2i 4 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. FT. m. 



so fast in the eighteenth century, that it was impossible for 

 such ignorance to continue long. People could not go on 

 digging wells and making mines in all parts of the world 

 without being struck by the way in which the different strata, 

 or layers of rock, are arranged in the earth's crust, nor 

 without noticing the fossil shelly plants, and bones of 

 animals which they found buried at great depths. 



At first they were very unwilling to believe that these 

 remains had ever belonged to living animals and plants, and 

 they tried to imagine that they were only stones resembling 

 shells, leaves, etc., which had been in some way mysteriously 

 created in the earth. Then, when this absurd idea was 

 given up, they next inquired whether a universal flood 

 might not have spread them over the land ; but though this 

 opinion was upheld for more than a hundred years, yet it 

 was clear to all those who really studied the subject that it 

 could not account for the many layers of different fossils 

 deeply buried in the earth. 



First Attempts to study the Fossil Remains and the 

 Beds containing them. At last, little by little, there arose 

 men who adopted the more sensible plan of studying the 

 different formations in the crust of the earth before making 

 theories about them. Bernard de Palissy, the maker of the 

 famous French pottery, was the first to assert, in 1580, that 

 the fossil shells were not only real sea-shells left by the 

 waters of the ocean, but that they belonged to marine 

 animals which had lived and died on the spots where they 

 were found, and had not been strewn at random over the land 

 by a deluge; then, in 1669, we find Steno, a Dane, writing 

 a remarkable work on petrifactions in the rocks ; and in 

 1670 Scilla, an Italian painter, published a treatise on the 

 fossil shells and oilier remains in the rocks of Calabria, and 

 made some beautiful drawings of these remains, which may 



