article in Science on the origin of cryptoexplosion structures that listed, with his usual rigorous logical clarity, objections to meteoric impact origin, which have never yet been adequately addressed.

Although he lived the rest of his life in the New York area and died there, in 1965, Walter Bucher always remembered that the most creative phase of his career had been in Cincinnati, and he always thought of Cincinnati as home. Ultimately, he came home: he is buried a short distance from the University of Cincinnati, in Spring Grove Cemetery. This leads us to the final, odd parallelism in the lives of these two remarkable men, for Nevin Fenneman, whose productive career was spent in Cincinnati, who maintained his firmest ties there all his life, and who died there is buried -- in New York.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Much of the material used here was generously furnished by Prof. Richard Durrell of the Geology Department of the University of Cincinnati. His help is greatly appreciated.

REFERENCES

BUCHER, W. H., 1933, The Deformation of the Earth's Crust. An Inductive Approach to the Problems of Diastrophism. Princeton University Press, Princeton. N.J., 518 p.

BUCHER, W. H., 1936, The Concept of Natural Law in Geology: Ohio Journal of Science, v. 36, no. 4, p. 193-194.

BUCHER, W. H., 1963, Cryptoexplosion Structures Caused from Without or from Within the Earth?: Am. Jour. Sci., v. 261, p. 597-649.

FENNEMAN, N. M., circa 1929, Notes to Advanced Students: Unpub. Essays, 19 p.

FENNEMAN, N. M., 1938, Physiography of Eastern United States. McGraw Hill, New York, N.Y., 714 p.

WALTERS, RAYMOND, 1945, Obituary, Nevin M. Fenneman: Science, v. 102, no. 2641, p. 142-143.