The Burnet of Textbooks

Burnet emerges from our textbooks as the archetype of a biblical idolatry that reined the progress of science. We may extend this tradition of commentary right back to the other two protagonists of this book—to James Hutton, who wrote of Burnet, "This surely cannot be considered in any other light than as a dream, formed upon a poetic fiction of a golden age" (1795,1,271); and to Charles Lyell, who remarked that "even Milton had scarcely ventured in his poem to indulge his imagination so freely . . . as this writer, who set forth pretensions to profound philosophy" (1830, 37).

No one professed the empiricist faith in purer form than the leading Scottish geologist, Archibald Geikie. His Founders of Geology (1897) promoted the tradition of heroes as field workers, and villains as speculators. As a "standard" history of geology for several generations, this book became the source for much continuing textbook dogma. Geikie included Burnet's book among the "monstrous doctrines" that infested late-seventeenth-century science: "Nowhere did speculation run so completely riot as in England with regard to theories of the origin and structure of our globe" (1905 ed., 66). Geikie then presented his empiricist solution—that facts must precede theory—to this retrospective dilemma: "It was a long time before men came to understand that any true theory of the earth must rest upon evidence furnished by the globe itself, and that no such theory could properly be framed until a large body of evidence had been gathered together" (1905 ed., 66).

Horace B. Woodward, in his official history of the Geological Society of London (1911, 13) placed Burnet's work among the "romantic and unprofitable labors" of its time. From a peculiar source came the most interesting of all critiques. George McCready Price, grandfather and originator of the pseudoscience known to its adherents by the oxymoron "scientific creationism," considered Burnet a special threat to his system. Price wished to affirm biblical literalism by an inductive approach based strictly on fieldwork. On the old principle that the enemy within is more dangerous than the