Dictionary of Scientific Biography

to found an annual meeting of scientific men. His public prominence and international contacts made him an obvious choice for president and host of the second meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1832 (the first full scientific meeting, since the one in 1831 was largely devoted to organizing the association). He was thereafter active at its meetings. He played a major role in the establishment of the Museum of Practical Geology and affiliated activities of his friend De la Beche.

Buckland was made dean of Westminster in 1845 by the Tory prime minister, Robert Peel, an admirer of his work. He left Oxford for London rather willingly, feeling that he had tried for forty-four years to spread a taste for science at the university, and had failed. We can see that he had raised geology to rank alongside the more prominent sciences, such as anatomy, and had helped foster the growing interest in science that led to its inclusion in the examination curriculum and to the building of the Oxford Museum, in the next decade. His own scientific work, while perhaps ultimately not so significant as that being done in physics at Cambridge, and not leading to an “Oxford school of geology,” did give Oxford an international name in science that it did not have in humanistic or biblical scholarship.

As dean of Westminster, Buckland was a vigorous administrator, repairing the physical deterioration of the abbey and the school, and restoring the school scholastically to the status of an effective modern educational institution. He took an interest in local sanitary reform. Basically a liberal in Anglican Church politics, he took particular pleasure in acting as host for the consecration of four missionary bishops, a move opposed by some factions.

Buckland held the rectory of Islip, seven miles from Oxford, as a country home. He was a useful rector, and retired there when, at the end of 1849, he contracted a mysterious illness characterized by apathy and depression. He died seven years later. The autopsy showed that damage to the base of the skull caused by a carriage accident in Germany thirty years before had developed into an advanced state of decay. His wife died a year later, apparently as a result of the same accident. Both were buried in Islip churchyard.

Personally, Buckland was characterized by great energy. His whole life and his household were organized around geology. His unfailing sense of humor puzzled and annoyed some of his more Victorianminded colleagues, such as Charles Lyell and Adam Sedgwick, and led John Henry Newman to distrust geology altogether. On the other hand, John Ruskin found him stimulating, as did most of his other auditors. Buckland took religion and geology seriously, but took himself, other geologists, and most geological theories much less so.

Buckland was not given to synthesis or system building, and there is a danger of attributing too much importance to his general theoretical positions, which were often derivative. His importance lay, rather, in helping to redefine the nature and method of a geological explanation. British stratigraphers before about 1815 had often been satisfied with a tracing of the strata (largely the secondary formations) or had gone all the way to a total system of geological dynamics. Following the suggestion of Cuvier in the first edition of his Discours préliminaire, Buckland and other geologists wished to produce detailed explanations that would in effect constitute a geological history, period by period, of the events in a given locality. To help in doing so, Buckland transferred Cuvier's method of reconstructing fossil animals to geology proper: that is, he tried to reason from the analogies of the existing world (Cuvier's création actuelle) to the events of a past world, even though Cuvier himself had cast some doubt on the validity of this process in geology.

Nothing is more characteristic of Buckland's papers than the use of some immediately observable contemporary analogy—the habits of modern hyenas, the cavities formed by air bubbles in clay, the geographical locus of modern animals. His method also differed from that of Cuvier's Discours in not depending primarily on paleontological evidence. Although Buckland was one of Cuvier's great admirers and seemingly enjoyed correcting him on all kinds of specific points, his own method was to bring together stratigraphical, petrological, dynamic, and paleontological reasoning and observations on modern forms and habits of life to explain the phenomena of a given locality. This is well exemplified by his paper of 1830, written with De la Beche, on the geology of the neighborhood of Weymouth, which utilizes the techniques he had developed over the previous fifteen years.1

In paleontology Buckland's most interesting work was on still-existing forms, such as hyenas and bears, and on marine shells. Cuvier was not much interested in conchology, the study of variations among shells per se; Buckland's emphasis, while including the organisms that produced the shells, was perhaps a bit more in the conchological tradition of William Smith and James Sowerby.

Buckland was thus one of the men, perhaps the ablest and probably the most acute, who built a typically “British” geology, based on careful local stratigraphy and local dynamic explanations but