NATURE OF FOSSILS 221 



course of Nature. As Bacon has observed, "It is prob- 

 able that Prometheus, when he first struck the flint, 

 must rather have marvelled at the spark than expected 

 it." With the advance of science we become less open 

 to surprises, and the number of discoveries due to some 

 happy chance constantly tends to diminish ; such, on the 

 other hand, are peculiarly characteristic of science in its 

 infancy. It would appear that the strange phenomenon 

 which first directed attention to the problems of geology 

 was the occurrence of curious stones, such as are now 

 termed fossils, that, having a likeness to the hard parts 

 of animals and plants, are yet found, to the surprise of 

 the observer, lying embedded in the substance of rocks 

 which form the interior of a country often at a great dis_ 

 tance from the sea, and sometimes at a great elevation 

 above it, as in the case of fossils in the Himalaya, which 

 are obtained from that lofty mountain chain at a height 

 of 16,000 feet. 



No doubt the nature of fossils had awakened a lively 

 interest in very early times. In Babylonia, that ancient 

 mother of arts and sciences, many different kinds of 

 fossils must have been familiar objects to the workmen 

 who dug clay for bricks, or hewed stone out of the 

 quarry ; they were probably seen and pondered over 

 by Chaldean philosophers, whose speculations concern- 

 ing them were afterwards embodied in a mythical 

 cosmogony. 



In ancient Greece they were well known and under- 

 stood ; but in Christian Europe, up to the sixteenth 

 century, the civilised world was occupied with problems 

 more important than the study of fossils ; and even when 

 in the revival of learning Fracastoro, Leonardo da Vinci, 

 and Pallisy the potter uttered true words concerning 

 them, these were little heeded, and it was not till after 

 the middle of the seventeenth century that fossils com- 



