HISTORY OF GEOLOGY FROM 1780 TO 1835 177 into them His lectures were popular, in that they seemed to show that Biblical history could find support in the latest findings of science The convenient occurrence of coals, limestones, and ore bodies supposedly evinced divine wisdom Regarding the Flood, Buckland believed that it was an historical event of divine origin and humans were of recent origin, as described in Mosaic history (though, following Cuvier, he denied that there were any evidences of fossilized antediluvian humans, such as might be expected if Mosaic history were correct) But, along with this ‘natural theology’, Buckland was a dedicated scientist, doing much fieldwork He showed that the marks on his cave bones were compatible with those left by the teeth of modern hyenas He even let a tortoise walk across pastry, claiming that the marks it made were comparable to those found on sedimentary rocks from Scotland, suggesting that the latter were imprints of an ancient reptilian analogue This was a kind of use of Cuvier’s ‘comparative method’ Buckland was one of many who made geology a highly popular science in the early nineteenth century Lyell and Uniformitarianism But Cuvier’s and Buckland’s geology was an anathema to the followers of Hutton, notably Charles Lyell, in his Principles of Geology (1830–1833) (see Famous Geologists: Lyell) Lyell, a lawyer turned writer and geologist, envisaged an open-ended time-scale, without direction to geological change Land could rise and fall in an irregular fashion, with consequent climatic changes, as high land happened to be chiefly near the poles or the equator With changing conditions of existence, new species would be formed (by an unknown process – perhaps God-caused?) or become extinct, the forms approximately tracking the changing conditions Hence, the proportions of extant forms would gradually decrease into the past, so that the percentage of present types could be used to provide divisions of Tertiary time Cuvier’s great palaeontological breaks were thought by Lyell to be due the loss of strata by erosion; or not all living forms having been preserved Lyell was a gradualist and a non-progressionist He was also dubbed a ‘uniformitarian’ or ‘actualist’, i.e., he thought that the proper mode of reasoning in geology was to explain the past by using analogies with the knowable circumstances and constant laws of nature of the present (Use analogies from knowledge of circumstances as they actually are; or use ‘the present as the key to the past’—an aphorism not coined by Lyell himself.) An important example of Lyell’s actualist geology is provided by his examination of Etna to argue for the great age of the Earth He could observe recent eruptions and lava flows and historical records of eruptions Hence he had an idea of the rate of accumulation of lava and the build-up of the volcano Knowing the height of the mountain and its approximate rate of formation (assumed to be constant), he could estimate its approximate age: some hundreds of thousands of years, which was very ancient in human terms But the lava flows lay on sediments containing fossils of recent appearance, similar to organisms in today’s Mediterranean Therefore, the sediments at the top of the stratigraphic column were very old in human terms Therefore, the Earth itself must be exceedingly ancient In this manner Lyell argued for the Earth’s enormous antiquity Geological time had been ‘proved’, on the basis of uniformitarian argument It should be remarked that Cuvier, Buckland, and Lyell all used ‘actualist’ arguments, even though the first two were ‘catastrophists’ while Lyell was a ‘uniformitarian’ Thus, there was some unity within geological thinking, even though many have thought that the early nineteenth century was divided into two hostile camps (as was undoubtedly true to an extent) Lyell was a religious man, and believed that humans were divinely created But he had no truck with such ideas as universal catastrophes or the ‘thread of operations’ being broken Mountain Building Lyell was a Huttonian, and accepted the idea of a hot interior to the Earth, and Hutton’s cyclic geohistory But he did not have much to say about the formation of mountains other than the build-up of lava-cones such as Etna In 1829–1830, however, an influential theory of mountain formation was published in France by Le´ once E´ lie de Beaumont (‘Recherches sur quelquesunes des revolutions de la surface du globe’) He envisaged a slowly cooling and contracting Earth, with the contraction of the fluid interior leading to occasional bucklings of the solid external crust (like the wrinkles on the skin of a drying apple, we might say), and hence the formation of linear mountain ranges and ocean trenches It was suggested that the several mountain ranges, running in different directions, might represent different ‘wrinklings’ of the crust (or orogenies), occurring at different times The idea was that parallel mountain ranges might have formed at about the same time Consequently, one could develop a kind of ‘tectonostratigraphy’ The theory was subsequently developed, with the idea of a vast geometrical pattern of foldings eventually forming around the globe It became especially influential in France, and was the forerunner of tectonic theories subsequently developed in the nineteenth century, such as that of Eduard Suess (see Famous Geologists: Suess), which envisaged