SOME FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF EARTH HISTORY 159 
fossils never represented living creatures, but were mere sports of 
nature, liisus naturae, lapides sui generis, lapides figurati. Those 
who could not accept this hypothesis had recourse to Noah’s 
flood, although the impossibility of this explanation is equaled 
only by that of the other. But the “ Diluvialists ” formed an 
important theologico-scientific school during the 16th, 17th and 
18th centuries, although they were combated by such men as 
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), the sculptor-engineer, Nicolas 
Steno the Dane (1631-1687), who was among the first to see that 
the earth’s strata constitute a chronological record, and Robert 
Hooke the Englishman (1635-1703), who argued against the 
insufficiency of the Noachian Deluge in length, just as some other 
scholars had come to question its universality. 
During this period there were devised a number of cosmogonies, 
whose chief aim was to harmonize natural events with theological 
interpretations and whose chief characteristic seems to have 
been their disregard for natural phenomena. The limitations 
under which their authors labored, both as to their knowledge 
of Nature and as to the time within which they must compress the 
history they treated, resulted in many ludicrous suppositions, 
such as the one already mentioned, that the immense thicknesses 
of fossiliferous rocks were formed during the Flood. 
There is a group of writers who deserve special mention be- 
cause their theories carry the first foreshadowings of the truly 
scientific attempts to explain origins and forces. These men 
were Descartes • (1596-1650) , Leibnitz (1646-1716) and Buffon 
(1707-1788) who all held that the planets were originally glowing 
bodies like the sun. Buffon went further and conceived of the 
planets as having formed a part of the sun’s mass, whence they 
were separated by the shock of a comet. While these men were 
limited by lack of data regarding the composition and mechanics 
of the heavenly bodies, their honest efforts to really use such 
knowledge as they had must command our admiration. Buffon 
indeed looked forward to the time when the oceans would erode 
away and cover the lands and when the planet would become 
gradually refrigerated and unfit for human occupancy. 
During the latter part of the 18th century there were probably 
no scholars who influenced geological thought as profoundly 
though in totally divergent directions as did the German Werner 
(1749-1817) and the Scotchman Hutton (1726-1797), founders 
