196 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



these men wielded great influence in their day, their 

 writings have fallen into deserved oblivion. They are 

 never read save by the curious student, who has leisure 

 and inclination to dig among the cemeteries of geological 

 literature. 



The gradual decay of Wernerianism is well indicated 

 by the eight volumes of Memoirs published by Jameson's 

 Wernerian Society, which ranged from 1811 to 1839, an 

 interval of less than a generation. The early numbers 

 might have emanated from Freiberg itself. Not a senti- 

 ment is to be found in them of which Werner himself 

 would not have approved. How heartily, for example, 

 Jameson must have welcomed the concluding sentence of 

 a paper by one of the ablest of his associates when, after a 

 not very complimentary allusion to Hutton's views about 

 central heat, the remark is made " He who has the bold- 

 ness to build a theory of the earth without a knowledge of 

 the natural history of rocks, will daily meet with facts to 

 puzzle and mortify him." * The fate which this complacent 

 Wernerian here predicted for the followers of Hutton, was 

 now surely and steadily overtaking his own brethren. 

 One by one the faithful began to fail, and those who had 

 gone out to preach the faith of Freiberg came back con- 

 vinced of its errors, and of the truth of much which they 

 had held up to scorn in the tenets of Hutton. Even 

 among Jameson's own students, defections began to appear. 

 His friends might translate into English, and publish at 

 Edinburgh, tracts of the most orthodox Wernerianism, such 

 as Werner's Treatise, on Veins, or Von Buch's Description of 

 Landeck, or D'Aubuisson's Basalts of Saxony. But his 



1 The Rev. John Fleming, Mem. Wer. Soc. vol. ii. (1813), p. 154. 



