1st Edition, complete set, of this legendary masterpiece written by an autodidact geologist: Eduard Suess.
Samuel Warren Carey begins his famous book ‘Expanding Earth’ (1976) with the following remarks:
‘'Das Antlitz der Erde, or The Face of the Earth was the title of the first great magnum opus on the gross surface of the Earth by Eduard Suess late last century…
Early science was egocentric, and uniformitarian, in that it assumed that things have always been much as we now see them, at least since the earliest beginning too hazed in ignorance to discuss. A century ago geologist believed that the mass, volume and diameter of the earth were fixed inheritances, that the axial obliquity to the ecliptic was immutable, that the earth was a drying body dissipating primal heat from a still molten core, the magnetic north was north and south was south, and always had been so, that physical constants had been and would remain constants, and that the continents were fixed permanent features which heaved and sagged from time to time against an ebbing and flooding sea. The geologist’s task was to describe and understands the details of a planet on which the really big things had happened eons ago as a prologue before his saga opened.
During the nineties Suess knew this had to be changed, for he recognized that 200 to 300 million years ago Africa, South America, India and Australia had been a super-continent" ...
S. W. Carey, Expanding Earth, 1976, p. 1
''Eduard Suess (20th August 1831–26th April 1914) is one of the greatest geologists of all time and he is probably the greatest geologist who ever lived...
If his name is no longer a household word, it is because his influence has been so enormous and so pervasive. Every geologist (and in the case of some terms such as Gondwana-Land and the Tethys much of the educated public) has heard the terms eustasy, Gondwana-Land, Tethys, foreland, listric fault, horst, graben, batholith, island arc, foredeep, Atlantic- and Pacific-type continental margins and many have heard of the Altaids, Sarmatian Stage, Angara-Land, Russian Platform (or Table), Laurentia, Caledonian Mountains, Variscan mountains, shield, back thrusting, forefolding, Zwischengebirge (betwixt mountains or median massifs in English translation).... We no longer reference Suess when we use these terms and most of us do not even know that he invented them. No modern textbook of geology that I know cites Suess in connexion with those terms, with the occasional exception of Gondwana-Land and the Tethys.
There is a huge number of active geologists in the world today, who use the terms listed above and yet has never even heard of Suess' name (that is why a large number uses his terms and concepts incorrectly: for example, many think Gondwana-Land pleonastic and drop the word wana from the name of the supercontinent thereby rendering its name and what it stands for infeli- citously. Others have used the term Tethys in the Caribbean, which is both untrue to Suess' meaning and both tectonically and palaeogeographically wrong even in the framework of plate tectonic reconstructions). Suess was also the one who discovered large strike-slip faults and recognised the tectonic importance of thrust faults in mountain-building on a global scale. Early in his career he became the founder of urban geology. We hardly ever think of him in these connexions any more, because they have become so commonplace. All earth scientists (palaeoclimatologists and palaeobiologists not excluded) are students of Suess as much as they are students of an Abraham Gottlob Werner or a Georges Cuvier, or a James Hutton or a Charles Lyell, or even a Darwin, but they are hardly conscious of it...
The success of Suess' synthesis on the continents is baffling. Almost everything he said about continental structure, including the nature of the rift valleys and continental margins, found themselves a ready home in plate tectonics, although much of what his fixist contractionist successors said had to be discarded.
I have often pointed out that Suess' great success was due to six factors:
1. His critical rationalist attitude; he never fell in love with any of this own theories and used the evidence to test them as mercilessly as possible.
2. His refusal to assume regularities on empirical data and his unwillingness to aban- don Lyell's way of looking at the planet. He always interpreted the past using present phenomena. The history of the earth was not uniformitarian in the sense of an absolutely steady- state earth, but it was uniformitarian in the sense that the processes have not changed. This is what Lyell also said, although he is often misrepresented by many of the modern historians of geology who are not geologists (and by a few who are, or used to be, geologists). Suess acknowledged that Nature was irregular and pretty much uniformitarian in its behaviour as far as geological phenomena are concerned.
3. His avoidance of becoming a specialist: he spanned the entire spectrum of the earth sciences. His research was not subject, but problem-driven. He got interested in problems and attacked them with whatever weaponary he could muster.
4. His incredible network of informants throughout the world (in this regard too his way of working resembled Darwin's). Suess embraced the entire planet from the first day of his entrance into geology. He knew that, however well-executed, local studies always have the potential of misleading the geologist concerning general problems. He was trilingual from childhood, but throughout his professional career he increased the number of languages he could read and speak, finally, at age 70, incorporating even Russian into his list of languages.
5. His command of the literature was amazing. He seems not to have neglected even the smallest brochure about an area or about a problem he was interested in. He read all the expe- dition repors about areas on which he was working, even if they contained only trifling amounts of geological data. Suess made sure that he had as complete a mental picture as possible of the areas he was studying. The way he describes landscapes he never saw is astonishing. I have wandered in many of the places he described: in Europe, in Asia, in Africa and in North America. I have always admired how accurate his depictions of those areas were and how much he was able to reflect the 'spirit' of the terrain.
6. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Suess was genuinely interested in knowing and understanding. He was an information absorber and a knowledge generater on a hitherto unseen scale in geology. He had no interest in being considered by others to be right or being regarded as an authority. He never fished for recognition, but was always hungry for knowledge.
He was a genuinely modest person; perhaps too modest. Had he been somewhat less modest, he might not have been forgotten to the extent that he has been, even in his own country. When the City of Vienna recently decided to change the name of the Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring, it simply renamed it as Universitätsring although Suess' last office is right on it. When the City was approached with an invitation to take part in the celebrations at the occasion of the centenary of the death of the master, its Cultural Office expressed little interest, although those who declined to be interested every day drink the water Suess provided for them.''
Celal Sengor, Eduard Suess and Global Tectonics; An Illustrated Short Guide
in Austrian Journal of Earth Sciences, Vol. 107/1, 2014, pp. 6-82
Vol. 1: 1st Ed., 1st print, 1883, Tempsky - Freytag, Prag - Leipzig, p. 778, 2 tabs, 4 maps, 8vo,
half-bound in green leather; gilded title on spine; Fine condition
Vol. 2: 1st Ed., 1st print, 1888, Tempsky - Freytag, Wien - Leipzig, p. 703, 1 tab., 2 maps, 8vo
bound in black leather, ornam. gilded covers, gilded leaves, ex libr. of Cape Town University
Arthur W. Rogers' personal copy (author of the first Geology of South Africa and Alexander
du Toit's friend). Fine condition.
Vol. 3/1: 1st Ed., 1901, Tempsky - Freytag, Wien - Leipzig, p. 508, 6 tabs, 1 map, 8vo, half-bound in
brown leather. Fine condition.
Vol. 3/2 (Index by Lukas Waagen, p. 158 incl.); 1st Ed.,1909, Tempsky - Freytag, Wien - Leipzig,
p. 789, 3 tabs., 5 maps, 8vo, half-bound in brown leather. Fine condition.