Palaeontology. 163 



ber, that the long dispute as to the organic or inorganic 

 character of Eozoon canadense has just ended at the close 

 of the nineteenth century. Ancient 



(2) The learned tell us, on the authority Opinions, 

 of Origen, that Xenophanes of Colophon, about 500 B.C., 

 observed fossil fish remains in the rocks near Syracuse 

 and Paros, and regarded them as remains of fishes which 

 had been entombed when these parts of the earth were 

 under water. 



(3) Another characteristically ancient view, which 

 both Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus countenanced, 

 though they did not wholly adopt it, was, that fossils 

 were expressions of the earth's plastic virtue results of 

 spontaneous generation which had not succeeded in 

 coming to the surface. 



(4) The discovery of many hippopotamus bones in 

 Sicily led Empedocles (about 450 B.C.) to regard this 

 area as a battlefield between the gods and the Titans, 

 and to interpret the bones as those of the extinct giants. 

 Here the true idea of fossils glimmered for a moment, 

 and was lost for much more than a millennium. 



It was in Italy, where shells abound in the rocks, 

 that a revival of independent interest in fossils was first 

 strongly marked. The artist and thinker Mediaeval 

 Leonardo da Vinci, born in 1452, protested Opinions, 

 vigorously against the current traditional beliefs, main- 

 taining that fossils were what they seemed to be 

 remains of animals which had once lived. In France, 

 Da Vinci's common sense found a supporter in Bernard 

 Palissy (1580), said to have been "the first to assert in 

 Paris, that fossil shells and fishes had once belonged to 

 marine animals ". 



The industrious accumulation of collections, and the 

 cataloguing of these, began to make the traditional 

 views less acceptable, but the truth had a slow dawn. 

 Steno, a Dane, professor of anatomy in Padua, showed 

 (1669) by actual comparison that the teeth of a living 

 Mediterranean shark were identical with those found 

 fossil in Tuscany, that fossil cockles and modern cockles 

 had much in common, and made for the first time the 

 suggestive observation that the oldest rocks contained 



