According to Werner, the first formed or oldest rocks were the chemically deposited Primitive strata, including granite and other igneous and metamorphic rocks. On these followed the Transition rocks, the earliest sediments of mechanical origin, and above them the Floetz rocks, a term for the horizontal stratified rocks. These last he said were partly of chemical but chiefly of mechanical origin. Last of all came the Alluvial series. The existence of volcanoes had been pointed out long before Werner’s time by the Italian school of geologists, but as for “the universality and potency of what is now termed igneous action,” all was “brushed aside by the oracle of Freiberg.” Reactions between the interior and exterior of our earth “were utterly antagonistic to Werner’s conception of the structure and history of the earth.” To him, volcanoes were “burning mountains” that arose from the combustion of subterranean beds of coal, spontaneously ignited. The breaking down of the Wernerian doctrines began with two of Werner’s most distinguished pupils, D’Aubuisson de Voisins (1769–1819) and Von Buch. The former in 1803 had accepted Werner’s aqueous origin of basalt, but after studying the celebrated and quite recent volcanic area of Auvergne he recanted in 1804. Here he saw the basaltic rocks lying upon and cutting through granite, and in places more than 1200 feet thick. “If these basaltic rocks were lavas,” says Geikie, “they must, according to the Wernerian doctrine, have resulted from the combustion of beds of coal. But how could coal be supposed to exist under granite, which was the first chemical precipitate of a primeval ocean?” Leopold von Buch (1774–1853), “the most illustrious geologist that Germany has produced,” after two years spent in Norway was satisfied “that the rocks in the Christiania district could not be arranged according to the Wernerian plan, which there completely broke down. Von Buch found a mass of granite lying among fossiliferous limestones which were manifestly metamorphosed, and were pierced by veins of granite, porphyry, and syenite.” Even so, he was not ready to abandon the teachings of his master. After a study of the mountain systems of Germany, however, “he declared that the more elevated mountains had never been covered by the sea, as Werner had taught, but were produced by successive ruptures and uplifts of the terrestrial crust” (Geikie).