INTRODUCTION. 19 



Fabio Colonna l upheld similar views in Italy. He tried to 

 show that the " Glossopetren" were not tongues of serpents but 

 the teeth of dog-fish, which occurred along with remains 

 of marine bivalves and snails in certain strata ; while in 

 others he recognised the remains of terrestrial animals and 

 plants. 



During the seventeenth century Nikolaus Steno and other! 

 Continental geologists contested the erroneous and ludicrous 

 ideas of their contemporaries ; while in England, Robert 

 Hooke, John Ray, and John Woodward guided scientific 

 thought to the true explanation of fossil remains. Leibnitz, 

 the founder of the Academy of Science in Berlin, and 

 Scheuchzer, the Swiss geologist, further advanced the scientific 

 research of fossils, so that, by the middle of the eighteenth 

 century, no man of science and letters believed that fossils 

 might be products of the earth itself. 



The English physicist and mathematician, Robert Hooke 

 (1635-1703), was one of the most brilliant original thinkers 

 of his own or any age. It was he who for the first time } 

 suggested the use that might be made of fossils, in 

 revealing the historical past of the earth. In an important ' 

 work upon earthquakes written in i688, 2 he stated that fossil 

 molluscs deserved to be regarded as historical, since they 

 represented monuments no less valuable than coins and 

 manuscripts, but he added that it certainly would be ex- 

 tremely difficult to construct a chronology of the earth upon 

 the evidence of fossils. Many fossil Ammonites, Nautilids, 

 and other conchylia undoubtedly differed from known living 

 forms, but he said it had to be remembered how scanty was 

 the existing knowledge of marine animals, especially of those 

 which inhabited the greater ocean depths. Hooke, however, 

 inclined to the opinion that the fossils of unknown forms 

 might really be extinct species, annihilated by earthquakes.. 

 He regarded it as certain that a number of fossil species had! 

 been confined to definite localities. And from the occurrence 

 of fossil Chelonias and large Ammonites in the strata of . 

 Portland Isle, Hooke concluded that the climate of England ) 

 had once been much warmer. This was explicable, in 

 Hooke's opinion, upon the assumption either that the earth's 



1 Osservazioni siigli animali aqnatici e terrtstri, 1616. 



2 This treatise is published in the Opera posthuma Robert Hooke, ed. 

 Rich. Waller, London, 1705. 



