70 A CENTURY OF SCIENCE 



April 4, 1804. In the summer of that year, Yale College 

 asked him to go to England to purchase material for the 

 College, and great possibilities for broadening his 

 knowledge now loomed before him. As Silliman himself 

 (43, 225, 1842) has told the interesting story of his 

 sojourn in England and Scotland, it is worth while to 

 restate a part of it here. 



11 Passing over to England in the spring of 1805, and fixing 

 my residence for six months in London, I found there no school, 

 public or private, for geological instruction, and no association 

 for the cultivation of the science, which was not even named in 

 the English universities." In geology " Edinburgh was then 

 far in advance of London . . . Prof. Jameson having recently 

 returned from the school of Werner, fully instructed in the doc- 

 trines of his illustrious teacher, was ardently engaged to maintain 

 them, and his eloquent and acute friend, the late Dr. John Mur- 

 ray, was a powerful auxiliary in the same cause; both of these 

 philosophers strenuously maintaining the ascendancy of the 

 aqueous over the igneous agencies, in the geological phenomena 

 of our planet. 



On the other hand, the disciples and friends of Dr. Hutton 

 were not less active. He died in 1797, and his mantle fell upon 

 Sir James Hall, who, with Prof. Playfair and Prof. Thomas 

 Hope, maintained with signal ability, the igneous theory of 

 Hutton. It did not become one who was still a youth and a 

 novice, to enter the arena of the geological tournament where 

 such powerful champions waged war; but it was very interest- 

 ing to view the combat, well sustained as it was on both sides, 

 and protracted, without a decisive issue, into a drawn battle . . . 



The conflicts of the rival schools of Edinburgh the Neptun- 

 ists and the Vulcanists, the Wernerians and the Huttonians, 

 were sustained with great zeal, energy, talent, and science ; they 

 were indeed marked too decidedly by a partisan spirit, but this 

 very spirit excited untiring activity in discovering, arranging, 

 and criticising the facts of geology. It was a transition period 

 between the epoch of geological hypotheses and dreams, which 

 had passed by, and the era of strict philosophical induction, in 

 which the geologists of the present day are trained . . . 



I was a diligent and delighted listener to the discussions of 

 both schools. Still the igneous philosophers appeared to me to 

 assume more than had been proved regarding internal heat. 

 In imagination we were plunged into a fiery Phlegethon, and I 

 was glad to find relief in the cold bath of the Wernerian ocean, 

 where my predilections inclined me to linger. " 



