The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (GSA Memoir 203)

Contents

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii Introduction: The revolution in geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Gary D. Rosenberg 1. The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Gary D. Rosenberg 2. Geochemical concepts in Isaac Newton’s early alchemy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 William R. Newman 3. From alchemy to science: The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment in Spanish American mining and metallurgy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Joaquín Pérez Melero 4. Signs and symbols in Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 William C. Parcell 5. Niels Stensen—Steno, in the world of collections and museums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Elsebeth Thomsen 6. The Path to Steno’s synthesis on the animal origin of glossopetrae . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Kuang-Tai Hsu 7. Hooke–Steno relations reconsidered: Reassessing the roles of Ole Borch and Robert Boyle. . . 107 Toshihiro Yamada 8. Prompters of Steno’s geological principles: Generation of stones in living beings, glossopetrae and molding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Troels Kardel 9. The age of Earth in Niels Stensen’s geology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 August Ziggelaar 10. Nicolaus Steno and the problem of deep time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Alan H. Cutler 11. Nicholas Steno and René Descartes: A Cartesian perspective on Steno’s scientific development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen

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Contents 12. On the origin of natural history: Steno’s modern, but forgotten philosophy of science . . . . . . . 159 Jens Morten Hansen 13. Nicholas Steno’s way from experience to faith: Geological evolution and the original sin of mankind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Frank Sobiech 14. The Scientific Revolution and Nicholas Steno’s twofold conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Gian Battista Vai 15. Benjamin Franklin and geology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Dennis R. Dean 16. Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Stephen M. Rowland 17. “Very vain is Science’ proudest boast”: The resistance to geological theory in early nineteenth-century England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Noah Heringman 18. Charles S. Peirce and the “Light of Nature” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Victor R. Baker 19. Theory choice in the historical sciences: Geology as a philosophical case study . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 William L. Vanderburgh 20. Natural theology, design and law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277 Michael T. Ghiselin

Dedication To those who love the history and philosophy of geology: The past is the key to the present and the future.

Preface In 2004, I had the good fortune to have a sabbatical in Copenhagen, Denmark, where I met many of the scholars devoted to the life and accomplishments of Nicholas Steno, aka Nicolaus Steno, Niels Stensen, and Nicolai Stenonis, preeminent Baroque polymath and founder of modern geologic thought. I was in Europe to pursue the connection between Steno and art history. Within art history, I believe, lie clues that explain the breadth of Steno’s accomplishments in fields that we now consider unrelated, anatomy and geology, but which were then considered integral exemplars of the same geometric paradigm of nature. My European colleagues urged me to organize a conference on Steno, which I did in 2006 as then chair of the History of Geology Division, Geological Society of America (GSA). The conference took place as a Topical Session at the Society’s national convention in Philadelphia, and it was titled, “From the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment: Emergence of Modern Geology and Evolutionary Thought from the 16th to the 18th Century.” The participants in that symposium urged me to assemble this volume, and, happily, most have contributed to it. Their papers are joined by additional important contributions that I solicited. I would like to thank all of the contributors for their dedication, enthusiasm, and patience, which made this volume possible, and, on their behalf, I would also like to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments. William Brice, then secretary-treasurer and primum mobile of the History of Geology Division, GSA, offered encouragement, experience, and advice that were invaluable during my tenure as chair of the division and subsequently as editor of this volume. Several sources generously provided travel funds for overseas participants in the Philadelphia symposium. These were principally the Mary C. Rabbitt Bequest of the History of Geology Division and funds from the International Division, GSA. I am especially grateful to Bill Brice for facilitating the former and to Yildirim Dilek, then chair of the International Division, GSA. The Paleontological Society kindly contributed travel funds as well, as did two anonymous donors. The Mary C. Rabbitt Bequest further contributed to the production of this volume. These funds have facilitated publication of images in color. Marion “Pat” Bickford, GSA books editor, clearly communicated GSA policies and expectations and generously gave advice and feedback. Pat and GSA publications staff kindly facilitated numerous publication matters. During my sabbatical in Denmark, Dr. August Ziggelaar, S.J., translator of Niels Stensen’s student notebook Chaos, set me thinking about Steno’s accomplishments in the context of their times. We also had some brief discussions about the metaphysics of the “anthropic cosmos,” although, in 2004, I had no idea the concept would subsequently figure in some of the papers in this volume. John Damsager, keeper of Archivum Nicolai Stenonis, the Steno Archives, which now reside in the St. Andrew’s Library of the Catholic diocese, Copenhagen, generously made their resources available for my research. His Excellency Bishop Czeslaw Kozon, bishop of Copenhagen, generously donated the Steno Archives’ duplicate holdings to the C.K. Leith Library of Geology and Geophysics, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Robert H. Dott Jr., emeritus professor of geology, University of Wisconsin–Madison, recognized the importance of those volumes and, with Marie Dvorzak, head of the library, arranged for their acceptance. Decades ago, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, it was Bob Dott who encouraged my thinking about the history of geologic thought, and I hope that this volume proves to be an appropriate tribute to Bob’s kind mentorship, which has been so influential and beneficial to the community of scholars devoted to the history of our science. Finally, I thank Arthur Mirsky, professor emeritus of geology, Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis, for continual encouragement and invaluable advice. Gary D. Rosenberg Department of Earth Sciences Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis vii

