1 64 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



quarto pages, it was written in a quiet logical manner, with 

 no attempt at display, but with an apparent anxiety to 

 state the author's opinions as tersely as possible. Probably 

 no man realized then that this essay would afterwards be 

 regarded as marking a turning-point in the history of 

 geology. For some years it remained without attracting 

 notice either from friend or foe. 1 



For this neglect various causes have been assigned. 

 The title of the memoir was perhaps unfortunate. The 

 words " Theory of the Earth " suggested another repetition 

 of the endless speculations as to the origin of things, of 

 which men had grown weary. System after system of this 

 kind of speculation had been proposed, and had dropped 

 into oblivion, and no doubt many of his contemporaries 

 believed Button's " Theory " to be one of the same ill- 

 fated brood. His friend Playfair admits that there were 

 reasons in the construction of the memoir itself why it 

 should not have made its way more speedily into notice. 

 Its contents were too condensed, and contained too little 

 explanation of the grounds of the reasoning. Its style was 

 apt to be prolix and obscure. It appeared too in the 

 Transactions of a learned Society which had only recently 

 been founded, and whose publications were hardly yet 

 known to the general world of science. 



1 It does not appear to be generally known that Desmarest, departing 

 from his usual practice of not noticing the work of living writers, wrote a 

 long and careful notice of Button's Memoir of 1785 in the first volume of 

 his Geographic Physique, published in 1794-1795. He disagrees with many 

 of Button's views, such, for instance, as that of the igneous origin of 

 granite. But he generously insists on the value of the observations with 

 which the Scottish writer had enriched the natural history of the earth 

 and the physical geography of Scotland. "It is to Scotland," he says, 

 "that Button's opponents must go to amend his results and substitute 

 for them a more rational explanation " (p. 750). 



