250 Epitome of the Progress of Natural Science, 



his opinion, that the fossil shells had not only belonged to living 

 animals, but that the Noachic deluge had no agency in bringing 

 them there. Fallopio, a professor of anatomy at Padua, even 

 taught that some Elephants' tusks, dug up at Puglia, were earthy 

 concretions. Mercati, who, in 1574, published some figures of 

 fossils preserved in the museum of the Vatican, declared that they 

 owed their forms to the influence of the heavenly bodies. In 

 1580, Palissy, a French writer, " On the origin of springs from 

 rain water," was the first, according to Fontenelle, to declare in 

 Paris, that organic remains had once been vitalized. The Ita- 

 lians, however, in the 17th century, continued to lead in geolo- 

 gical inquiries, and Colonna and Steno, although they conceded 

 the position of fossil remains to be owing to the Noachic deluge, 

 contended for their previous existence. In like manner, the 

 interesting work of Scilla, a Sicilian painter, on the fossils of 

 Calabria, published in 1670, with engravings, is a mixture 

 of sound opinions, restrained by what he thought due to popu- 

 lar prejudice. Quirini, in a work on fossil testacea, in 1676, 

 contended that the deluge could not have brought fossils into the 

 situation in which some of them were found, and was the first to 

 doubt its universality. In England, in 1677, Dr. Plot, in his 

 " Natural History of Oxfordshire," attributed fossils to the * plas- 

 tic virtue' before spoken of. Lister, the conchologist, in 1678, 

 thought them either " terriginous," or representing extinct 

 animals. 



Robert Hooke, M* D. in his " Discourse of Earthquakes," writ- 

 ten in 1688, expresses many opinions, which obtain at this time. 

 Speaking of organic remains found at great elevations, he says, they 

 might have been raised there by those earthquakes " which have 

 turned plains into mountains," &c.,&c. ; he therefore was opposed 

 to the hypothesis which accounted for fossils by the deluge. Ray, 

 an able naturalist, and cotemporary with Hooke, placed a bar- 

 rier in the way of his own vigorous mind, and of his sound views 

 of physical science, by conceding to the prevailing theological 

 opinions. Another cotemporary, Woodward, who by found- 

 ing a chair at Cambridge — now filled by the Rev. Adam Sedge- 

 wick — has indirectly a claim to be considered a benefactor to 

 geological science, entertained the most extravagant notions of the 

 flood, teaching that the whole solid fabric of the globe had been 

 dissolved in it, and that the strata were the result of the general 



