126 A CENTURY OF SCIENCE 



country. ' ' The prevailing American and English view for 

 the first quarter of the nineteenth century is expressed 

 in the reviews in this Journal, where the well-known 

 conclusions of Conybeare and Phillips that streams are 

 incompetent to excavate valleys are quoted with approval 

 and admiration is expressed for Buckland 's famous 

 "Reliquiae Diluvianse, " a 300-page quarto volume devoted 

 to proof of a deluge. The professor at Yale, Silliman, 

 and the professor at Oxford, Buckland, saw that an 

 acceptance of Button's views involved a repudiation of 

 the Biblical flood, and much space is devoted to combating 

 these " erroneous " and "unscientific" views. For exam- 

 ple, Buckland says : 6 



". . . The general belief is, that existing streams, avalanches 

 and lakes, bursting their barriers, are sufficient to account for 

 all their phenomena, and not a few geologists, especially those 

 of the Huttonian school, at whose head is Professor Playfair, 

 have till recently been of this opinion. . . . But it is now very 

 clear to almost every man, who impartially examines the facts 

 in regard to existing vallies, that the causes now in action, men- 

 tioned above, are altogether inadequate to their production; 

 nay, that such a supposition would involve a physical impossi- 

 bility. We do not believe that one-thousandth part of our 

 present vallies were excavated by the power of existing streams. 

 ... In very many cases of large rivers, it is found, that so far 

 from having formed their own beds, they are actually in a grad- 

 ual manner filling them up. 



Again ; how happens it that the source of a river is frequently 

 below the head of a valley, if the river excavated that valley ? 



The most powerful argument, however, in our opinion, 

 against the supposition we are combating, is the phenomena of 

 transverse and longitudinal valleys; both of which could not 

 possibly have been formed by existing streams." 



Phillips writes in 1829 : 7 "The excavation of valleys 

 can be ascribed to no other cause than a great flood of 

 water which overtopped the hills, whose summits those 

 vallies descend. " 



Faith in Noah's flood as the dominant agent of erosion 

 rapidly lost ground through the teaching of Lyell after 

 1830, but the theory of systematic development of land- 

 scapes by rivers gained little. In fact, Scrope in 1830, 8 

 in showing that the entrenched meanders of the Moselle 