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Introduction: The revolution in geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment Gary D. Rosenberg† Department of Earth Sciences, Indiana University–Purdue University, 723 West Michigan Street, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202, USA

Keywords: history and philosophy of geology, Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Nicholas Steno, Michel Foucault, evolution, spatial relationships, Western materialism, anthropic principle, democracy. Christendom. Since it changed the character of men’s habitual mental operations even in the conduct of the non-material sciences, while transforming the whole diagram of the physical universe and the very texture of human life itself, it looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodization of European history has become an anachronism and encumbrance.

DEFINING THE PERIOD The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked a period when Western Europeans began to view nature in a profoundly new way as a result of the rediscovery of Greek and Arabic geometry at the beginning of the Renaissance, roughly the period of the fifteenth century. Subsequently, during the Enlightenment or Age of Reason of the eighteenth century, the emergent sciences were frequently cited as a model for bringing rationalism, individualism, and democracy, as well as modern technology, to Western civilization. As such, the period was one of the most momentous in Western civilization, giving rise to not only science and technology, but encompassing and transforming all aspects of Western culture, shaping what we now know as modern Western civilization. The question considered in this volume is how modern geologic and evolutionary thought emerged from this milieu. It is an important question because, to rephrase Santayana’s famous dictum (a little more positively than he himself said it), those who remember the lessons of the past are able to benefit from them. Butterfield (1965, p. 7–8) gave what now is regarded as the canonical assessment of the Scientific Revolution:

The Scientific Revolution is said to have started with Vesalius and Copernicus in 1543 and to have ended with Newton in 1687. In 1543, Flemish anatomist Vesalius published his treatise on human anatomy, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, and its companion, the Epitome, which “established with startling suddenness the beginning of modern observational science and research” (Saunders and O’Malley, 1950, p. 9). Also in the same year, Nicholas Copernicus sent a letter now known as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) to Pope Paul III informing him that Earth and other known planets travel around the Sun, contrary to the Churchsanctioned model that the Sun and planets travel around Earth. Copernicus and later Galileo’s model overturned the Aristotelian cosmos composed of a series of concentric zones, each inhabited by one of the known planets, the Earth’s Moon, the Sun, and stars, each walled off from adjacent zones, and each subject to its own laws. As for Isaac Newton, in 1687, he published his Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in which he defined the laws of motion of the planets in the solar system and thereby established the isotropy of space, the uniformity of natural laws throughout the cosmos. Dear (2001) advocated dividing the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into the Scientific Renaissance (roughly the sixteenth

Since [the Scientific Revolution] overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval †

E-mail: [email protected].

