Sherlock on the Rocks

The great detective Sherlock Holmes is the geologist's exemplar

By Andrew Alden

It has been well over a century since the world—the readers of Beeton's Christmas Annual, anyway—first met the remarkable character of Sherlock Holmes. I reread that first novel, "A Study in Scarlet," recently, and it struck me how profoundly Holmes is like the geologist.

We see the great detective in our mind's eye with his magnifying glass and deerstalker cap, but in "A Study in Scarlet" Holmes first appears in a medical laboratory, his hands burned and mottled from working with acids. Dr. John Watson arranges to share rooms with him and, one day, makes a list of his puzzling roommate's set of skills. One item on the list is "Knowledge of Geology.—Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them."

Real geologists have the same habit, of course, and can hardly turn it off. John McPhee writes, in his great Basin and Range, of a Western movie that had a scene with a villain tumbling down a dusty hillside. The filmmaker got calls from one geologist after another, asking where that hillside full of clinoptilolite was located. (My own version of this is trying to identify the localities where MTV videos are shot.)

Holmes, upon meeting Watson for the first time, astounds him by saying, "How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." Later, Holmes recounts the facts he had observed—the war-wounded doctor's deep tan, nervous exhaustion, and so on—and the chain of inference he followed: "Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan. The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished."

The things that geologists have learned are also astonishing—where to drill for oil, why the sea is deep and the mountains high, where humankind came from and where the dinosaurs went—but those things too are the result of trained observations and rigorous logic. And just as Watson was at first put off by his friend's seeming arrogance, so are Biblical literalists deeply threatened by the facts the Earth has taught us (I've given this rant before).

Holmes goes with Watson to visit a murder scene, but on the way there he chats about violins, not the crime: "No data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence," he says. "It biases the judgment." And so it is in Earth science, too.

Holmes, of course, gets his man. We then have a long and melodramatic flashback to the mountainous American West, where the murderer's story began, full of the sort of erroneous history that's exciting to read if you don't know the real facts. Finally, back at 221B Baker Street, Holmes tells Watson something about his method of reasoning:

"In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically."

"I confess," said I, "that I do not quite follow you."

"I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically."

The geologist, too, seeks to explain the steps that led up to today's landscape. Some geologists even specialize in Holmes's sort of forensics, studying sedimentary evidence from crime scenes. Sherlock is their patron saint.

It is curious that part of "A Study in Scarlet" occurs in the desert of Utah. The American West not only is a great stage for historical fiction, but it's also the country where the science of geology made enormous advances a century ago. That spacious land with its vast rock exposures was a mecca for geologists from Europe as well as America, and just as the cowboys and the range entered the world's storybook—even detective fiction—so did the scientific discoveries from the land of basins and ranges enter the world's textbooks and journals.

The literary style of the Sherlock Holmes stories is growing quaint with the passage of time, but the character of Holmes remains strikingly modern. It is no wonder; his type is still hard at work today.

Don't just sit there, go read some Sherlock Holmes yourself! On second thought, stay right there and visit this site at the Baker Street Connection, which has all of those great stories waiting for you. Or for the mother lode of Holmesiana, visit the Sherlockian Holmepage.