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level in the scheme - note that he failed to recognise that basalt was a
product of volcanic activity. Werner imagined that these rocks were
deposited during a global flood event, and the primitive rocks formed a
basal blanket over the whole globe, on which the sediments of the
later periods were subsequently deposited. As the rocks built up in the
oceans some successions broke through the water and became the
continental masses. Werner's Kurze Klassifikation is important as it
was an attempt to provide an integrated classification of all the rock
types known on the Earth's crust, and it is, surprisingly, the only such
scheme to come from Werner himself.
As Ospovat has noted, Werner's scheme was widely 'adopted,
adapted and sometimes just copied.' Werner's influence in geological
matters was widespread thanks to his teaching role in Freiburg. Many
of his students became notable - no, this is too weak a description -
geological giants in their own right. They included Friedrich Wilhelm
Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the traveller and
author of the geological and geographical classic Kosmos, Christian
Leopold von Buch (1774-1853), who formulated a theory on uplift and
the formation of volcanic craters and who edited the first geological
map of Germany, and Ernst Friedrich von Schlotheim, who had a
glittering palaeontological career in Russia. In Britain his greatest
disciple was Robert Jameson (1774-1854) who returned to Edinburgh
to the Chair of Natural History in 1804 and soon afterwards estab-
lished the Wernerian Natural History Society in that city.
While Werner did not discuss the actual age of the Earth,
he noted in 1786 'the enormously great time spans which perhaps
far exceed our imagination'. This comment remained unpublished
for nearly two hundred years until 1971 when it appeared in a
volume that contained a classification of various rocks, a manuscript
classification brought to light and edited by Ospovat. Werner verbal-
ised the great difficulty that many educated people faced at the time:
from the evidence of the rocks geological time was vast, but still
biblical and religious dogma played its part in keeping at bay the
widespread public proliferation of such thoughts.
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