PLUTONISTS AND NEPTUNISTS 165 



had formed singularly narrow conceptions of the great 

 processes whereby that crust has been built up. His 

 enthusiasm, however, fired his disciples with the zeal of 

 proselytes, and they spread themselves over Europe 

 to preach everywhere the artificial system which they 

 had learnt in Saxony. By a curious fate Edinburgh 

 became one of the great headquarters of Wernerism. 

 The friends and followers of Hutton found themselves 

 attacked in their own city by zealots who, proud of 

 superior mineralogical acquirements, turned their most 

 cherished ideas upside down and assailed them in the 

 uncouth jargon of Freiberg. Inasmuch as subterranean 

 heat had been invoked by Hutton as a force largely 

 instrumental in consolidating and upheaving the ancient 

 sediments that now form so great a part of the dry 

 land, his followers were nicknamed Plutonists. On 

 the other hand, as the agency of water was almost 

 alone admitted by Werner, who believed the rocks 

 of the earth's crust to have been chiefly chemical 

 precipitates from a primeval universal ocean, those who 

 adopted his views received the equally descriptive name 

 of Neptunists. The battle of these two contending 

 schools raged fiercely here for some years, and though 

 mainly from the youth, zeal, and energy of Jameson, 

 and the influence which his position as Professor in the 

 University gave him, the Wernerian doctrines con- 

 tinued to hold their place, they were eventually 

 abandoned even by Jameson himself, and the debt 

 due to the memory of Hutton and Playfair was tardily 

 acknowledged. 



The pursuits and the quarrels of philosophers have 

 from early times been a favourite subject of merriment 



