278 Palissy, Mitchell, and Ficchsel. 



nor Greek, was the first who dared assert in Paris, 

 and to the face of all the doctors, that fossil shells were 

 true shells, deposited formerly in the sea in the places 

 where they are found, . . . and he stoutly defied all 

 the school of Aristotle to attack his proofs. This man 

 was Bernard Palissy, Saintongeois, as great a physician 

 as unassisted nature can produce.' In 1669, Steno 

 published his remarkable treatise De Solido intra So- 

 lidum naturaliter Contento, in which he demonstrated 

 that plants, shells, and teeth found in rocks are truly 

 organic; and that they were buried in marine sedi- 

 ments, in the same manner that the remains of plants 

 and marine animals are now entombed in modern sea 

 bottoms. Hook, in his Discourse of Earthquakes 

 (1688), maintains like opinions; and he inferred the 

 extinction of species, and the introduction of varieties, 

 consequent on changes in physical geography. Still 

 further, he speaks of the ' records of antiquity which 

 nature has left as monuments and hieroglyphic charac- 

 ters of preceding transactions ; . . . and though it is 

 very difficult to read them, and to raise a chronology 

 out of them, . . . yet 'tis not impossible.' This is 

 the earliest distinct hint of the principle of succession 

 of life in time. 



In 1760, Mitchell, in his Memoir on Earthquakes, in 

 the 'Philosophical Transactions,' shows a clear perception 

 of an order of superposition in strata, but he does not 

 combine it with the fact of a parallel succession of life. 

 About this time matters begin to become more definite, 

 and a physician of Eudelstadt, George Christian Fuchsel, 

 showed a remarkable knowledge both of the succession 

 of stratified formations and of the succession of life 

 in time, and his writings contain even more than the 

 germ of many of the truths that, during the present 



