Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER FOUR
Charles Lyell,
Historian of Time's Cycle
The Case of Professor Ichthyosaurus
Few scientists are so full of fun and color that their anecdotes outlive their
ideas. Yet professors of geology still tell stories about the Reverend William
Buckland (1784-1856) who ended his career as the prestigious Dean of
Westminster, but began as England's first great academic geologist, reader at
Oxford, and teacher of Charles Lyell, among others. Remember the time
Buckland identified the ever-liquefying "martyr's blood" on the pavement of
a continental cathedral as bat urine—by the most direct method of kneeling
down and having a lick. And, oh yes, what about the day that he served
crocodile meat for breakfast at the deanery, after horse's tongue the night
before. Even the ever-genial Charles Darwin professed a distaste for
Buckland, "who though very good humored and good- natured seemed to me
a vulgar and almost coarse man. He was incited more by a craving for
notoriety, which sometimes made him act like a buffoon, than by a love of
science."
When Buckland was commissioned to write one of the Bridge-water
Treatises "on the power, wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the
creation," he devoted a chapter to the ichthyosaur as a primary illustration of
divine benevolence. He presented all the conventional arguments for
inferring God's handiwork from the anatomical perfection of this oddly
fishlike reptile—"these devia-
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