HISTORICAL GEOLOGY 63 



was a definite order and process in the formation of the 

 earth's crust, their example was barren of followers until 

 the beginning of the eighteenth century. 



Wernerian Geology or Geognosy. We come now to 

 the time of Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817), who 

 from 1775 to 1817 was professor of mining and mineral- 

 ogy in the Freiberg Academy of Mines. Geikie, in his 

 most interesting Founders of Geology, says that Werner 

 "bulks far more largely in the history of geology than 

 any of those with whom up to the present we have been 

 concerned a man who wielded an enormous author- 

 ity over the mineralogy and geology of his day." 

 "Although he did great service by the precision of his 

 lithological characters and by his insistence on the doc- 

 trine of geological succession, yet as regards geological 

 theory, whether directly by his own teaching, or indi- 

 rectly by the labors of his pupils and followers, much of 

 his influence was disastrous to the higher interests of 

 geology." 



Werner arranged the crust of the earth into a series of 

 formations, as had been done previously by Lehmann 

 and Fiichsel, and one of his fundamental postulates was 

 that all rocks were chemically precipitated in the ocean 

 as "universal formations." For this reason Werner's 

 school were called the Neptunists. Nowhere, however, 

 did he explain how and where the deep and primitive 

 ocean had disappeared. 



According to Werner, the first formed or oldest rocks 

 were the chemically deposited Primitive strata, including 

 granite and other igneous and metamorphic rocks. On 

 these followed the Transition rocks, the earliest sedi- 

 ments of mechanical origin, and above them the Floetz 

 rocks, a term for the horizontal stratified rocks. These 

 last he said were partly of chemical but chiefly of mechan- 

 ical origin. Last of all came the Alluvial series. 



The existence of volcanoes had been pointed out long 

 before Werner's time by the Italian school of geologists, 

 but as for "the universality and potency of what is now 

 termed igneous action," all was "brushed aside by the 

 oracle of Freiberg." Reactions between the interior 

 and exterior of our earth "were utterly antagonistic to 

 Werner's conception of the structure and history of the 



