46 



RAY.— WOODWARD. 



[Ch. Ill, 



by fire, was held to be as necessary an article of faith by 

 the orthodox, as was the recent origin of our planet. His 

 discourses, like those of 



of Hooke, are highly 

 familiar association in the minds 



f Newton. 



as 



1, of questions in physics and divinity. 

 Kay gave an unequivocal proof of the sincerity of his mind 

 by sacrificing his preferment in the Church, rather than take 

 an oath against the Covenanters, which he could not reconcile 

 with his conscience. His reputation, moreover, in the scien- 

 tific world placed him high above the temptation of courting 

 popularity, by pandering to the physico-theological taste of 

 his age. It is, therefore, curious to meet with so many cita- 

 tions from the Christian fathers and prophets in his essays 

 on physical science — to find him in one page proceeding, by 

 the strict rules of induction, to explain the former changes of 

 the globe, and in the next gravely entertaining the question, 

 whether the sun and stars, and the whole heavens, shall be 

 annihilated, together with the earth, at the era of the grand 

 conflagration. 



Woodward. 1695 



— Among the 



temp 



Wood 



most 



information respecting the geological 

 structure of the crust of the earth. He had examined many 

 parts of the British strata with minute attention ; and his 

 systematic collection of specimens, bequeathed to the Uni- 

 versity of Cambridge, and still preserved there as arranged 



he had advanced in ascertaining the 



him 



m the g 



order of superposition. Fr< 

 lected by him, we might have expected his theoretical views 

 to be more sound and enlarged than those of his contempo- 

 raries ; but in his anxiety to accommodate all observed phe- 



nomena 



most 



He conceived 'the 



whole terrestrial globe to have been taken to pieces and dis- 

 solved at the flood, and the strata to have settled down from 



mass 



>* 



In corroboration of these views he insisted upon the fact, 

 that ' marine bodies are lodged in the strata according to 



* Essay towards a Natural History of the Earth, 1695. Preface. 





