Charles Schuchert — Historical Geology, 1818-1918. 55 



The conflicts of the rival schools of Edinburgh — the Neptun- 

 ists and the Vuleanists, the Wernerians and the Huttonians, 

 were sustained with great zeal, energy, talent, and science ; they 

 were indeed marked too decidedly by a partisan spirit, but this 

 very spirit excited untiring activity in discovering, arranging, 

 and criticising the facts of geology. It was a transition period 

 between the epoch' of geological hypotheses and dreams, which 

 had passed by, and the era of strict philosophical induction, in 

 which the geologists of the present day are trained . . . 



I was a diligent and delighted listener to the discussions of 

 both schools. Still the igneous philosophers appeared to me to 

 assume more than had been proved regarding internal heat. 

 In imagination we were plunged into a fiery Phlegethon, and I 

 was glad to find relief in the cold bath of the Wernerian ocean, 

 where my predilections inclined me to linger." 



Silliman' s Students and their Publications. — Silli- 

 man's first student to take up geology as a profession was 

 Denison Olmstead (1791-1859), educator, chemist, and 

 geologist, who was graduated from Yale in 1813. Four 

 years later he was under special preparation with Silli- 

 man in mineralogy and geology, and in that year was 

 appointed professor of chemistry in the University of 

 North Carolina. In 1824-1825 Olmstead issued a Report 

 on the Geology of North Carolina, which is the first offi- 

 cial geological report issued by any state in America, 

 "a conspicuous and solitary instance, " according to 

 Hitchcock's review of it (14, 230, 1828), "in which any 

 of our state governments have undertaken thoroughly to 

 develop their mineral resources. ' ' 



Amos Eaton (1776-1842), lawyer, botanist, surveyor, 

 and one of the founders of American geology, was a 

 graduate of Williams College in the class of 1799. He 

 studied with Silliman in 1815, attending his lectures on 

 chemistry, geology, and mineralogy. He also enjoyed 

 access to the libraries of Silliman and of the bot- 

 anist, Levi Ives, in which works on botany and materia 

 medica were prominent, and was a diligent student of the 

 College cabinet of minerals. He settled as a lawyer and 

 land agent in Catskill, New York, and here in 1810 he 

 gave a popular course of lectures on botany, believed to 

 have been the first attempted in the United States. 



In 1818 appeared Eaton's first noteworthy geological 

 publication, the Index to the Geology of the Northern 

 States, a text-book for the classes in geology at Williams- 

 town. The controlling principle of this book was Wer- 



