34 EVOLUTION AND DOGMA. 



stranger figures which often characterize what is 

 known as landscape marble, in which trees, castles, 

 mountains and other objects are frequently depicted 

 with striking fidelity. 



But in spite of the yoke of authority, especially 

 of Aristotle, which bore heavily upon the students of 

 science, and notwithstanding the generally received 

 teaching, often based on the Bible, to oppose which 

 required considerable courage, new views were slowly 

 but surely supplanting the old. And strange as it 

 may seem, it was not some philosopher who was the 

 first to proclaim the truth, but the celebrated pot- 

 ter, Bernard Palissy. " He was the first," says Fon- 

 tenelle, " who dared assert in Paris that fossil re- 

 mains of testacea and fish had belonged to marine 

 animals." 



Italian Geologists on Fossils. 



A century after Palissy 's time, in 1669, Nicholas 

 Steno, a Danish Catholic priest, showed the identity 

 of the teeth and bones of sharks then living in the 

 Mediterranean with those of fossil remains found in 

 Tuscany. " He also compared the shells discovered 

 in the Italian strata with living species ; pointed out 

 their resemblance and traced the various grada- 

 tions from shells which had only lost their animal 

 gluten, to those petrifactions in which there was a 

 perfect substitution of stony matter." 



And yet, notwithstanding the observations of 

 such men as Steno, Palissy, and others, the old no- 

 tions, according to which fossils were the products 

 of a certain plastic virtue latent in nature, or were 



