Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Earth's structure, but it is easy to understand how he could have made
this mistake. If you take a glass beaker and pour into it a couple of
handfuls of sand collected at a beach, then fill the container with
water and agitate it violently, when set down the heavier sediments
will settle out. However, the pattern may become somewhat cloudy if
you have sediments of equal density but of different grain size within
your container. Then the coarser sediment will settle first. One can
imagine Woodward carrying out such experiments, but although he
was an accomplished field geologist he failed to understand the mes-
sage the surface rocks were giving him. Additionally, fossils are not
arranged in a sequence according to their density but in a biological
lineage that is better understood now than in the late 1600s, when the
biological affinities of fossils were not accepted by all.
Nevertheless, as Martin Rudwick has pointed out, Woodward's
ideas were important as he attempted to give reasons for the presence
of characteristic fossils in an ordered succession of strata. Further
understanding in the early 1800s of this palaeontological characterisa-
tion of the rock succession played an important role in the develop-
ment of stratigraphical geology and biochronology.
The confrontational Whiston
One of Woodward's minor critics was William Whiston, who pro-
duced his own theory of the Earth in 1696, translated into German
in 1713. The 1696 volume carried the splendid, long and explicit title:
A new theory of the Earth, from its Original to the Consummation of
All Things, wherein the Creation of the World in six days, the uni-
versal deluge, and the general conflagration, as laid down in the Holy
Scriptures, are shewn to be perfectly agreeable to reason and philoso-
phy. In the title alone Whiston nailed his colours to the Mosaic mast.
He followed this up two years later with a volume containing a vindi-
cation of his earlier book and its contents.
William Whiston was born in 1667 in Leicestershire in the vil-
lage of Norton where his father served as the Rector. A sickly child, he
was educated at home. He later entered Clare College, Cambridge,
