THE HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AT OXFORD. 25 



No doubt the nature of fossils had awakened a lively 

 interest in very early times. In Babylonia, that ancient 

 mother of Arts and Sciences, many different kinds of 

 fossils must have been familiar objects to the workmen 

 who dug clay for bricks, or hewed stone out of the quarry ; 

 they were probably seen and pondered over by Chaldean 

 philosophers, whose speculations concerning them were 

 afterwards embodied in a mythical cosmogeny. 



In ancient Greece they were well known and under- 

 stood ; but in Christian Europe, up to the sixteenth century, 

 the civilised world was occupied with problems more im- 

 portant than the study of fossils ; and even when in the 

 revival of learning Fracastoro, Leonardo da Vinci, and 

 Pallisy the potter, uttered true words concerning them, these 

 were little heeded, and it was not till after the middle of 

 the seventeenth century that fossils commenced to arouse 

 that serious attention which with increasing earnestness has 

 continued to be given to them ever since. It is in two 

 little books, one entitled Cam's Carcharice Dissecttim Caput, 

 and the other De Solido intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento, 

 published in 1669, that the germ of modern geology is to 

 be found. They were written by the famous Steno, the 

 true founder and father of our science. Steno was by birth 

 a Dane, who occupied for a time the Chair of Anatomy 

 at Padua. Dwelling thus not far from the shores of the 

 x'Vdriatic, he was able to make studies in marine zoology, 

 and of these the most important was his dissection of a 

 shark's head. Steno paid particular attention to its jaws 

 and teeth, which are well worthy of study, as being probably 

 the sharpest cutting instruments naturally produced. But 

 these put him in mind of certain " glossopetrse " which are 

 dug out of the ground in Malta, and on making a careful 

 comparison of the fossil with the recent teeth he convinced 

 himself of their precise similarity. But according to Steno's 

 logic, nothing but a shark could make shark's teeth, and he 

 consequently concluded that the ancient glossopetrse had 

 once belonged to the mouth of a shark, and that the mouth 

 opened into a shark's body behind it. You cannot assert, 

 he remarks, that Nature will make the hand of a man with- 



