''^="■1 THE SCIENTIFIC PERIOD. 39& 



the fifteenth century, when Leonardo da Vinci revived it, attacked 

 the current scholastic doctrines, and maintained that the fossils which 

 had been the subject of so much interest in Italy had been living 

 creatures and had once lived in the sea. A century later Sarayna, 

 as we have seen, asserted the organic origin of the Veronese petri- 

 factions, and Pracastorius explained the fossils of the Kircherian, 

 Moscardan, and Calceolarian Museums by assuming that the moun- 

 tains containing them had stood in the water during the time the 

 animals lived, and that these had left their remains on the retreat 

 of the waters. These and all similar voices were, however, drowned 

 amid the angry and senseless discussions of the time. Nicholas Steno, 

 towards the end of the seventeenth century, in a work to which atten- 

 tion has already been called {supra, p. 394, note 96), recognized the differ- 

 ent ages of stratified rocks, and asserted that the oldest rocks contained 

 no fossils. In the posthumous "Protoggea" '^^ of Leibnitz, which must 

 have been written very early in the eighteenth century, a cosmogony is 

 elaborated which recognizes something like the true process of sedi- 

 mentation, but is vitiated entirely by an attempt to harmonize it with 

 the literal six days cosmogony of Moses. Lehmann (1756), whose errors, 

 so far as his conclusions were concerned, we have already mentioned, 

 nevertheless performed a truly pioneer work both for geology and for 

 paleobotany in correctly indicating the relative depth, position, and re- 

 lations of the different strata with their characteristic vegetable remains 

 in the coal region at Ihlefeld. These and a few other like treatises 

 prepared the way for Blumenbach and the sound views which began to 

 prevail at the close of the eighteenth century. The inadequacy of the 

 Flood theory to explain the facts and the conviction that there must 

 have been a series of antecedent revolutions in the floras and faunas of 

 the globe began to inspire research, and promised the fruitful results 

 which, in fact, so soon and so richly followed. 



2. THE SCIENTIFIC PERIOD. 



Having thus rapidly passed in review the long crepuscular period of 

 speculation, conjecture, and groping research which was necessary to 

 precede and prepare for the true advent of science — a period through- 

 out most of which no real science of paleontology could be said to exist, 

 or, if havingaquasi-existence,its zoologic and phytologic branches were 

 as yet for the most part undifferentiated— the scientific period, which, so 

 far at least as plants are concerned, literally began with the beginning 

 of the jJresent century, next claims attention. In the biological sketches 

 which preceded this historical one the chronologic arrangement was 

 adopted, and in this, therefore, was necessarily embraced much of the 

 true history of the science, but, as there stated, this form of treatment 



"8 G. W. Leibnitz. Protogaea, sive de prima facie telluris et antiquiseimse historise 

 vestiglis in ipsis naturae monumentis dissertatio ; ex schedis manuscriptis vlri illastris 

 in lucem edita a C. Soheidio. Gottingse, 1749. § XLV treats of fossil trees and wood ; 

 JXLVI of peat, and § XL VII of the Lnneburg fossil trees. 



