Ill 



Werner on Volcanoes 123 



Werner himself made two contributions to the discussion, 

 one giving his theory of volcanoes, 1 and the other his 

 matured views upon basalt. 2 



Volcanoes and volcanic action, if they were regarded as 

 betokening any potent kind of reaction between the interior 

 and the exterior of our planet, were utterly antagonistic 

 to Werner's conception of the structure and history of the 

 earth. In a world which had entirely resulted from the 

 precipitations and depositions of an ocean of water, there 

 was obviously no place for internal fire. In the system 

 which Werner had so laboriously devised, it was impera- 

 tively necessary to treat volcanoes as modern and accidental 

 phenomena, which never entered into the process of the 

 formation of the crust of the earth. Accordingly, in his 

 earliest sketch of his classification of rocks, he placed 

 volcanic rocks among the latest of the whole series. And 

 this view he maintained to the last. That volcanic action 

 had been in progress from the very beginning of geological 

 time, and that it had played an important part in building 

 up the framework of the land in many countries all over 

 the globe, were ideas that seem never to have occurred 

 to him. 



We have seen how old was the notion that volcanoes, 

 or " burning mountains," arose from the combustion of 

 subterranean beds of coal. Werner adopted this opinion, 

 which suited his system, and was quite in congenial 

 surroundings there. In 1789, two years after the appear- 

 ance of his little Kurze Klassification, he definitely 

 announced, in one of the papers above referred to, what 



1 Hopfner, Magazinfur die Erdkunde, iv. (1789), p. 239. 



2 Bcrgmannislics Journal, 1789, i. p. 252. See also p. 272. 



