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Church of the Assumption in the village of Harlton near Cambridge
and served the university as a Chaplain of Jesus College. Like many a
country cleric at that time, Fisher was able to indulge his passion for
physics and geology, and was well versed in the scientific debates of
his time. Regarding geochronology, he was familiar with the argu-
ments proposed both in Europe and America - he had earlier, in
1893, reviewed Clarence King's work in the United States, which
focused on cooling rates of igneous rocks to derive a figure for the
age of the Earth. In his review of Joly's paper, Fisher argued that the
processes invoked by Joly were not uniform throughout geological
time. Additionally he suggested that Joly's figures for the volume of
sodium delivered into the oceans by rivers might be at fault, and
moreover was at pains to point out that Joly did not take into account
the effect of 'fossil sea water' which Fisher noted was present trapped
in sediments and elsewhere. Onemajor area of contention that kept on
recurring was that pertaining to the volume of recycled sodium. Joly
estimated that 10% of the sodium chloride carried down in the rivers
came from rainwater and thus was recycled. Fisher felt that this
percentage was too high. William Ackroyd, the public analyst for
Halifax, agreed, and so began a public debate played out in the pages
of Chemical News and Geological Magazine, where the combatants
became increasingly aggressive with each communication. Ackroyd
even went as far as accusing Joly of avoiding and leaving unanswered
his arguments. It must be suspected that Ackroyd did not fully under-
stand the intricacies of Joly's lines of thought.
Not all reviews of the 1899 paper were negative, however, and
Joly found some useful allies. One was Sollas, by then Professor of
Geology at Oxford, and a major influence in British geological circles.
Sollas, on pure scientific reasoning, and not on sentimentality or
association, sided with Joly, stating in his 1899 presidential address
to SectionC of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
meeting at Bradford that 'there is no serious flaw in the method, and
Professor Joly's treatment of the subject is admirable in every way'.
Sollas did, however, question the reliability of the data concerning the
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