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knee in front of Queen Victoria receiving a knighthood. He was later
appointed Director of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom,
served as President of both the Geological Society and the Royal
Geographical Society, and as The Times for 13 January 1866 reported,
was 'granted the dignity of a Baronet'.
THE ICING ON THE LAYER-CAKE
This summary of the naming of the geological Periods concludes with
a brief dip into the background of the terminology of the successions
that ice the geological 'layer-cake' - the loose unconsolidated sedi-
ments and soil that smother much of the underlying bedrock.
In 1829 Quaternary was used by Jules Pierre Fran¸ois Stanislas
Desnoyers (1800-1887) in its modern sense: that is, it included all the
unconsolidated material deposited during the last ice age (the
Pleistocene Epoch - a term first devised by Lyell in 1839, but restricted
by Edward Forbes (1815-1854) to the glacial episode) and during the
time following it to the present day (the Holocene Epoch - a term first
used by Paul Gervais in 1867, and synonymous with the 'Recent' of
Forbes). Desnoyers was a French geologist and historian and a
co-founder of the Geological Society of France in 1830.
In 1823 William Buckland had published an important book,
Reliquiae diluvianae, in which he gave credence to the theory that
much of the unconsolidated sediment referred to as 'diluvium' was
formed during the flooding associated with Noah. Soon afterwards it
was discovered that several different layers of diluvium existed in
Europe, but perplexingly none was present in the low and middle
latitudes. Buckland changed his tack and with others argued that
these various deposits had been formed as a result of several flooding
events that were not necessarily global, but were older than Noah's
Flood, a concept referred to historians of geology as 'neo-diluvialism'.
Buckland was a keen student of subterranean spaces and discovered
many examples of cave deposits complete with bones of hyenas, bears
and others animals. These deposits he considered to have been
emplaced thanks to floodwaters.
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