THE HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AT OXFORD. 41 



of feet in thickness. Well might the stoutest hearted be 

 appalled before the vast aeons of time which Hutton con- 

 jured up before the imagination ! Not so Hutton ; having 

 broken the narrow bonds of time previously imposed upon 

 our science, he revelled in excess of freedom, and declared 

 that the duration of our planet was practically infinite ! 



How was this new teaching received in Oxford ? 



The title of a work by Dr. Kidd, who was Professor of 

 Chemistry in 1803, will inform us. It runs as follows: A 

 Geological Essay on the Imperfect Evidence in Support of a 

 Theory of the Earth, 181 5 ; and the book itself concludes 

 with the assertion that " ancient strata cannot be explained 

 by existing causes : that the Science of Geology is so com- 

 pletely in its infancy as to render hopeless any attempt at a 

 successful generalisation". In this opinion I believe Dr. 

 Kidd to have been in sound agreement with the teaching of 

 the leading geologists of the day : his work is by no means 

 aggressive, and might rather be regarded as a text-book 

 than a polemic: as a text-book it was well "up to date," 

 and we are impressed on reading- it with the great advance 

 which had been made since the time of Plot. 



Here must be mentioned the name of William Smith, a 

 native of Oxfordshire, though not a member of this Uni- 

 versity. His various works were published between the 

 years 1790 and 181 5, and to him we owe a discovery that 

 excited no controversy, but which nevertheless was the 

 greatest in Geology made since the time of Steno. It was 

 that different strata contain different kinds of fossils, which 

 are peculiar to them, and thus serve as marks by which the 

 strata can be identified ; so .that with the aid of fossils it has 

 become possible to trace the same group of strata across 

 the length of the British Isles, nay, even throughout the 

 whole of Europe and into distant parts of the world. This 

 discovery made Geology for the first time possible as an 

 exact science. 



The successor to Dr. Kidd was a geologist of the very 

 highest rank, one eminently great amongst a crowd oi great 

 contemporaries. I allude to the famous Dr. Buckland. 



The period of Buckland has been styled, and justly 



