41 

 ELEMENTARY LECTURE— PALAEONTOLOGY. 



By Walter R. Billings. 



(Read January 20th, 1890.) 



A fossil (from fossus the Latin for "dug up ") Lyell defines as 

 " any body or the traces of the existence of any body, whether animal or 

 vegetable, which has been buried in the earth by natural causes." 



What these natural causes were is a question which has engaged 

 the attention of thoughtful men from early historical times, and so far 

 back as 5 centuries before Christ, Zenophanes of Colophon (500 B.C.), 

 Herodotus, and Empedocles of Agrigentum (450 B.C.), followed some- 

 what later by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). appreciated to some extent the 

 true character of, and gave rational explanations concerning, the presence 

 of these remains. They concluded that when the bottom of the sea had 

 been in a soft condition that the remains were entombed, and that the 

 sea, deserting some lands and invading others, had brought the earlier 

 sea bottom within reach of easy inspection. Aristotle's opinions con- 

 cerning the spontaneous generation of animals, which he believed could 

 originate from moist earth or the slime of rivers was applied by his 

 followers to fossils as well, for it seemed to them a much simpler way 

 of accounting for the remains of animals in the rocks, than the mar- 

 vellous changes of sea and land otherwise required to explain their 

 presence, and this view later on obtained credence more readily, owing 

 to its accordance with the Biblical theory of the creation of man out of 

 the dust of the earth. The Romans merely repeated the ideas of the 

 Greeks on this subject, some holding with the earlier writers, others 

 with Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, that they were produced by 

 a certain plastic virtue latent in the earth until, near the close of the 

 second century, we find Tertullian instancing the remains of sea animals 

 on the mountains far from the sea as proof of the general deluge 

 recorded by Moses. 



During the thirteen or fourteen centuries onward from the close of 

 the second century all departments of knowledge were enveloped in 

 darkness, and no attention was paid to fossils excepting that occasional 

 repetitions of the ideas of the ancients were made without appreciation 

 or any special show of interest. 





