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 elements much attention was being paid to properties that did not seem to manifest themselves in the processes of our planet. The idea of a chemical element became more abstract, it seemed that there was an insurmountable barrier between chemical and geological sciences. This was clearly shown in the different classifications of sciences that were so numerous at that time. The state of mind of researchers was unfavorable for creating geochemistry.
The generalizing and deep view of chemistry that brilliantly combined the traditions of Rouelle, Lavoisier, Davy, and Bercelius, and that was interpreted by such an original and powerful mind as D. I. Mendeleyev in his Foundations of Chemistry, stood absolutely alone. In Foundations of Chemistry, the problems of geochemistry and space chemistry were not only fully described, but were also often dominant. As always with D. I. Mendeleyev, it was not a repetition of someone else’s materials, but it contained something new, something found by his brilliant personality, grasped by his shrewd mind.
In general, neither in geochemistry nor in chemistry did a favorable environment exist for the development of geochemical problems into an integral, separate, and scientifically based new discipline. The soil had not been ready, and it was slowly being prepared for decades, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. There were three changes in the ideas about the environment that provided a solid basis for this new science in the twentieth century.
In the second half of the nineteenth century our notions about the chemistry of the cosmos began to change. The unity of its chemical composition, which – as we could see – had been clear to Huygens in the seventeenth century and had been confirmed by the analysis of meteorites, received a new and solid affirmation in 1859 with the discovery of spectral analysis by G. R. Kirchhoff (1824–1887) and R. Bunsen (1811–1899).10 This discovery expanded the human horizon enormously. In fact, it was one of the deepest insights into the structure of matter; spectral analysis proved the chemical unity of the universe. But at the same time, thanks mainly to spectral analysis and to the development of our notions about the complicated unity of matter expressed in its atomic aspect, which led to a deeper theoretical understanding of the great scientific generalization of the Periodic System of elements, thanks to all this, the very notion of the chemical unity of the world became enormously deeper and wider.
On the one hand it became clear that the atoms of our planet were present in different states. It was also necessary to admit the existence of certain states of atoms (i.e., chemical elements of the universe) that cannot exist on planets including the Earth.11 On the other hand a question arose whether the atomic manifestation of matter – its chemical composition – corresponds to the dominating mass of matter dispersed throughout the time and space of reality. The spectral analysis in the works of Kirchhoff and Bunsen clearly and definitely confirmed the existence of chemical elements in dispersion – all matter of the Earth being permeated by them. For some elements such as sodium this was already understood by H. Davy and then by others, but this notion entered the general scientific mind only after the works of Kirchhoff and Bunsen. Nevertheless, the idea of its importance
