IV 



Robert Jameson 1 9 3 



tempt for every other. Nowhere indeed can the pecu- 

 liarities of the Wernerian style be seen in more typical 

 perfection than in the writings of the Edinburgh pro- 

 fessor. 1 



In the year 1808, Jameson founded a new scientific 

 association in Edinburgh, which he called the " Wernerian 

 Natural History Society," with the great Werner himself 

 at the head of its list of honorary members. So far as 

 geology was concerned, the original aim of this institution 

 appears to have been to spread the doctrines of Freiberg. 

 I know no more melancholy contrast in geological litera- 

 ture than is presented when we pass from the glowing pages 

 of Playfair, or the suggestive papers of Hall, to the dreary 

 geognostical communications in the first published Memoirs 

 of this Wernerian Society. On the one side, we breathe 

 the spirit of the most enlightened modern geological 

 philosophy, on the other we grope in the darkness of a 

 Saxon mine, and listen to the repetition of the familiar 

 shibboleths, which even the more illustrious of Werner's 

 disciples were elsewhere beginning to discard. 



The importation of the Freiberg doctrines into Scotland 

 by an actual pupil of Werner, carried with it the contro- 

 versy as to the origin of basalt. This question might 

 have been thought to have been practically settled there by 

 the writings of Hutton, Playfair, and Hall, even if it had 

 not been completely solved by Desmarest, Von Buch, and 

 D'Aubuisson on the Continent. But the advent of Jameson 



1 See, for instance, the way in which he dismisses the observations of 

 Faujas de St. Fond on Scottish rocks, and the unhesitating declaration 

 that there is not in all Scotland the vestige of a volcano. Mineralogy 

 of the Scottish Isles (1800), p. 5. He never looses an opportunity of a 

 sneer at the " Vulcanists " and "fire-philosophers." 



O 



