enemy without, Price wanted to distance himself as far as possible from men like Burnet, who told their scriptural history of the earth from their armchairs:

Their wild fancies deserve to be called travesties alike on the Bible and on true science; and the word "diluvial" has been a term to mock at ever since. Happy would it have been for the subsequent history of all the sciences, if the students of the rocks had all been willing patiently to investigate the records, and hold their fancies sternly in leash until they had gathered sufficient facts upon which to found a true induction or generalization. (Price, 1923, 589)

This characterization persists into our generation. Fenton and Fenton, in their popular work Giants of Geology (1952, 22), dismiss Burner's theory as "a series of queer ideas about earth's development," and misread his mechanism as a series of divine interventions: "Thomas Burnet thought an angry God had used the sun's rays as a chisel to split open the crust and let the central waters burst forth upon an unrepentant mankind." Davies (1969, 86), in his excellent history of British geomorphology, states that the scrip- tural geologies of Burnet and others "have always had a peculiar fascination for historians as bizarre freaks of pseudo-science."

Science versus Religion?

The matrix that supports this canonical mischaracterization of Burnet is the supposed conflict, or war, between science and religion. Though scholars have argued ad, nauseam that no such dichotomy existed—that the debate, if it expressed any primary division, separated traditionalists (mostly from the church) and modernists (including most scientists, but always many churchmen as well)—this appealing and simplistic notion persists.

The locus dassicus of "the warfare of science with theology" is the two-volume work (1896) of the same name by Andrew Dickson