) See the Works of Granville Penn, vol. ii, p. 273.

The defection of Buckland was especially felt by the orthodox party. His
ability, honesty, and loyalty to his profession, as well as his position
as Canon of Christ Church and Professor of Geology at Oxford, gave him
great authority, which he exerted to the utmost in soothing his brother
ecclesiastics. In his inaugural lecture he had laboured to show that
geology confirmed the accounts of Creation and the Flood as given
in Genesis, and in 1823, after his cave explorations had revealed
overwhelming evidences of the vast antiquity of the earth, he had still
clung to the Flood theory in his Reliquiae Diluvianae.

This had not, indeed, fully satisfied the anti-scientific party, but as
a rule their attacks upon him took the form not so much of abuse as of
humorous disparagement. An epigram by Shuttleworth, afterward Bishop
of Chichester, in imitation of Pope's famous lines upon Newton, ran as
follows:

"Some doubts were once expressed about the Flood: Buckland arose, and
all was clear as mud."

On his leaving Oxford for a journey to southern Europe, Dean Gaisford
was heard to exclaim: "Well, Buckland is gone to Italy; so, thank God,
we shall have no more of this geology!"

Still there was some comfort as long as Buckland held to the Deluge
theory; but, on his surrender, the combat deepened: instead of epigrams
and caricatures came bitter attacks, and from the pulpit and press came
showers of missiles. The worst of these were hurled at Lyell. As we have
seen, he had published in 1830 his Principles of Geology. Nothing
could have been more cautious. It simply gave an account of the main
discoveries up to that time, drawing the necessary inferences with plain
yet convincing logic, and it remains to this day one of those works
in which the Anglo-Saxon race may most justly take pride,--one of the
land-marks in the advance of human thought.

But its tendency was inevitably at variance with the Chaldean and other
ancient myths and legends regarding the Creation and Deluge which
the Hebrews had received from the older civilizations among their
neighbours, and had incorporated into the sacred books which they
transmitted to the modern world; it was therefore extensively "refuted."

Theologians and men of science influenced by them insisted that his
minimizing of geological changes, and his laying stress on the gradual
action of natural causes still in force, endangered