The Story of the Earth

My mom got me a couple really neat old books. One was written by T.H. Huxley aka "Darwin's Bulldog", and the other by a geology professor from The King's College in London called "The Story of the Earth". The latter was written and published in 1895. Quite an interesting read!
Being a post-tectonics geologist, it is almost impossible for me to comprehend what geology was before anyone knew that the crust of the earth was broken up into plates and moved around forming mountain chains and building and breaking apart continents. I mean how else can you explain the Himalayas?
In some ways the geologists of 100 years ago understood our field so well, to the point that their "laws" of original horizontality, cross cutting, and uniformity are still true today.
But then I read about their explanation for how mountain chains form, or the mechanisms for deformation and I'm struck by how wrong they were. (Not that I think this is a fault of theirs. Certainly not. They were doing the best they could with the information and technology they had.) They cited everything from shrinking and expanding rock (somehow due to infiltration of water) to tides to explain volcanoes and mountain building!
It's amazing that geology has come so far so quickly. And I am glad I got to be in on it on this side of the "Tectonic Revolution". It's been really neat to look at a subject I love so dearly through they eyes of an expert in the field that lived over one hundred years ago. It's may not be scientifically accurate, but it's still such an enlightening window into my chosen field. It's an early chapter from a story about a group of scientists searching for the truth about the earth. Maybe they didn't quite make it there in 1895, but those that came after them kept searching, and thinking and trying, and eventually they (we) figured it out. As Newton (Sir Issac, not Wayne or Cam) famously said "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."