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

    internal organ of an extinct species and indicated the species' eating habits; they proved that carnivorous “warfare” had always been a law of nature “to maintain the balance of creation.” Further, their preservation in vast amounts furnished a “geological chronometer” of a period of undisturbed accumulation at the bottom of a sea. Coprolites should therefore be looked for in all periods when vertebrates had existed.

Toward the end of 1828 Charles Lyell and Roderick Murchison mounted an attack on Buckland's valleyformation ideas. W. D. Conybeare labeled the debate one between “fluvialists” (Lyell and Murchison) and “diluvialists” (Conybeare and Buckland). Since the fluvialists could only show that the particular valleys they discussed were caused by erosion, and since Buckland himself had shown that some valleys were so caused, the debate was inconclusive; and Lyell agreed to Buckland's general position in his Principles of Geology.13 The debate seems, however, to have stimulated Adam Sedgwick and William Hopkins to extend Buckland's notions of elevation and dislocation as agents of surface formation in the 1830's and 1840's.

In 1830 Buckland was nominated to write the geological work in a series of books on natural theology that stemmed from the will of the eccentric eighth earl of Bridgewater; the final contracts were signed in 1832. We may assume that most of his energies until 1836 were directed to this project. Thus his celebrated explanations of the habits of the fossil Megatherium and the present-day sloth were devoted to showing how perfect their organization is for their mode of life,14 and the same examples reappear in the Bridgewater treatise.

Buckland was in the middle of a general conservative revolt at Oxford, led by the Tractarians, and his treatise was completed during the spring of 1836, when their fierce opposition to the appointment of the mildly liberal R. D. Hampden as professor of divinity drove a wedge of bitterness into the Anglican Church. Buckland's natural theology conceded nothing to the new religious challenge. His position was essentially the same as in 1819, but its theological liberalism was by now more obvious, and was presented at length and without subterfuge. Buckland particularly emphasized William Paley's position that the world was not made for man alone but for the pleasure of all species of life; in relation to the object to be attained, all organic mechanisms are equally good, are evidence of beneficent adaptation. He reasserted that it is futile to try to reconcile geological epochs with the days of creation in Genesis, and now openly renounced the identification of his geological deluge with the Mosaic flood. He went no further toward admitting miracles as physical causes than he had done in 1819. The final cause of successive organic systems, he said, is the purpose of maintaining the greatest possible amount of life on earth at all times. He was insistent that the past was regulated by the same laws and processes as the present, and showed the same kind of ecological balance. This demonstrated the unity of the Deity (whereas the Tractarians were fond of saying that natural theology tended to polytheism).

As a geological system Buckland chose, possibly borrowing from De la Beche and Conybeare, progressive development from an initially hot earth, with discontinuous assemblages of organic life being created and dying out. To express a secular development while simultaneously rejecting continuous progress and transmutation, he deliberately kept the rhetoric of the Great Chain of Being, but with missing links or gaps in the present creation being filled up by fossil organisms from past time periods. This was a noteworthy change from Cuvier, and a major step in the conversion of a balanced Malthusian ecology into a system maintaining its balance while it changed over time. Although not agreeing with Charles Lyell's uniformitarianism, Buckland cited the Principles of Geology with respect. The treatise was the major general view of paleontology produced in Britain in the period; Buckland's own new contributions were on mollusks, especially the mechanical contrivances (for example, syphons) used in chambered shells.

His Bridgewater treatise was Buckland's last sustained independent scientific work. He became increasingly interested in Roman archaeology and in the practical applications of geology, particularly the drainage of farms and the use of manures. He spread knowledge of Liebig's work but also advocated the widespread use of the natural phosphates contained in the large beds of coprolites he had identified.

In the period from 1838 to 1840 Buckland at last found a physical cause for a geologically recent catastrophe. Louis Agassiz convinced him that much of his evidence constituted signs of widespread glaciation. He and Agassiz delivered papers to the Geological Society of London in November 1840 on glaciation in Britain, and Buckland gave two more in 1840 and 1841.15 He did not agree completely with Agassiz, however. He thus had the opportunity, of which he took full advantage in his presidential address to the Geological Society in 1841,16 to accuse both the “glacialists” (Agassiz) and the “diluvialists” (by whom he meant especially Roderick Murchison) of “extreme opinions.” He himself compromised by