The defection of Buckland was especially felt by the orthodox
party. His ability, honesty, and loyalty to his profession, as
well as his position as Canon of Christ Church and Professor of
Geology at Oxford, gave him great authority, which he exerted to
the utmost in soothing his brother ecclesiastics. In his
inaugural lecture he had laboured to show that geology confirmed
the accounts of Creation and the Flood as given in Genesis, and
in 1823, after his cave explorations had revealed overwhelming
evidences of the vast antiquity of the earth, he had still clung
to the Flood theory in his _Reliquiae Diluvianae_.
This had not, indeed, fully satisfied the anti-scientific party,
but as a rule their attacks upon him took the form not so much
of abuse as of humorous disparagement. An epigram by
Shuttleworth, afterward Bishop of Chichester, in imitation of
Pope's famous lines upon Newton, ran as follows:
"Some doubts were once expressed about the Flood:
Buckland arose, and all was clear as mud.
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