THE PRODROMUS 21 j 



In more recent periods the difficulty of the ancients was 

 pressed with less insistence, since almost all were concerned 

 with tracing out the origin of the bodies mentioned. They 

 who ascribed them to the sea accomplished this result: they 

 proved that bodies of this character could not have been pro- 

 duced by any other agency. They who attributed these bodies 

 to the land, denied that the sea could have covered the places 

 where they were found, and were wholly engaged in praising the 

 forces of a Nature of which they had little knowledge — forces 

 fitted to produce anything whatsoever. Perhaps a third opinion 

 may properly be admitted, in accordance with which a part of 

 the bodies under consideration is regarded as attributable to the 

 land, and a part to the sea. Nevertheless there is deep silence 

 almost everywhere concerning the doubt of the ancients, except 

 that some make mention of floods, and a sort of immemorial 

 succession of years, but merely in passing and, as it were, in 

 P. 8. treating another subject. In order, therefore, to satisfy, to the 

 best of my ability, the laws of analysis, I wove and unwove the 

 web of this research, and scrutinized its various details again 

 and again, until I saw no difficulty left any longer in the rea,d- 

 ing of authors, or in the objections of friends, or in the ex- 

 amination of places, which I had not either solved, qr at least 

 determined, from facts hitherto known to me, to what extent a 

 solution was possible. 



The first question was, whether Glossopetrae Melitenses ^ were 



' The same thing happened in the case of the Mediterranean. For the sea, after having 

 been filled by the rivers emptying into it, had brolcen a passage through at the Pillars (Gibral- 

 tar), and the places formerly covered with shoal water, were left dry by this eruption. He 

 (Strato) finds the cause for this, first, in the fact that the bottoms of the Atlantic and of the 

 Mediterranean are not on the same level, and, secondly, in the fact that even now a sand-bank 

 runs beneath the water from Europe to Libya, bearing witness to the time when the Mediter- 

 ranean and the Atlantic were not united. Strato also said that the waters around Pontus are 

 very shallow, whereas off Crete, Sicily, and Sardinia they are very deep. . . . 



' Egypt, too, he said, was formerly covered by the sea as far as the marshes near Pelusium 

 (Tineh) and Mount Casius (El-Kas) and Lake Sirbonis (Lake Sebaket-Bardoil) . Even now, 

 when salt is dug in Egypt, the beds are found beneath layers of sand and mixed with fossil 

 shells, as if the country had formerly been under the sea, and all the region around Casiura 

 and Gerra (Maseli) had a shoal extending to the Arabian Gulf.' 



1 The literal translation of Glossopetrae Melitenses is 'tongue-stones from Malta.' In the 



treatise Canis Carchariae Dissectum Caput (1667), Steno was not free from doubt, as to the 



origin of the ' stones,' as shown by the following passage (Maar, op.cit.. Vol. II, pp. 127, 128) : 



No decision has yet been reached regarding the \2x^ix glossopetrae.zs, to whether they are 



shark's teeth or stones formed in the earth. Some have maintained that substances found in 



