FOREWORD 



The Science of the Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno 



In reading the Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno one should remember 

 that the essay was written near the middle of the seventeenth century, 

 when scientific observation was hardly thought of. All knowledge 

 concerning the causes of natural phenomena was generally supposed 

 to have been given by God directly to man, and the message was 

 strictly guarded by the church. Giordano Bruno, who denied that 

 there had been a universal deluge, and who had brought forward 

 evidence that a change had taken place in the distribution of land 

 and sea, was burned at the stake for heresy. More than a century 

 later, and a half a century after Steno wrote, de Maillet, in order to 

 express his conviction that the rocks of the earth were marine deposits, 

 thought it necessary to disguise his name in the anagram Telliamed 

 and to allow his views to be published only after his death. 



In view of these conditions Steno's Prodromus is remarkable for 

 its generally untrammelled reasoning, although the concluding pages 

 of the essay are given over to a somewhat labored effort to prove 

 that his views are . not incompatible with Scripture, and that the 

 written word has supplemented his observation. It seems doubtful, 

 however, that he would have escaped persecution had he not been a 

 devout Catholic and, moreover, under the protection of a powerful ' 

 prince, the Grand Duke Ferdinand II. Some indication of the 

 atmosphere of Florence in Steno's time may be gained from Vin- 

 centius Viviani's certificate appended to i]\e Prodromus and approving 

 it for publication, "since I have recognized in it a perfectly sincere 

 manifestation of the Catholic faith and of good morals, as in the very 

 candid author, I have thought the same worthy of being entrusted 

 to type" (p. 271). 



Steno is the pioneer of the observational methods which dominate 

 in modern science, but he was destined to pass away and be almost 

 forgotten before the methods which he used were to be adopted by 

 students of science. If we except Leonardo da Vinci, who like Steno 

 was a Florentine by adoption and who antedated him by a century 



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