﻿Ixxiv PROCEEDIK'GS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May I908, 



communicated, however, to our Society, but to the Cambridge 

 Philosophical Society, which he had recently helped to found. By 

 the time he brought his contributions to the Geological Society he 

 had abandoned the I^eptunist faith. In later life he used pla5^fully 

 to refer to these early days in his career before he had ' learned to 

 shake off the Wernerian nonsense he had been taught ; ' when he 

 was ' eaten up with the Wernerian notions — ready to sacrifice his 

 senses to that creed — a Wernerian slave,' and when, as he admitted, 

 he ' was troubled with water on the brain,' until ' light and heat 

 had completely dissipated it.' ^ 



Twenty years after the foundation of our Society, on 

 Pebruary 15th, 1828, Fitton, in the first annual Presidential 

 Address which has been preserved, could speak of ' the complete 

 subsidence or almost oblivion of the Wernerian and Xeptunist 

 hypotheses,' and ' the universal adoption of a modified volcanic 

 theory.' ' Whatever be the fate of the Huttonian theory in general,' 

 he remarks, ' it must be admitted that many of its leading 

 propositions have been confirmed in a manner which the inventor 

 could not have foreseen.' I cannot perhaps more fittingly close 

 this brief account of what appears in the Society's records regarding 

 the famous Xeptunist and Yulcanist controversy than by quoting 

 from the same address Fitton's eloquent and genial tribute to the 

 memory of Playfair (Proc. vol. i, 1834, pp. 55, 56) i — 



* The geological writings of that distinguished man,' he remarks, ' have had, 

 indirectly, an eflfect in accelerating the progress of our subject, the benefit of 

 which we experience at this moment, and probably shall long continue to feel. 

 He clothed our subject with the dignity of an eloquence most happily adapted 

 to philosophic inquiry ; and redeemed the geologist from association with that 

 class of naturalists who lose sight of general laws, and are occupied incessantly 

 with details, — placing him, where he ought to stand, beside the mathematician, 

 the astronomer, and the chemist, and permanently raising our science into an 

 elevated department of inductive inquiry. His mild and tolerant character 

 threw an assuaging influence upon the waves of a controversy, which in his 

 time considerations, entirely foreign to science, had exasperated into unusual 

 violence ; and if, fortunately, there is no longer any trace of this asperity, 

 the change must, in a great degree, be ascribed to the tone of Mr. Playfair's 

 writings, enforced by the manly and consistent tenour of his blameless life.' 



In order to keep our survey of the work of the Geological Society 

 within some reasonable compass, the subject may conveniently be 



1 ' Life & Letters of Adam Sedgwick ' by J. W. Clarke & T. McKenny Hughes, 

 vol. i (1890) pp. 251, 284. 