Rosenberg, G.D., 2009, Introduction: The revolution in geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 1–11, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(00). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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century), when scholastics (academics) tried to fit observations about nature into the classical, Aristotelian paradigm that the Church had embraced, and, on the other hand, the true Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, when naturalists used new knowledge about nature to overturn the old paradigm. Other historians take a more extreme position and question the existence of the Scientific Revolution altogether. Dobbs (2000) was one who asserted that the Scientific Revolution is merely a construct of modern historians who project their preconceptions onto the past. She deplored the canonization of a few men and the uncritical use of their accomplishments to define the period. For example, she asserted that scholars ignore the fact that the heliocentric theory antedates Copernicus and that both Copernicus and Galileo tried to fit heliocentrism into the Aristotelian paradigm in order to ensure that the Church would sanction it. Similarly, she claims that Newton’s accomplishments are tainted by his interest in alchemy and his theism. Dobbs concludes that such oversights produce the mistaken impression that modern science evolved over a scant 200 yr period along a straight line of discoveries that progressively corrected medieval misconceptions about nature. Most historians take the position that the Scientific Revolution was real (Osler, 2000; Westfall, 2000). Westfall (2000) cited evidence that development of the modern perspective of nature accelerated in the seventeenth century. For one, experimentation as a means of learning about nature was rare before the seventeenth century but was common by the end. Further, new instruments, most notably the microscope and telescope, proliferated during the period, and they facilitated revolutionary observations and experimentation. Third, few people accepted heliocentrism in 1600, but by 1650, almost everyone who was educated did, and the change marked a fundamental paradigm shift from a model of the cosmos based on the microcosmmacrocosm analogy to a mechanistic, inertial concept that became central to modern science after Newton. Fourth, science came to be used to support Church doctrine, a symptom of the weakening of religion (just as it is with contemporary creationism). During the Middle Ages, Church doctrine would have been regarded as inherently true, and it would have been unheard of to call upon extrinsic evidence for proof. Newton’s ascription of the order of the cosmos to divine will and his belief that one could find connections between the first cause (God) and laws of nature (Hansen, this volume) would be one example. In addition, only a few natural laws such as Archimedes’ principle had been known since classical times (Zilsel, 1978), and they were not used to justify doctrine, let alone to question it (Westfall, 2000). Fifth, scientific societies began to assert political power at religion’s expense by the end of the seventeenth century, and the authority of science quickly pervaded Western Europe, a change that Westfall states accounts for the “whole meaning” of the Enlightenment (and which hence accounts for the stretch of time encompassed in the present volume). Nevertheless, the revisionist advocacy of a holistic approach to the history of science in general is a point well taken for consideration of the origin of modern geoscience in particular. Tra-

ditional renditions of the Scientific Revolution pigeonhole the canonical figures of the Scientific Revolution and their accomplishments into specific sciences (typically ignoring the emergence of geology), obscuring the fact that these personae were interested in larger issues that were as much a part of the establishment of paradigmatic geology as they were of chemistry, physics, astronomy, or biology. Conversely, the period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the focus of the most important general histories of the science (e.g., Rudwick, 2005), and consideration of its antecedents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (and earlier, e.g., Oldroyd, 1996) is less common. However, the entire body of Western civilization underwent a revolution in spatial relationships. Mankind’s perspective on his place in the cosmos, his position in the affairs of fellow human beings, and his locus in the environment underwent a profound reformation from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The revolution in understanding the structure of Earth and of living things, the configuration and integration of Earth and life processes, and the conceptualization of their evolutionary ramifications was all part of the flow, all integral to the emergence and growth of democracy during the Enlightenment, and thus all fundamental to Western culture today. It is this historical context that is the unifying theme of this volume. THE SPATIAL REVOLUTION IN WESTERN EUROPE The Scientific Revolution involved the geometrization of nature, a process begun at the close of the Middle Ages when Western Europe rediscovered Greek and Arabic geometry and used it to understand the structure and spatial relationships of nature as never before. All modern sciences including geology were the outcome. Geology deals with spatial relationships over a wide range in scale, from the level of the cosmos, to the solar system, the whole Earth, its zones, and down to crystals and their unit cells, so one would expect that the history of geology would intertwine with the history of understanding spatial relationships in the other sciences. A traditional, linear or steppingstone rendition of the Scientific Revolution might relate that Copernicus and Galileo’s use of geometry to define their heliocentric models of the solar system started the process of redefining nature, and moreover redefined Western Europeans’ understanding of their place among the heavens, displacing mankind from the center, especially with the Protestant Reformation, and subsequently transforming all of Western civilization. However, geometry in the sense of a rational system for understanding spatial organization was “the tide that raised all ships,” revolutionizing all aspects of Western culture. Stated a little differently, the revolution in understanding spatial relationships took place at all scales of the human condition. For example, beginning in Italy, Renaissance artists revolutionized the perception of nature with visual perspective, and visual perspective employs the same geometry that transformed accounting and the flow of wealth, land ownership, and organization

