348 cosmos 



the former beds of streams* In the geognostic character of 

 the soil of Tuscany, Steno recognized convulsions which must, 

 in his opinion, be ascribed to six great natural epochs (Sex 

 sunt distinct Etruriae facies ex praesenti facie Etruriae col- 

 lectse). The sea had broken in at six successive periods, and, 

 alter continuing to cover the interior of the land for a long 

 time, had retired within its ancient limits. All petrifactions 

 were not however, according to his opinion, referable to the 

 sea ; and he distinguished between pelagic and fresh-water 

 formations. Scilla, in 1670, gave drawings of the petrifac- 

 tious of Calabria and Malta ; and among the latter, our great 

 anatomist and zoologist, Johannes Muiler, has recognized the 

 oldest drawing of the teeth of the gigantic Hydrarchus of Al- 

 abama (the Zeuglodon celoides of Owen), a mammal of the 

 great order of the Cetacea.t The crown of these teeth is 

 lbrmed similarly to those of seals. 



Lister, as early as 1673, made the important assertion that 

 each kind of rock is characterized by its own fossils, and that 

 " the species of Murex, Tellina, and Trochus, which occur in 

 the stone quarries of Northamptonshire, are indeed similar to 

 those existing in the present seas, but yet, when more closely 

 examined, they are found to differ from them." They are, he 

 says, specifically different.^ Strictly conclusive proofs of the 

 truth of these grand conjectures could not, however, be ad- 

 vanced in the then imperiect condition of descriptive morphol- 

 ogy. We here indicate the early dawn and speedy extinction 

 of light prior to the noble palseontological researches of Cuvier 

 and Alexander Brongniart, which have given a new foun to 

 the geognosy of sedimentary formations. Lister, whose at 



.-turi. Essai snr les Outn-ages Physico-mathimatiques de Leonard 

 de Vinci, 1797, % 5. No. 124. 



t Agostiuo Scilla. La vana Speculazinne disingannata dal Senso. Nap., 

 1670. tab. xii., fig. 1. Compare Joh. Miiller, Bericht icber die von Herrn 

 Koch, in Alabama Gesammelten Fossilen Knockenreste seines Hylrackus 

 (the Basilosaurus of Harlan, 1835; the Zeuglodou of Owen, 1839; the 

 vtlodon of Gratelonp, 1840; the Dorudon of Gibbes, 1845), read in 

 Hoyal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, April June, 1847. These 

 valuable fossil remains of an ancient world, which were collected in 

 the State of Alabama (in Washington county^iear Clarksville), h:ve 

 become, by the munificence of our king, thejjmiperty of ihe Zoological 

 Museum at Berlin since 1847. Besides the remains found in Alabama 

 aud South Carolina, parts of the Hydrarchus have been found in Eu- 

 rope, at Leosrnau near Bordeaux, near Liuz on the Danube, aud, in 

 1670. in Malta. 



+ Martin Lister, in the Philosophical Transactions, vol. vi., 1671, No. 

 lxxvi., p. 2283. 



5 See a luminous expositic n of the earlier progress of palaeontologies! 



