an to assert itself.
The actual founder and first president of the society, Greenough, had
been a pupil of Werner, and used all his great influence to discourage
the dissemination of any but Wernerian doctrines--foreign geologists,
like Dr Berger, being subsidised to apply the Wernerian classification
and principles to the study of British rocks. Thus, in early days, the
Geological Society became almost as completely devoted to the teaching
of Wernerian doctrines as was the contemporary society in Edinburgh.

Dr Buckland used to say that when he joined the Geological Society in
1813, 'it had a very _landed_ manner, and only admitted the professors
of geology in Oxford and Cambridge on sufferance.'

But, gradually, changes began to be felt in this aristocratic body of
exclusive amateurs and wealthy collectors of minerals. William Smith,
'the Father of English Geology'--though he published little and never
joined the society--exercised a most important influence on its work. By
his maps, and museum of specimens, as well as by his communications, so
freely made known, concerning his method of 'identifying strata by their
organic remains,' many of the old geologists, who were not aware at the
time of the source of their inspiration, were led to adopt entirely new
methods of studying the rocks. In this way, the accurate mineralogical
and geognostical methods of Werner came to be supplemented by the
fruitful labours of the stratigraphical palaeontologist. The new school
of geologists included men like William Phillips, Conybeare, Sedgwick,
Buckland, De la Beche, Fitton, Mantell, Webster, Lonsdale, Murchison,
John Phillips and others, who laid the foundations of British
stratigraphical geology.

But these great geological pioneers, almost without exception,
maintained the Wernerian doctrines and were firm adherents of
Catastrophism. The three great leaders--the enthusiastic Buckland, the
eloquent Sedgwick, and the indefatigable Conybeare--were clergymen, as
were also Whewell and Henslow, and they were all honestly, if
mistakenly, convinced that the Huttonian teaching was opposed to the
Scriptures and inimical to religion and morality. Buckland at Oxford,
and Sedgwick at Cambridge, made geology popular by combining it with
equestrian exercise; and Whewell tells us how the eccentric Buckland
used to ride forth from the University, with a long cavalcade of mounted
students, holding forth with sarcasm and ridicule concerning 'th