TUOMEY'S GEOLOGY OF SOUTH CAROLINA – THE PAST IS KEY TO THE PRESENT

This November will mark the 170^th anniversary of Michael Tuomey submitting his Report on the Geology of South Carolina, though it was not published for two more years. Several contributors acknowledged in this work were avid amateurs rather than professional geologists, though the difference was not as strong then as it is now. A postscript reported that the state Committee on publication decided that the plates were "not essential". Tuomey's note resonates with those of us today who sometimes struggle with tight funding or dissenting editors. Without the plates, much of the Coastal Plain stratigraphy and paleontology was made useless because many species were left as nude names. The Plio-Pleistocene plates were published later in Tuomey and Holmes, but the older faunas remain difficult to decipher. New studies on these deposits provide some guesses, but unless plates or specimens survived the Civil War and other vicissitudes, the species cannot be definitely identified.

 

Tuomey also included a discussion on the harmonization of geology and the Bible. Although the issue is also familiar today, the positions under consideration were quite different. Imposing modern categories of creationism or evolution on the 1800’s is misleading. Knowledge of the development of geology in the 1700's and 1800's is necessary to understand what Tuomey argued for and against. He recognized the sequential appearance of different types of living things, without accepting Lamarckian evolution (the main version of evolution available in the 1840's). Tuomey saw geology as supporting the Bible once the error of an unduly literalistic idea of the timeframe is corrected. In turn, a better understanding of Tuomey's context may help to address some of the modern areas of tension between religions and geology.