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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