XC11 PROCEEDINGS—PERTHSHIRE SOCIETY OF NATURAL SCIENCE. 
Charles M‘Laren and James Smith, who were afterwards to investigate 
respectively the geology of the East and of the West of Scotland, 
were both eighteen. 
We thus see that when the nineteenth century dawned geology 
had reached a period of transition. In one sense, as a modern 
science of precise observation and deduction, it may be said hardly 
to have passed its initial stage; while, in another sense, it was as old 
as philosophy itself. True, James Hutton had a few years previously 
recorded his conviction that it is to the forces at work on the earth 
at the present day that we have to look for the key to the problems 
of the past, but it yet remained for his expositor, Playfair, to put 
these ideas in such a form as to attract serious attention to them. 
Then again, Werner had already advanced his belief that the stratified 
rocks had been laid down under water, during the course of long 
ages, but the influence of the popular interpretation of the Mosaic 
Cosmology, limiting the age of the earth to some five or six thousand 
years, still militated against the acceptance of this view. In like 
manner, the views advanced by Cuvier and others regarding the true 
origin of fossils were still looked on by many as antagonistic to the 
orthodox doctrine of the Noachian Deluge, which was supposed to 
account for the presence of animal and plant remains in the sedi¬ 
mentary rocks, unless, indeed, these were mere “Freaks of Nature.” 
These prejudices were not fully overcome until thirty years later, 
when Lyell brought forward an overwhelming mass of evidence, 
gleaned from all parts of the world, to prove that the crust of our 
earth has been built up, not by a series of catastrophes, but by a 
majestic process of gradual development, the result of the familiar 
forces of nature, acting through the long ages of the past. 
The period of thirty-seven years, extending from the beginning 
of the century to the beginning of the Queen’s reign, was one of great 
activity and advance in Geology. Foremost among the workers in 
England were William Smith, the pioneer of geological surveyors, 
who died two years after the Queen ascended the Throne; Prof. 
William Buckland, who helped to make the science popular by means 
of his lectures; Prof. Adam Sedgwick, eminent both as a teacher, and 
as the interpreter of the Cambrian System in Wales; Sir Roderick 
Murchison, who unravelled the next great system in the geological 
sequence, namely, the Silurian; Sir Charles Lyell, gradually accumu¬ 
lating materials for his monumental “ Principles of Geology,” 
published in 1830-33; Sir Henry De la Beche, Prof. John Phillips, 
and others of less note. In Scotland, Prof. Robert Jameson still 
occupied his Chair in Edinburgh; John MacCulloch, who died in 
1835, had completed his researches among the rocks of the High¬ 
lands ; Plugh Miller was already at work amongst the Old Red 
Sandstone rocks of the North, although his book was not published 
until four years later; and William Nichol, of Edinburgh, had perfected 
his method of examining transparent sections of rock under the micro¬ 
scope. Charles MfLaren’s “ Geology of Fife and the Lothians ” was 
published one year after the Queen came to the Throne, but already 
one or two rough geological maps of Scotland had been published. 
During this period, another great name was beginning to come into 
