50 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
which certainly had deceived its collector. It is so well preserved, and 
so resembles a billet of wood, that even to-day a casual observer might 
have taken it for a piece of weathered drift-wood. While this must be 
one of the earliest known specimens actually collected and used by man, 
we can hardly say that its study led to any direct advance. Nor did the 
well-known specimen of Cycadeoidea etrusca, Capellini, found in a tomb 
twenty miles west of Bologna, signify anything more than that it had 
struck the curiosity of some ancient Etruscan. Neither the utilitarian 
outlook of the prehistoric Scot nor the curiosity of the Etruscan had any 
recorded result in further research. Other known uses of fossil plants by 
the ancients, such as the employment of logs of fossil wood by the Egyptians 
in making roads over the desert, and in fabricating ornaments, or the tools 
made out of the Rhynie chert, are likewise without any real significance 
from a geological point of view. They are all interesting, but have not 
led to further developments. 
PALZZONTOLOGICAL IDEAS IN CLASSICAL TIMES. 
Among the Greek and Roman philosophers there is no doubt that 
many were acquainted with fossils, and znter alia with fossil plants, but 
again the geological import of these objects was hardly considered. They 
were accepted as of organic origin, and their presence in rocks was attributed 
variously to former inundations of the land or a vis plastica. 'That they 
were remnants of former worlds never seems to have struck them. IJnun- 
dations of the land, or elevations of the land above the sea by earthquakes 
or volcanic action, they knew, and even successions of such changes,? 
but the great past history of the earth was still an unknown volume. Yet 
the naturalness of their deductions is often very striking. This applies’ 
perhaps with greatest force to the Geography of Strabo. The work was 
written for the instruction of administrators, and the sanity of the dis- 
cussions and final conclusions, together with the fair-minded criticism of 
the authorities he quotes, is startling when one considers the ideas of many 
of his contemporaries, and of his predecessors. He is perhaps too generous 
to Homer, whom he seems to consider infallible, and the depository of all 
knowledge: but in this he only follows most of the Greek philosophers. 
The works of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny, Herodotus and Seneca, 
that are extant, are all excellent in their way as illustrating here and there 
geological ideas prevalent before, and just after, the beginning of Christian 
times ; but Strabo excels them all. 
Yet, with all their knowledge of the processes of nature, and of the 
plants and animals that inhabitated the earth, there does not appear a 
single hint of any former phase different from the present. In fact, although 
many geological processes and phenomena were known, there was no 
science of Geology. Yet the ancients have left us a legacy in their desire 
to find a natural explanation for the origin of everything. Curiosity to 
explore and explain nature seems to have been their watchword. For 
nearly 1,000 years from the beginning of the Christian era geological 
2 Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses. 
