Ill 



THE NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY 



WILLIAM SMITH AND FOSSIL SHELLS 



inVER since Leonardo da Vinci first recognized the 

 C true character of fossils, there had been here and 

 there a man who realized that the earth's rocky crust 

 is one gigantic mausoleum. Here and there a dilet- 

 tante had filled his cabinets with relics from this mon- 

 ster crypt ; here and there a philosopher had pondered 

 over them questioning whether perchance they had 

 once been alive, or whether they were not mere 

 abortive souvenirs of that time when the fertile matrix 

 of the earth was supposed to have 



44 teemed at a birth 



Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms, 

 Limbed and full grown." 



Some few of these philosophers as Robert Hooke and 

 Steno in the seventeenth century, and Moro, Leibnitz, 

 BufTon, Whitehurst, Werner, Hutton, and others in the 

 eighteenth had vaguely conceived the importance of 

 fossils as records of the earth's ancient history, but the 

 wisest of them no more suspected the full import of the 

 story written in the rocks than the average stroller in 

 a modern museum suspects the meaning of the hiero- 

 glyphs on the case of a mummy. 



It was not that the rudiments of this story are so 



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