Even Hutton’s clear reasoning, firmly buttressed by concrete examples, was insufficient to overcome the belief in ready-made or violently formed valleys and original corrugations and irregularities of mountain surface. The pages of the Journal show that the principles laid down by Playfair were too far in advance of the times to secure general acceptance. In the first volume of the Journal, the gorge of the French Broad River is assigned by Kain to “some dreadful commotion in nature which probably shook these mountains to their bases,”[7] and the gorge of the lower Connecticut is considered by Hitchcock (1824)[8] as a breach which drained a series of lakes “not many centuries before the settlement of this country.” The prevailing American and English view for the first quarter of the nineteenth century is expressed in the reviews in this Journal, where the well-known conclusions of Conybeare and Phillips that streams are incompetent to excavate valleys are quoted with approval and admiration is expressed for Buckland’s famous “Reliquiæ Diluvianæ,” a 300–page quarto volume devoted to proof of a deluge. The professor at Yale, Silliman, and the professor at Oxford, Buckland, saw that an acceptance of Hutton’s views involved a repudiation of the Biblical flood, and much space is devoted to combating these “erroneous” and “unscientific” views. For example, Buckland says:[9] “... The general belief is, that existing streams, avalanches and lakes, bursting their barriers, are sufficient to account for all their phenomena, and not a few geologists, especially those of the Huttonian school, at whose head is Professor Playfair, have till recently been of this opinion.... But it is now very clear to almost every man, who impartially examines the facts in regard to existing vallies, that the causes now in action, mentioned above, are altogether inadequate to their production; nay, that such a supposition would involve a physical impossibility. We do not believe that one-thousandth part of our present vallies were excavated by the power of existing streams.... In very many cases of large rivers, it is found, that so far from having formed their own beds, they are actually in a gradual manner filling them up. Again; how happens it that the source of a river is frequently below the head of a valley, if the river excavated that valley? The most powerful argument, however, in our opinion, against the supposition we are combating, is the phenomena of transverse and longitudinal valleys; both of which could not possibly have been formed by existing streams.” Phillips writes in 1829:[10] “The excavation of valleys can be ascribed to no other cause than a great flood of water which overtopped the hills, whose summits those vallies descend.”