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CONYBEARE, WILLIAM DANIEL (b. London,
England, June 1787; d. Llandaff, Wales, 12 August
1857), geology.
Conybeare was the younger son of Rev. William
Conybeare, rector of St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, London.
He was educated at Westminster School and
Christ Church, Oxford. On marrying in 1814, he took
a curacy in Suffolk, became rector of Sully (Glamorganshire)
in 1822, took his family living as vicar of
Axminster (Devon) in 1836, and became dean of
Llandaff in 1845. An early member (1811) of the
Geological Society of London, he was elected a fellow
of the Royal Society in 1832. In addition to his scientific
work he published works on biblical and patristic
theology and was Bampton lecturer at Oxford in 1839.
Conybeare was one of the most active early members
of the “Oxford school” of geology and was a close
associate of William Buckland. He was one of the
most able British exponents of the synthesis of progressionism
and catastrophism, which dominated
geology in the 1820's and 1830's.
His most important single work was his great
enlargement and improvement of William Phillips'
compilation of English stratigraphy. This created a
synopsis of stratigraphical knowledge that was at the
time unrivaled in detail and accuracy (1). In the
general introduction to the Outlines, Conybeare considered
the range of “actual causes” but regarded
them as inadequate to explain such phenomena as the
“diluvium” (glacial drift) and the form of valleys; for
these he proposed diluvial explanations, although
without stressing any concordance with the scriptural
Flood. The Outlines described British stratigraphy
back to the Carboniferous and was termed “Part I”;
Adam Sedgwick was to have assisted Conybeare with
a second volume on the earlier strata, but it was never
published. Conybeare collaborated with Buckland in
a stratigraphical memoir on the coal fields around
Bristol (2) that was much admired as a model of clear
description and reasoned inference; he also attempted
a general correlation with Continental stratigraphy
and tectonics (3).
Some fragmentary fossil remains from the Lias of
Lyme Regis prompted Conybeare's main work in
paleontology. From a detailed comparison of normal
reptiles and the highly aberrant Ichthyosaurus, he
inferred that the new remains were intermediate in
anatomy. This reconstruction of the Plesiosaurus,
which excited great interest, was later confirmed by
the discovery of a more complete skeleton (4). His
functional anatomy clearly was modeled on Cuvier;
but he stressed the interest of intermediate forms as
“links in the chain” of organisms, showing, however,
by an explicit rejection of Lamarck's transmutation,
that the chain was that of an échelle des êtres, not an
evolutionary series.
Conybeare's exposition of the catastrophist-progressionist
synthesis was both more able and more
moderate than that of Buckland. He argued in 1829
that the fluvial erosion postulated by Lyell for the
valleys of central France was inadequate to explain
the form of the valleys of the Thames and other British
rivers and suggested that the more powerful agency
of a “diluvial” episode was required to account for
them (5). He defended the progressionist viewpoint
on directional climatic change against the criticisms
of John Fleming (6) and later (1830-1831) wrote one
of the most important defenses of the whole progressionist
synthesis in answer to the more radical attack
of Lyell's Principles of Geology (7). The moderate and
flexible character of his catastrophism is shown, however,
by his skepticism about Élie de Beaumont's
theory of the parallel and paroxysmal elevation of
mountain ranges: here he not only criticized the hasty
generalization of the theory and its inapplicability to
British geology but also emphasized the slow and
gradual nature of many—though not all-tectonic
movements (8). His presidency of the Geology Section
of the British Association in 1832 gave him an opportunity
to review the general progress of the science
(9). Here, and later in an important letter to Lyell (10),
he expounded his own theoretical viewpoint. This
combined an actualistic method in geology with an