DR. HENRY WOODWARD ON EAST ANGLIAN GEOLOGY. 
A *7*7 
4/ / 
IV. 
EAST ANGLIAN GEOLOGY— HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
DAWN OF THE SCIENCE OF GEOLOGY. 
By Henry Woodward, LL.D., F.R.S., F.G.S., F.Z.S., 
President, N. & N. Nat. Soc. 
Read 25 th November, 1902. 
The Eastern Counties appear to me to offer a favourable country 
for the manufacture of good home-made geologists, and I am 
convinced that the subsoil is accountable for the circumstance. 
Indeed it is an interesting fact, that wherever scientific observers 
have arisen in the old days, before geology became established as 
one of the natural sciences, such observers were first led to reflect 
by noticing around them the presence of fossil shells and other 
marine organisms scattered over the surface, often on high elevations 
far removed inland away from the present sea-margin, as they may 
frequently be seen in Norfolk and Suffolk to-day. But even men 
of intelligence do not view the phenomena of nature from the same 
stand-point, and thus it happens that whilst a few able men in the 
early days convinced themselves that such remains indicated the 
former presence of the sea over those lands, the larger number 
accounted for them by saying that such bodies were turns naturce, 
and had never been alive — or that they were incontrovertible 
evidence of the Noachian Deluge. 
In Italy, one of the earliest intelligent observers was Steno, 
a Dane, Professor of Anatomy at Padua, who in 1669 dissected 
a recent Shark, and showed that its teeth were like those of the 
fossil Sharks found on the Tuscan hills, and that the fossil shells 
found there resembled those living in the adjacent sea. 
Another early writer suggested that the extinct bivalve shells 
known as Pecten jacobceus found on the Tuscan hills, were dropped 
VOL. VII. II 
