32 | Great Geologists
William Buckland
Oxford University has a rich heritage of
geological research and teaching. The first
Reader of Geology at the university was
the charismatic, some might say eccentric,
William Buckland. His appointment at the
university made him the first professionally
appointed British geologist. Buckland’s
contributions to geology far transcend
those of his university appointment. He
collected and described a great number
of fossils including the jaw of what would
subsequently become to be understood as
a dinosaur. He pioneered the understanding
of cave faunas and discovered the remains
of what would be one of the oldest humans
in Europe. In his later career he was much
taken with the importance of glaciation in
shaping the landscape. Possessing a degree
in divinity he spent much of his career
attempting to reconcile the geological and
biblical records. By doing so he popularized
geology and paved the way for the flowering
of the science in the mid-19th century.
Buckland was born in Axminster, Devon
in 1784. In 1801 he won a scholarship to
Corpus Christi College in Oxford and studied
divinity with the intention of becoming an
Anglican clergyman. Having obtained his
degree he became a fellow of the college
in 1809 and was ordained in the same year.
Notwithstanding his theological interests
an obsession with geology was taking root.
He made numerous field excursions around
the British Isles collecting fossils and noting
the rock types present. Such interests
led the university to make him Reader in
Minerology in 1813. By 1819, with no less
a personage than the Prince Regent as his
benefactor, he was appointed to the newly
created position of Reader in Geology. By all
accounts his lectures were delivered in an
ebullient manner and were judged as to be
so popular and entertaining by the students
of the university that he could charge 2
Guineas to attend them. Henry Acland, as a
student, attended Buckland’s lectures and
described his lecturing style thus: “He paced
like a Franciscan preacher up and down
behind a long showcase ... He had in his hand
a huge hyaena’s skull. He suddenly dashed
down the steps - rushed skull in hand at the
first undergraduate on the front bench and
shouted ‘What rules the world?’ The youth,
terrified, threw himself against the next back
seat, and answered not a word. He rushed
then on to me, pointing the hyaena full in my
face - ‘What rules the world?’ ‘Haven’t an
idea’, I said. ‘The stomach, sir’, he cried (again
mounting the rostrum) ‘rules the world. The
great ones eat the less, the less the lesser
still.’”
In his inaugural lecture as Reader in Geology
he spoke of how geology could be reconciled
with the Bible and offered nine ‘proofs’
that the world had been overwhelmed by
catastrophic flooding which at the time he
correlated with Noah’s Flood. His evidence
included fossil fauna from caves, superficial
deposits of sediments and rocks transported
far from their source – erratics. Over time
his position of the origin of such features
would shift and he developed a more subtle
reconciliation between the Bible and the
geological record, ultimately viewing Earth
history as a series of separate creations.
His first book published in 1823 was
Reliquiae Diluvianae (‘Relics of the Flood’)
which focused on his excavations at Kirkdale
Cave in Yorkshire, where he found an
assemblage of bones belonging to extinct
species such as mammoth and wooly