In 1668, Dr. Thomas Burnet printed his _Theoria Telluris Sacra_,
“an eloquent physico-theological romance,” says Sir David Brewster,
“which was to a certain extent adopted even by Newton, Burnet’s
friend. Abandoning, as some of the fathers had done, the hexaëmeron,
or six days of Moses, as a physical reality, and having no knowledge
of geological phenomena, he gives loose reins to his imagination,
combining passages of Scripture with those of ancient authors, and
presumptuously describing the future catastrophes to which the earth is
to be exposed.” Previous to its publication, Burnet presented a copy
of his book to Newton, and requested his opinion of the theory which
it propounded. Newton took “exceptions to particular passages,” and
a correspondence ensued. In one of Newton’s letters he treats of the
formation of the earth, and the other planets, out of a general chaos
of the figure assumed by the earth,--of the length of the primitive
days,--of the formation of hills and seas, and of the creation of the
two ruling lights as the result of the clearing up of the atmosphere.
He considers the account of the creation in Genesis as adapted to the
judgment of the vulgar. “Had Moses,” he says, “described the processes
of creation as distinctly as they were in themselves, he would have
made the narrative tedious and confused amongst the vulgar, and become
a philosopher more than a prophet.” After referring to several “causes
of meteors, such as the breaking out of vapours from below, before
the earth was well hardened, the settling and shrinking of the whole
globe after the upper regions or surface began to be hard,” Newton
closes his letter with an apology for being tedious, which, he says,
“he has the more reason to do, as he has not set down any thing he has
well considered, or will undertake to defend.”--See the Letter in the
Appendix to _Sir D. Brewster’s Life of Newton_, vol. ii.
The primitive condition of the earth, and its preparation for
man, was a subject of general speculation at the close of the
seventeenth century. Leibnitz, like his great rival (Newton),
attempted to explain the formation of the earth, and of the
different substances which composed it; and he had the advantage
of possessing some knowledge of geological phenomena: the earth
he regarded as having been originally a burning mass, whose
temperature gradually diminished till the vapours were condensed
into a universal ocean, which covered the highest mountains, and
gradually flowed into vacuities and subterranean cavities produced
by the consolidation of the earth’s crust. He regarded fossils
as the real remains of plants and animals which had been buried
in the strata; and, in speculating on the formation of mineral
substances, he speaks of crystals as the geometry of inanimate
nature.--_Brewster’s Life of Newton_, vol. ii. p. 100, note. (See
also “The Age of the Globe,” in _Things not generally Known_, p.
13.)
“THE FATHER OF ENGLISH GEOLOGY.”
In 1769 was born, the son of a yeoman of Oxfordshire, William
Smith. When a boy he delighted to wander in the fields, collecting
“pound-stones” (_Echinites_), “pundibs” (_Terebratulæ_), and other
stony curiosities; and receiving little education beyond what he taught
himself, he learned nothing of classics but the name. Grown to be a
man, he became a land-surveyor and civil engineer, and was much engaged
in constructing canals. While thus occupied, he observed that all the
rocky masses forming the substrata of the country were gently inclined
to the east and south-east,--that the red sandstones and marls above
the _coal-measures_ passed below the beds provincially termed lias-clay
and limestone--that these again passed underneath the sands, yellow
limestone, and clays that form the table-land of the Coteswold Hills;
while they in turn plunged beneath the great escarpment of chalk that
runs from the coast of Dorsetshire northward to the Yorkshire shores
of the German Ocean. He further observed that each formation of clay,
sand, or limestone, held to a very great extent its own peculiar suite
of fossils. The “snake-stones” (_Ammonites_) of the lias were different
in form and ornament from those of the inferior oolite; and the
shells of the latter, again, differed from those of the Oxford clay,
Cornbrash, and Kimmeridge clay. Pondering much on these things, he
came to the then unheard-of conclusion that each formation had been in
its turn a sea-bottom, in the sediments of which lived and died marine
animals now extinct, many specially distinctive of their own epochs in
time.
Here indeed was a discovery,--made, too, by a man utterly unknown to
the scientific world, and having no pretension to scientific lore.
“Strata Smith’s” find was unheeded for many a long year; but at length
the first geologists of the day learned from the land-surveyor that
superposition of strata is inseparably connected with the succession
of life in time. Hooke’s grand vision was at length realised, and it
was indeed possible “to build up a terrestrial chronology from rotten
shells” imbedded in the rocks. Meanwhile he had constructed the first
geological map of England, which has served as a basis for geological
maps of all other parts of the world. William Smith was now presented
by the Geological Society with the Wollaston Medal, and hailed as “the
Father of English Geology.” He died in 1840. Till the manner as well
as the fact of the first appearance of successive forms of life shall
be solved, it is not easy to surmise how any discovery can be made in
geology equal in value to that which we owe to the genius of William
Smith.--_Saturday Review_, No. 140.
DR. BUCKLAND’s GEOLOGICAL LABOURS.
Sir Henry De la Beche, in his Anniversary Address to the Geological
Society in 1848, on presenting the Wollaston Medal to Dr. Buckland,
felicitously observed:
It may not be generally known that, while yet a child, at your
native town, Axminster in Devonshire, ammonites, obtained by your
father from the lime quarries in the neighbourhood, were presented
to your attention. As a scholar at Winchester, the chalk, with its
flints, was brought under your observation, and there it was that
your collections in natural history first began. Removed to Oxford,
as a scholar of Corpus Christi College, the future teacher of
geology in that University was fortunate in meeting with congenial
tastes in our colleague Mr. W. J. Broderip, then a student at Oriel
College. It was during your walks together to Shotover Hill, when
his knowledge of conchology was so valuable to you, enabling you
to distinguish the shells of the Oxford oolite, that you laid the
foundation for those field-lectures, forming part of your course
of geology at Oxford, which no one is likely to forget who has
been so fortunate at any time as to have attended them. The fruits
of your walks with Mr. Broderip formed the nucleus of that great
collection, more especially remarkable for the organic remains
it contains, which, after the labours of forty years, you have
presented to the Geological Museum at Oxford, in grave recollection
of the aid which the endowments of that University, and the leisure
of its vacations, had afforded you for extensive travelling during
a residence at Oxford of nearly forty-five years.