Benjamin Silliman.

significantly (except in the level of detail), the interpretation of what the rocks mean is often very different.

Interest in geology as a serious pursuit of study began in the early 1700s in Europe and a century later in Connecticut and the rest of the New World. Little mention of geologic science is found in the writings of the first 200 years following colonization. The earliest study of Connecticut geology was carried out in the summer of 1806 by Benjamin Silliman, then 27 years old and Yale University's first and only professor of chemistry and natural history. Five years before, Silliman was about to complete a law degree when Timothy Dwight, president of Yale and a close family friend, asked him if he would like to drop his law career to teach chemistry and natural history at Yale. As President Dwight explained, the country already had lawyers aplenty. Although Silliman had no background in either chemistry or natural history, he agreed and spent the next few years studying science in Philadelphia, London, and Edinburgh. (But to be on the safe side, Silliman completed his law degree first.) His 1806 study, entitled "Sketch of the Mineralogy of the Town of New Haven ' " was the first effort by a promising young scientist and was the beginning of both his own career and the geologic exploration of Connecticut. In the years that followed, Silliman developed into a truly gifted teacher and perhaps the most influential scientist in America. Probably his most notable accomplishment was the establishment in New Haven of the American Journal of Science, the oldest American scientific journal still in continuous publication.

In his 1806 study, Silliman recognized most of the features of the New Haven area considered important by today's geologists. He mentioned brownstone, traprock, the very different rocks of the uplands to the east and west, and the cover of loose surficial sediments on top of the bedrock. Silliman saw the land in much the same way as today's geologists see it, but his interpretations of these observations were very different indeed.

Probably the most important contrast between the interpretations of early and modern geologists is in the different sense of time. In the early Keith century, geologists believed the world to be quite young and essentially unchanged from the time of creation. Silliman put it this way

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