INTRODUCTION. I/ 



means of good illustrations to an ever-increasing number of 

 observers. The works of Aldrovandi, Athanasius Kircher the 

 Jesuit, Sebastian Kirchmaier, Alberti, Balbini, Geyer, Hartley, 

 and many others in the seventeenth century contain some very 

 good figures, and extended the knowledge of the fossils 

 found in various European localities. The fossils were, 

 however, treated usually as mineral curiosities, or as illusions 

 of nature, sometimes as forms called forth in the earth by 

 vis plastica or some other force, sometimes compared with 

 living mussels, snails, sea-urchins, plants, etc., and named 

 accordingly. 



Probably the greatest representatives of this literature are 

 the Englishmen Lister and Lhuyd (Luidius) and the Swiss 

 Nikolaus Lang. Martin Lister 1 had an excellent knowledge 

 of living conchylia. He had also observed that certain rocks 

 are present over a definite extent of surface, so that maps might 

 be constructed with respect to the distribution of different 

 kinds of rock, and further, that the fossil bivalves and snails 

 differed in the different kinds of rock. He therefore laid 

 down the important principle that the different rocks might 

 be distinguished according to their particular fossil contents, 

 although, strange to say, he thought the rocks themselves had 

 the power to produce the different forms of fossils. Lister 

 warmly combated the idea that the fossils could have proceeded 

 from animals (Philos. Trans. Roy. Soc. London, 1671). Never- 

 theless, he illustrated living and fossil conchylia side by side 

 with one another, in order to demonstrate their resemblance, 

 at the same time writing in the text, that the fossil conchylia 

 were mere rough imitations of the real forms imitations 

 produced in the rocks by some unknown causes. 



The English antiquary, Edward Lhuyd (Luidius), described 

 a thousand species of British fossils in a long and beautifully 

 illustrated work. Lhuyd's theory of " Aura seminalis " strongly 

 recalls the fanciful doctrines of Anaximander and Theophrastus. 

 In a letter, "De fossilium et foliorum mineralium origine," to the 

 famous zoologist John Ray, Lhuyd sets forth how the fossils 

 have developed from moist seed-bearing vapours which have 

 risen from the seas and entered into the strata of the earth. 



1 Lister was born at Radcliff in 1638, studied in Cambridge, and was 

 highly respected in York and London as a medical man. In 1698 he 

 accompanied the English ambassador, Lord Portland, to Paris, in 1709 

 became house physician to Queen Anne, and died 1711. 



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