Ill 



Von Buck's Labours 147 



to expand his geological horizon. When he announced 

 that the whole of the continent of Sweden from Frederik- 

 shald to Abo is now slowly rising above the sea, he did 

 as much as any Vulcanist of his day in support of the 

 Huttonian theory. 



A further emancipation from the tenets of Freiberg was 

 displayed by a series of papers on the mountain-system of 

 Germany, wherein Von Buch gave the first clear description 

 of the geological structure of Central Europe. He declared 

 that the more elevated mountains had never been covered 

 by the sea, as Werner had taught, but were produced by 

 successive ruptures and uplifts of the terrestrial crust. 

 In 1824 he produced a geological map of the whole of 

 Germany in forty-two sheets, the first large map of its kind 

 to illustrate a great area of the European continent, and a 

 signal monument of its author's unwearied research and of 

 his geological acumen. For more than sixty years this dis- 

 tinguished man continued to enrich geological literature 

 with memoirs contributed to scientific societies and journals, 

 and with independent works. His earliest writings stamped 

 him as an observer of great sagacity and independence, and 

 his reputation rose higher every year, until he came to be 

 the acknowledged leader of geological science in Germany. 

 Pressing forward into every department of the science, he 

 illuminated it with the light of his penetrating intellect. 

 From the North Cape to the Canary Islands there was 

 hardly a region that he did not personally explore, and not 

 many that he did not describe. With ceaseless industry 

 and exhaustless versatility, he ranged from the structure 

 of the Alps to that of the Cystideans, from the distribution 

 of volcanoes to that of Ammonites, from the details of 



