EASTMAN : DESCRIPTIONS OF BOLCA FISHES. 5 



in which he refers to the occurrence of fossils, and agrees with Pom- 

 ponius Mela (whose Cosmograjjhy he quotes) in considering them as 

 having belonged to living bodies. A passage is also said to occur in 

 Book YIII. of the Filocopo, by the same author, in which fossils are 

 mentioned, and the inference is drawn from them that the land had 

 been submerged beneath the sea ; but Brocchi,^ who is authority for 

 this statement, appears to have been mistaken in his reference. 



Sixteenth Century. Very few Cinquecentisti appear to have in- 

 quired into the significance of fossils. The first to claim our attention 

 is Alexander ab Alexandro (1461-1523), a learned Neapolitan juris- 

 consult, concerning whom little is known save for personal statements 

 interjected amongst a mass of miscellaneous information in his Dies 

 Geniales.^ In Book Y., chapter ix., of this peculiar work, which first ap- 

 peared at Rome in 1522, the author recalls having seen in the moun- 

 tains of Calabria, at a considerable distance from the sea, divers sorts of 

 marine shells heaped together and embedded in a variegated hard 

 marble, so that they formed one mass : " quas quidem ossea et non 

 lapideas esse, et quales in litoralibus vadis inspicimus, facile erat cernere,^^ 

 as he remarks. He refers to the statement of Herodotus ^ concerning 

 the presence of marine shells in the hills of Egypt and over the Libyan 

 desert, from which the Greek geographer had inferred that the sea 

 formerly covered that whole region ; and a like explanation is applied 

 by him to Calabria. 



According to Brocchi and Lyell, both of whom have furnished ex- 

 cellent accounts of the development of geological science in Italy, 

 Alessandro anticipated by a long interval the theory advanced by 

 Burnet and Whiston in England, which explained the waters formerly 

 covering the land as having been drawn off in consequence of a change 

 in the inclination of the earth's axis of rotation. But such a theory 

 implies an understanding of the Copernican cosmogony, which Ales- 

 sandro certainly did not possess, and as no such suggestion as is attrib- 

 uted to him can be found in the Dies Geniales, the statement is 

 probably an error. Nevertheless, Alessandro is deserving of credit for 



1 Brocchi, G., Discorso sui progress! dello studio della conchiologia fossile in 

 Italia, prefixed to liis Conchiolorjia Fossile Subappenina, Vol. I. p. iv. Milan, 1814. 

 Other early references to petrifactions are given by G. Lami in his Hodoeporicon 

 of Chariton and Hippophilus (Deliciae Eruditorum, Vol. X., p. 43, passim). Florence, 

 1741. 



- Alexandri ab Alexandro, Gertialium Dierum, libri sex. There is a Paris 

 edition of 1589, and a Leyden edition of lG7o, in two volumes. 



3 History, Lib. II. cap. xiii. 



