202 On the Antiquity of the Volcanos of Auvergne. | April, 
Although in the lore which he had imported from his German 
master there was no small admixture of hypothesis, and that, as we 
now conceive, of a very crude and gratuitous character, yet the 
Professor contrived to impress his pupils with a high idea of the 
soundness of his instructions, not only for the reasons already 
assigned, but also from his dry and didactic manner, which seemed 
to preclude the notion of anything like fancy or imagination inter- 
mingling in the circle of his ideas. Coming forward indeed as the 
British representative of the Wernerian School of Geology, he felt it 
incumbent upon him in his lectures to exhibit the greatest pos- 
sible antagonism to the treatises of Hutton, Playfair, and others of 
his countrymen who had appealed to Vulcan and Pluto as the main 
Artificers in the formation of the globe. With this view he founded, 
in opposition to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, where the Hut- 
tonian theory maintained its ascendancy, a new one, consisting 
chiefly of his own friends and adherents, which was denominated 
the Wernerian ; and in order to render more patent the contrast 
between his mode of teaching and that of his opponents, he adopted 
the term Geognosy instead of that of Geology, by way of implying 
that his views were based upon observation, whilst theirs had 
drawn largely from the regions of imagination. 
Now Werner had carried. the Neptunian theory, as it was called, 
to such an extent, as to regard as deposited from aqueous solu- 
tion, not only granite, but even basalt and traps of every form and 
description ; and inasmuch as in Saxony from whence his observa- 
tions were chiefly derived, the trappean rocks occur in vast tabular 
masses overlying the other strata, he imagined the former to have 
been deposited in consequence of a great inroad over the land, of 
water, carrying with it in solution the materials of which these 
rocks consist, so that the retiring flood left behind it on the summits 
of the highest ground it had reached those great deposits of trap 
which are found at this elevation. 
And Werner's disciple, Professor Jameson, so far conformed to 
the creed of his master, that he stoutly maintained the aqueous 
origin also of all those formations of trap and porphyry which 
assume such gigantic proportions in various parts of Scotland, in 
the Hebrides, and in the north of Ireland. 
In spite of the striking contrast which these rocks in their litho- 
logical characters present to ordinary deposits from water; in spite 
of the resemblance they bear to the products of fire; in spite of 
their intrusion into other strata in a manner which conveyed the 
idea of their former liquidity; and in spite even of the changes 
they often appear to have wrought upon the beds in contact, indica- 
tive, as it would seem, of fusion, Professor Jameson persuaded his 
pupils that the Wernerian theory was to be extended to them as 
well as to the rest. 
But Auvergne, a region which had been already explored by 
