Early Discoverers XXVII: Announcement of Glaciation in Scotland William Buckland (1784-1856)

Abstract

BEFORE 1840 Louis Agassiz had twice visited Great Britain upon invitations to discuss fossil fish, the subject on which his fame then rested.By the autumn of 1840 his great work , Etudes sur les glaciers (Agassiz, 1840[a] ) was safely in final press, and in September and October 1840 he traveled with vVilliam Buckland through Scotland, where he discovered traces of glaciation and demonstrated them to Buckland.Buckland was President of the Geological Society of London and Professor of G eology at Oxford, and in 1845 h e becam e D ean of Westminster.His route and discoveries h ave been d etermined in great d etail by Davies ( 1968) .On 4 November 1840, Agassiz read a paper before the G eological Society of L ondon "On glaciers, and the evidence of their having once existed in Scotland, Ireland , and England" (L.Agassiz, 1840[b]; E. C. Agassiz, 1885, vo!.I, p .309; Marcou , 1896, vol.I, p. 168-74 ; North , 1943, p. 22 ).Buckland had written on 15 October 1840 to Agassiz telling of Lyell 's acceptance of the glacial theory (E.C .Agassiz, 1885, vo!.I , p. 309) .A letter written by Buckland on 4 October 1840, here reproduced, is his announcement of the discovery.It was sent the day after Agassiz had written to Robert J ameson about the glacial origin of the famous parallel roads of Gl en R oy (Davies, 1968, p. 137).As far as I know the letter h as, except fo r one sen ten ce, never been published.The le tter had b een loaned to the biographer of Buckland , who barely m entioned the announcement as "1840" and guoted only one senten ce of the letter (Gordon, 1894, p. 14; Davies, 1968, p. 137).The letter is not m entioned in M a rcou's or in Mme Agassiz's biographies of Agassiz, because it was n ever known to them.The letter also provides som e details of the routes taken by Dr and Mrs Buckland and Agassiz during 3-7 October 1840, and it strongly suggests that Agassiz then traveled by the most direct route from Aberdeen to Glasgow.The exact routes for these days have been less certain than those for the remainder of Agassiz's 1840 tour (Davies, 1968, p. 138-39) .The letter is on one folded sheet 1 I by 17 cm, apparently enclosed in a small envelope 8.5 by 5.5 cm, which was presumably discarded .Fortunatel y, a p encil note establishes that Flemingwas the r ecipient.The Rev. Professor J ohn Fleming (1785-1857) was Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, 1834-45 , and in 1845 h e became Professor orNatural Science at the Free University in Edinburgh, having moved there as a result of his adherence to the Free Church at the time of the Disruption in 1843 (Duns, 1859) .The note on the fron t of the letter is in the handwriting ofRalph Richardson, who was secretary of the Geological Society of Edinburgh and the husband of the granddaughter of Fleming.It was found inserted at page lxxv of the copy of Duns' memoir of Fleming, which appears to have belonged to Richardson , as this copy has other letters inserted and many penciled notes .This book itself is of glacial interest because the second half (p. 1-102), consisting of Fleming's Lithology, is a lmost entirely on surficial materials, with detailed sketch es and sections showing the anatomy of the glacial deposits.However, Fleming was uncertain of the origin of the deposits.Although h e had entertained the two chief early proponents of the glacial theory almost at the very moment of their discovery of glacial action in Scotland, Fleming (always a stubborn man) did not really accept the glacial origins of the deposits.He asserted

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