Fitton has very truly said that 'the views proposed by Hutton failed to produce general conviction at the time; and several years elapsed before any one showed himself publicly concerned about them, either as an enemy or a friend[20].' Sad is it to relate that, when notice was at last taken of the memoir on the 'Theory of the Earth,' it was by bitter opponents--such 'Philistines' (as Huxley calls them) as Kirwan, De Luc and Williams, who declared the author to be an enemy of religion. Not only did Hutton, unlike the writers of other theories of the earth, omit any statement that his views were based on the Scriptures, but, carried away by the beauty of the system of continuity which he advocated, he wrote enthusiastically 'the result of this physical enquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning--no prospect of an end[21].' This was unjustly asserted to be equivalent to a declaration that the world had neither beginning nor end; and thus it came about that Wernerism, Neptunism and Catastrophism were long regarded as synonymous with Orthodoxy, while Plutonism and 'Uniformitarianism' were looked upon with aversion and horror as subversive of religion and morality. Almost simultaneously with the foundation of the Wernerian Society of Edinburgh (in 1807) was the establishment in London of the Geological Society. Originating in a dining club of collectors of minerals, the society consisted at first almost exclusively of mineralogists and chemists, including Davy, Wollaston, Sir James Hall, and later, Faraday and Turner. The bitter but barren conflict between the Neptunists and the Plutonists was then at its height, and it was, from the first, agreed in the infant society to confine its work almost entirely to the collection of facts, eschewing theory. During the first decade of its existence, it is true, the chief papers published by the society were on mineralogical questions; but gradually geology began to assert itself. The actual founder and first president of the society, Greenough, had been a pupil of Werner, and used all his great influence to discourage the dissemination of any but Wernerian doctrines--foreign geologists, like Dr Berger, being subsidised to apply the Wernerian classification and principles to the study of British rocks. Thus, in early days, the Geological Society became almost as completely devoted to the teaching of Wernerian doctrines as was the contemporary society in Edinburgh. Dr Buckland used to say that when he joined the Geological Society in 1813, 'it had a very _landed_ manner, and only admitted the professors of geology in Oxford and Cambridge on sufferance.'