The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [121]
The flood, depicted in 1828. The last remnants of humankind and the animals reach the top of a mountain and await their inevitable fate, which is, conveniently, to remove them from the fossil record.
A cartoon showing James Hutton, carrying his geological hammer and observing a rock which has been eroded into the shape of the faces of his principal critics.
Cuvier’s double flood theory was refined by an odd English clergyman called William Buckland. Born in Trusham, Devon, Buckland had gone hunting for fossil shells as a boy. By 1813 he was Reader in Mineralogy at Oxford, where he lived in notable surroundings: ‘a long corridor-like room, which was filled with shells, rocks and bones in dire confusion, and in a sort of sanctum at the end… in his black gown, looking like a necromancer, [was Buckland] sitting on a rickety chair covered with some fossils … ’Buckland’s habits were equally eccentric. His interest in natural history had led him to idiosyncratic tastes in food including, among other things, garden snails, crocodile meat, puppies, ostrich, mice, bats and, it was rumoured, the mummified heart of Louis XIV, all of which he would nibble during lectures. John Ruskin wrote, after missing an appointment with him: ‘I have always regretted a day of unlucky engagement on which I missed a delicate toast of mice.’
On one occasion, during a visit to a foreign cathedral, Buckland identified a dark stain on the floor, said to be of martyr’s blood, by licking it and declaring it to be bat urine. As Dean of Westminster from 1845 to 1856, he carried a feather duster at all times. Darwin later said of him: ‘Though very good-humoured and good-natured [Buckland] seemed to me a vulgar and almost coarse man. He was incited more by a craving for notoriety, which sometimes made him act like a buffoon, than by a love of science.’
Buckland’s view was that there had been only one flood and he produced water-level marks in caves to prove it. For him the flood explained several mysteries such as the unexplained boulders dotting the north German plain, Scandinavia and Britain, the large patches of ill-assorted gravel and sand, the terraces in river banks sited well above present water-levels, as well as small rivers wandering at the bottom of great valleys apparently too deep for them to have scooped out. Buckland was a brilliant lecturer and showman, but he failed to make his case. It was said of him at the time:
Some doubts were once expressed about the Flood.
Buckland arose, and all was clear as mud.
An illustration from Buckland’s Observations on the Organic Remains Contained in Caves, Fissures and Diluvial Gravel, 1823. Buckland used comparative anatomy to prove that the bones he found in caves were those of extinct antediluvian animals.
His position was, in fact, one in which total objectivity would have been difficult. In his inaugural lecture on geology in 1819 he claimed that geology supported the biblical record of events. The new professorial chair to which he had been elected had been approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Sumner, on the basis that if geology supported the Church, the Church would return the favour.
But in spite of apparent diluvial evidence later found in a Kirkby Moordale cave in 1821, Buckland’s argument failed, due mainly to the work of a Scots doctor called James Hutton. Hutton had farmed in Berwickshire, but in the latter third of the eighteenth century he moved to Edinburgh. Like his contemporaries, Hutton also looked for evidence of the Grand Design.
At the time the