Structures and Relationships of Igneous Rocks
Opposed Interpretations of Plutonists and Neptunists
During the first quarter of the nineteenth century the geologic controversy between the Plutonists and Neptunists was at its height; the Plutonists, following the Scotchman, Hutton, holding to the igneous origin of basalt and granite, the Neptunists, after their German master, Werner of Freiberg, maintaining that these rocks had been precipitated from a primitive universal ocean. The Plutonists, although time has shown them to have been correct in all essential particulars, were for a generation submerged under the propaganda carried forward by the disciples of Werner. The “Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth,” a remarkable classic, worthy of being studied to-day as well as a century ago, was published in 1802 by John Playfair, professor of mathematics in the University of Edinburgh and a friend of Hutton, who had died five years previously. This volume was opposed by Robert Jameson, professor of natural philosophy in the same university, who had absorbed the ideas of the German school while at Freiberg and published in 1808 a volume on the “Elements of Geognosy,” in which the philosophy of Werner is followed throughout and even obsidian and pumice are argued to be aqueous precipitates. The authority of the Wernerian autocracy caused its nomenclature to be adopted in the new world, but strong evidence against its interpretations was to be found in the actual structural relations displayed by the igneous rocks.