1 2 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



of the earth. The rare literary skill with which he pre- 

 sented his views enabled him to exercise a powerful influ- 

 ence on his contemporaries, and to direct their attention 

 to the deeply interesting problems of which he wrote. 

 Yet he could never shake himself free from the theological 

 bias which had so long lain as an incubus upon the pro- 

 gress of scientific investigation. The theological doctors 

 of the Sorbonne compelled him to publish a retractation 

 even of the very guarded statements he had presented in 

 his Theory of the Earth statements which are now 

 accepted among the obvious commonplaces of science. 

 Although the second treatise shows that the long interval 

 of thirty years had given him greater freedom and had 

 still further enlarged his views of nature, he was evidently 

 unaware of much that had been observed and described 

 during that interval by his own countrymen and in other 

 parts of Europe. His eloquent pages are rather a 

 pictorial vision of what his brilliant imagination bodied 

 forth as the origin of things, than a sober attempt to work 

 out a theory on a basis of widely collected, carefully sifted 

 and systematically co-ordinated facts. 



Among Buffon's contemporaries there lived a man of 

 a totally different stamp, who, shunning any approach to 

 theory, dedicated himself with the enthusiasm of a true 

 naturalist to the patient observation and accumulation of 

 facts regarding the rocks of the earth's crust, and to whom 

 modern geology owes a deep debt of gratitude, that has 

 never yet been adequately paid. This man, Jean ]tienne 

 Guettard (1715-1786), was born in the year 1715 at the little 

 town of Etampes, about thirty miles S.W. from Paris. 1 As 



1 For the biographical facts here given I am indebted to the tfloge of 



