42 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



styled, the Golden Age of Geology. Sedgwick was his 

 contemporary in Cambridge, Phillips, afterwards to succeed 

 him, was his contemporary in Dublin, Murchison learnt 

 his first lesson in the field from him, Lyell was his pupil, 

 Agassiz a coadjutor, and Conybeare his nearest friend. 



When Buckland was appointed Reader in Geology, the 

 foundations of the science were already laid, but great 

 problems remained for solution. The question of the 

 deluge and how far its effects could be recognised in the 

 structure of the earth's crust was still one of these. 



Buckland appeared at first as a champion of the deluge: 

 thus in his inaugural lecture delivered before this Uni- 

 versity in 1819, he expressed himself in the following 

 words : "The grand fact of an universal deluge at no very 

 remote period is proved on grounds so decisive and incon- 

 trovertible, that had we never heard of such an event from 

 Scripture or any other Authority, Geology of itself must 

 have called in the assistance of some such catastrophe to 

 explain the phenomena of diluvial action ". 



Subsequently pursuing his researches into this question 

 he seems to have ransacked the whole world for evidence 

 and found everywhere confirmatory proofs. The ancient 

 gravels of Wytham were, he considered, swept from War- 

 wickshire and counties still farther north, in the rush of 

 the great flood ; stones from Norway were carried to the 

 east coast of England, and the mass of pebbles and other 

 ddbris, which were driven along with it, scoured the face of 

 the country and thus produced the polishing and striation so 

 frequently visible on the surface of the harder rocks of our 

 islands ; the bones of mammoths and other mighty monsters 

 of prediluvial times, that lie buried in caves and elsewhere, 

 were eloquent in their testimony to the destruction which 

 it wrought on the living- world. That the loftiest mountains 

 were submerged by it was proved by the discovery of the 

 bones of horses and deer at an altitude of 16,000 feet above 

 the sea on the slopes of the Himalayas. They are brought 

 down by the avalanches of those mountains, and are said by 

 the natives to have fallen from the clouds and to be the 

 bones of genii. The Reliquice Dihivian<z, in which these 



