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

    miracle, his “creative interference” being always a final, not an efficient, cause. Buckland's insistence on the actual evidence of a deluge was partly an answer to Sumner's insistence that the Mosaic records were much more reliable than geological evidence. The notion that with Buckland “Cuvier and orthodoxy were triumphant”3 is an old one, but incorrect. For years one of Buckland's roles was to keep room clear for an independent evaluation of scientific evidence within the Anglican community, in spite of increasing pressures from Evangelicalism and, later, from Tractarianism.

Buckland's major work on the geological evidence for a recent deluge was his paper on the quartz pebbles of Lickey Hill in Worcestershire, read later in 1819.4 By tracing the distribution of these pebbles as far east as London, he thought to trace the path of the deluge and to show that some valleys were scooped out by its waters. This paper, with its conclusion that such superficial gravel appears in similar circumstances all over the world, represents the high point of Buckland's belief in universal formations and universal events; and it is presented in unusually dogmatic form as compared to Buckland's more usual qualified assertions. In the next year came his first published dealings with non-European rocks, in a brief paper on resemblances between specimens from Madagascar and New South Wales, and English rocks; here he was more moderate.5 In his major paper on the structure of the Alps in 1821, Buckland showed that formations on the flanks of the mountains were the equivalent of certain secondary formations in England, and that there is a regular order of succession in Alpine districts identical with that of England.6 The table of equivalents annexed to the paper is quite useful. This paper was perhaps the most important work on the Alps between J. G. Ebel's treatise of 1808 and the work of Sedgwick and Murchison around 1830.

Buckland continued his dynamic and stratigraphic researches, and his important summary was “On the Formation of the Valley of Kingsclere,” read in 1825.7 As opposed to simple Huttonian erosion, he believed in the multicausal origin of valleys, in which elevation, fracture, diluvial currents, and erosion had all played their parts. And he noted that the Savoy Alps had been elevated from the ocean floor since the deposition of the Tertiary strata.

In 1822 Buckland published his study of the fossil bones found in Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire, and in 1823 expanded it into a full-scale treatise, Reliquiae diluvianae.8 The dedication to Bishop Shute Barrington, Sumner's patron in the church, pointedly hoped it would no longer be asserted that there is no geological evidence for a universal deluge but reminded the bishop that the deluge's physical cause was still unknown.

The deluge, however, was not the important novelty of the Reliquiae. Buckland considered the work his “hyena story,”9 for he proposed that the cave had been the den of hyenas; he not only found fossil feces (“coprolites”) and tooth-marked bones, but also made observations on the habits of modern hyenas. His important conclusion was that species of animals that now exist together only in the tropics had coexisted in northern Europe with species still in existence, and that this demonstrated a tropical climate in antediluvial times, before the deluge buried the bones in a layer of mud. Further, the bones and caves showed that Europe had then been dry land much as it is now. In another cave Buckland found a human skeleton which, since the cave showed signs of human disturbance in historic time, he took to be postdiluvial.

The Reliquiae was well received for its scientific content, although some critics felt that Buckland had pushed the use of analogies from “modern causes” too far. Cuvier was very pleased with it, although he did not fully concede the general validity of Buckland's reasoning concerning climate. Buckland's assertion of the reality of the Mosaic flood as shown by paleontological evidence, although praised by his friend Edward Copleston in the Quarterly Review, was widely attacked by other critics and even by James Smithson, who, somewhat confused, was under the impression that he was defending Buckland from an attack by Granville Penn.10 Buckland's Oxford students found the idea more amusing than convincing. Apparently it needed only to be stated clearly and fully in order to seem unconvincing; in the popular Conversations on Geology of 1828 the instructress says that Penn's theory was “no less fanciful than Mr. Buckland's.”11 Buckland's geological evidence for a large-scale force or agent acting in geologically recent times remained intact, but he quietly abandoned its identification with the Mosaic flood. For several years he intended a second volume of the Reliquiae but never published it because he could propose no convincing physical cause of the debacle.

Buckland took part in the giant saurian hunt of the 1820's, perhaps more as a follower than as a leader, although he deserves much of the credit for the Megalosaurus. He sometimes acted as geological intermediary between the discoverer in the field (who was often a layman) and such expert anatomists as Clift and Broderip. His own striking contribution was his paper (1829) on the coprolites of Ichthyosauri.12 These coprolites permitted the reconstruction of a soft