William Buckland - Bridgewater Treatise

Bridgewater Treatise

He was commissioned to contribute one of the set of eight Bridgewater Treatises, "On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation". This took him almost five years' work and was published in 1836 with the title Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology. His volume included a detailed compendium of his theories of day-age, gap theory and a form of progressive creationism where faunal succession revealed by the fossil record was explained by a series of successive divine creations that prepared the earth for humans. In the introduction he expressed the argument from design by asserting that the families and phyla of biology were "clusters of contrivance":

The myriads of petrified Remains which are disclosed by the researches of Geology all tend to prove that our Planet has been occupied in times preceding the Creation of the Human Race, by extinct species of Animals and Vegetables, made up, like living Organic Bodies, of 'Clusters of Contrivances,' which demonstrate the exercise of stupendous Intelligence and Power. They further show that these extinct forms of Organic Life were so closely allied, by Unity in the principles of their construction, to Classes, Orders, and Families, which make up the existing Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms, that they not only afford an argument of surpassing force, against the doctrines of the Atheist and Polytheist; but supply a chain of connected evidence, amounting to demonstration, of the continuous Being, and of many of the highest Attributes of the One Living and True God.

In response, computing pioneer Charles Babbage produced his "Ninth Bridgewater Treatise".

Following Charles Darwin's return from the Beagle voyage, Buckland discussed with him the Galapagos Land Iguanas and Marine Iguanas. He subsequently recommended Darwin's paper on the role of earthworms in soil formation for publication, praising it as "a new & important theory to explain Phenomena of universal occurrence on the surface of the Earth—in fact a new Geological Power", while rightly rejecting Darwin's suggestion that chalkland could have been formed in a similar way.