56 LIFE OF BENJAMIN SILLIMAN. 



4 



often without acknowledgment When I say you 



Journal is not exactly suited to the United States, I think 

 it has been formed rather too much on our English patterns, 

 which however are not themselves suited to the general 

 taste of the English reader. The Journal of our civil 

 engineers is the kind of book that America wants, and I 

 apprehend its information might be combined with more 

 scientific articles. The Journals in France have also de- 

 creased lately, I mean of course the scientific ones. But 

 I am afraid I have tired you with hints and queries that 

 may be of little use. 



FROM^MR. BAKEWELL. 



HAMPSTEAD, July 28, 1836. 



GEOLOGY is in a rather strange state in England 



at present ; the rich clergy begin to tremble for their in- 

 comes, and seek to avert their fate by a revived zeal for 

 orthodoxy, and are making a great clamor against geology 

 as opposed to Genesis. I have no doubt this is the prime 

 cause why Buckland's Bridgewater treatise, though an- 

 nounced and reviewed in the " Quarterly " last May, has not 



yet appeared. I have no doubt the reviewer was = 



who at the bottom hates Buckland cordially, as I am in- 

 formed by Mantell. The reviewer brought forward all 

 those points which Buckland would have been glad to pass 

 sub silentio, namely, that B. had now given up the 

 Noachian deluge, so far as it was to explain any geological 

 phenomena, and also stating how much he differed from 

 the literal account of creation in Genesis. Oxford, where 

 B. resides, and is a Canon, has been thrown into a great fer- 

 ment about Dr. Hampden's free opinions, and the geologists 

 have come in for a share of the censure. In England the 

 attempt to introduce new names and new theories is sinking 

 geology in the opinion of well -judging people. The Eocene, 

 Miocene, and Pliocene, these names, as Sedgwick says, 



