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BUCKLAND, WILLIAM (b. Axminster, England, 12
March 1784; d. Islip, England, 14 August 1856),
geology, paleontology.
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