216 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. FT. in. 



markable work on petrifactions in the rocks; and in 1670 

 Scilla, an Italian painter, published a treatise on the fossil 

 shells and other remains in the rocks of Calabria, and made 

 some beautiful drawings of these remains, which may now 

 be seen in the Woodwardian Museum at Cambridge. Next 

 we find our own scientific men, Hooke, the naturalist Ray, 

 and a famous geologist Dr. Woodward, speculating why the 

 earth's crust is made up of different layers, one above 

 another, with different fossils in each. Woodward (1695) 

 made a careful collection of specimens of chalk, gravel, coal, 

 marble, and other rocks, together with the fossils which he 

 found in them ; and these also are in the Cambridge Mu- 

 seum. But all these men, though they did good work, still 

 held very erroneous notions about the way in which the 

 crust of the earth had been formed. 



The first geologist who gave any real explanation of the 

 facts was Lazzaro Moro, an Italian, born at Friuli in Lom- 

 bardy, in 1687. Moro pointed out, as Woodward had done 

 before him, that the different strata lie in a certain order one 

 above the other, and that within them are imprisoned fossil 

 fishes, shells, corals, and plants, in all countries, and at all 

 heights above the sea. The rocks, said Moro, writing in 

 1740, must have been soft when these fossils were buried in 

 them, and some must have been near rivers, because they con- 

 tain fresh-water animals and plants ; while others contain only 

 marine fossils, and must have been laid down under the sea. 

 It is clear, then, that they must all have been formed in lakes 

 or seas, and have been raised up by earthquakes, or thrown 

 out by volcanoes, such as we see taking place from time to 

 time in the world now. This explanation, though rough, was 

 true, and Moro deserves to be remembered as one of the 

 first men who led the way towards a true study of the earth. 



