FORMATION OF THE EARTH 59 



'A Remonstrance upon the Dangers of Peripatetic 

 Philosophy ' a pleasantly ornate alias for the British 

 Association addressed to the Duke of Northumber- 

 land, its president in that year. At the second York 

 meeting, in 1844, he was on his own ground : the 

 Geological Section, in any case, could scarcely have 

 refused his offered paper, ' Critical Remarks on certain 

 Passages in Dr. Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise/ for, 

 incredible as it may now appear, the Dean had his own 

 pretty extensive following. His paper, which crowded 

 the section, opened with an endeavour to demolish 

 Buckland's theories as to the formation of the earth, 

 and then proceeded to develop his own, which in 

 summary were these : ' I suppose that everything in 

 the world was made at one time ; nothing has been 

 added, nothing taken away. The world was as now, 

 land and water, both resting on a strong basis con- 

 sisting of the granite rocks. So the world continued 

 for nearly 2000 years the land, the air, and water 

 being all thickly peopled. There then burst forth, 

 by natural or supernatural means, numerous sub- 

 marine volcanoes. The first broke through the 

 crust of granitic stones, and threw up, but not to the 

 top of the water, a great quantity of these pulverised 

 and perhaps melted stones mixed with clay, which, 

 slowly subsiding in the tranquil sea, produced the 

 strata of the transition series/ The Flood was 

 invoked as a further supernatural agent, and ' the 

 embedded fossils represent the remains of animals 

 that were alive when the convulsions began, and were 

 so obliging as to die in the definite and regular order 

 in which their shells and bones are now deposited/ 1 



1 Life and Letters of Sedgwick, ii, 76. This last, it need hardly be 

 added, is not a quotation from the paper. 



