408 HISTORY OF SCIENCE. 



gestiveness of his speculations. He followed Palissy in asserting that 

 fossils were truly animal remains. Nature had never, he thought, in 

 a playful mood, formed in stone useless imitations of living things. 

 Hooke observes that many species of animals found fossil in England 

 were no longer to be met with living ; and though he considers it not 

 unlikely that such species may still inhabit the depths of the sea, he 

 suggests that some species may have become entirely extinct, and con- 

 nects their disappearance from the earth with the great convulsions 

 which, according to his idea, had been produced by earthquakes. It 

 was, according to Hooke, the operations of earthquakes " which have 

 turned plains into mountains, and mountains into plains, seas into land, 

 and land into seas, made rivers where there were none before, and swal- 

 lowed up others that formerly were, etc., and which since the creation 

 of the world have wrought many changes in the superficial parts of the 

 earth, and have been the instruments of placing shells, bones, plants, 

 fishes, and the like, in those places where, with much astonishment, 

 we find them." 



Ray, the naturalist (page 238), proposed in 1692 a theory of the 

 changes the earth had undergone, which in its general outline much 

 resembled that of Hooke. But Ray was the first English writer who 

 traced the effects of running water, and of the action of the sea upon 

 the shores, in carrying down the materials of the land. WOODWARD, 

 a contemporary of Hooke and of Ray, examined carefully many of the 

 British strata, and specimens he collected are still preserved at Cam- 

 bridge as arranged by himself. Woodward, and certain other writers 

 of that period, were too biassed by their preconceived physico-theo- 

 logical views to elucidate new truths. Hutchinson and others ob- 

 jected even to Newton's theory of gravitation, because they could not 

 find it in the Bible, which they maintained comprised a perfect system 

 of natural philosophy. MORO (1687 17..), an Italian, attributed 

 (1740) the formation of strata to the effects of earthquakes, which 

 changed seas into lands and lands into seas ; and his ideas were a few 

 years later (1749) expounded by GENERELLI, a learned Carmelite friar. 

 Generelli shows that continents and mountains are continually being 

 worn down by running water, and this gives rise to the following ob- 

 servations : " Is it possible that this waste should have continued for six 

 thousand, and perhaps a greater number of years, and that the moun- 

 tains should remain so great, unless their ruins had been repaired? Is 

 it credible that the Author of Nature should have founded the world 

 upon such laws as that the dry land should for ever be growing smaller, 

 and at last become wholly submerged beneath the waters? Is it 

 credible that, amid so many created. things, the mountains alone should 

 daily diminish in number and bulk, without there being any repair of 

 their losses? This would be contrary to that order of Providence 

 which is seen to reign in all other things in the universe. Wherefore 

 I deem it just to conclude that the same cause which, in the beginning 



