Abstract
THE history of the Geological Society of London is rich in interest and instruction, as the society is unique in the? of its influence on the science it was founded to promote. Geology had no chance of a satisfactory beginning, because of its immediate discovery of evidence inconsistent with the Mosaic account of Creation and the universality of Noah's deluge. Thus geology was driven at once into cosmogony, and started where it should have ended, and its immediate encroachment on the domain of dogma involved religious controversies that were not only tiresome, but demoralising. Classical and mediæval literature both contain some true descriptions of geological phenomena, but such observations were too occasional to influence the general trend of thought. The men who wrote the first general geological treatises, from Burnet's “Sacred Theory of the Earth” to Townsend, were essentially theologians, who failed owing to their application of spiritual laws to the natural world. The pioneers of geology were not free to choose their own ground and work on it at leisure; it was their misfortune rather than their fault that their views were often the illogical offspring of observations distorted by a cosmogonic squint. “A well-educated geognost” (a term then used as synonymous with geologist), according to Bakewell in 1813, “has lost the use of his own eyes.”
The History of the Geological Society of London.
By H. B. Woodward. Pp. xx + 336; illustrated. (London: The Geological Society, 1907.) Price 7s. 6d. (to Fellows, 6s.)
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G., J. The History of the Geological Society of London . Nature 76, 537–539 (1907). https://doi.org/10.1038/076537a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/076537a0