Introduction: The revolution in geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment of nation states, navigation, mapping, and artillery (Cosgrove, 1985). When, after its separation from Spain in 1648, Holland adopted a geometric grid system to subdivide land reclaimed from the sea in order to foster private land ownership, the new nation was applying the same geometry that Renaissance artists had used to depict landscape in their paintings and to identify it as an object of scientific study. In turn, the Dutch precedent directly influenced the development of Jefferson’s public land survey system of the late eighteenth century, which not only serves as a template for geologic mapping today but which also democratized land ownership in America “in the spirit of the Enlightenment” (Pattison, 1957). Western civilization changed organically, just as a body’s form, structure, and physiology change allometrically or proportionally as it grows. This is, at any rate, how Michel Foucault (1994) described the revolution in his book The Order of Things, one of the most thought-provoking discussions of the spatial reorganizations that spread throughout Western civilization; it is particularly interesting here because it analogizes the evolution of language, wealth, economy, and government (emergence of democracy) with the evolution of biology (taxonomy, physiology, and the emergence of the concept of biological evolution itself). The structure of pre-paradigmatic geology that emerges from the papers in this volume is compatible with this model. According to Foucault, during the Renaissance, and until the end of the sixteenth century, “resemblance” played a key role in organizing knowledge in Western culture, for example, how the features of the face emulate the sky, how a man’s face is to his body as the face of heaven is to ether, how man’s bones are rocks, veins are rivers, and his baser parts are to hell. These are examples of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy of the cosmos—in other words, the ways in which the human body is an analogy for the cosmos. The period was marked by an interest in signs and sympathies that make resemblances visible; the walnut resembles the head; therefore, the rind of the nut must cure damage to the covering of the skull. Aristotle recognized five elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Ether) and classified heavy things that fall toward Earth when dropped as Earth because he considered that behavior to be an inherent property. Fire rises and becomes humid so is linked to water and air. Nature was organized according to a potentially infinite number of resemblances and may best be conceptualized by “curiosity cabinets,” or collections of diverse natural and man-made objects organized according to rather amorphous Aristotelian concepts or to the manner in which the objects were used (Mordhorst, 2003; Rosenberg, 2006a, 2006b, 2001). They were precursors of our modern museums. The diversity of their contents reflected the diversity of subjects encompassed simultaneously by Renaissance and Baroque minds. Nicholas Steno’s notebook, Chaos, which he compiled as a student at the University of Copenhagen in 1659, is in itself a curiosity cabinet of subjects united, as previously stated, by his interest in geometry (Ziggelaar, 1997; Rosenberg, 2006a, 2006b). Foucault adds that, toward the end of the sixteenth century, the idea of resemblances began to yield to identities, in other

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words, classification based on structural similarities and differences, which were vastly more limited than resemblances. The “organic analogy” between the body and Earth continued into the Enlightenment, but on a newly objective, anatomical basis, and one that no longer privileged the microcosm.1 Hence, it involved a reorganization of conceptual space. The method we now know as taxonomy, classification on the basis of geometric structure and form, developed, and it became the center of knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the fundamental task of discourse was to name things according to their identities. Foucault points out that the spatial considerations of taxonomy are analogous to modern, double-entry bookkeeping, which was codified, if not actually founded, in the Renaissance. Both Leonardo da Vinci and Nicholas Copernicus were involved in its development. Double-entry bookkeeping took a jumbled mass of information pertaining to the exchange of goods and separated and classified it on the basis of profits and loss, income and expenses, or assets and liabilities. Luca Pacioli’s (1494) treatise on mathematics, which Leonardo da Vinci helped to illustrate, included the first definitive writing on double-entry bookkeeping. Triple-entry bookkeeping followed, and it facilitated the understanding of trends in gains and losses or assets and liabilities. In other words, triple-entry bookkeeping added the dimension of time to the taxonomy of assets and liabilities, just as the taxonomy of similarities and differences of objects in nature and of human artifacts was to facilitate the entry of time, or evolution, into the taxonomy of living and nonliving things in nature, as well as to the classification of man-made artifacts in culture. The connection between these apparently disparate entities is that all came to be conceived as material objects, and, once they were identified, they could be described and their evolution conceptualized. According to Foucault, language simultaneously changed. Writing during much of the Renaissance had been used to create theater and mythological histories. Places were defined by their histories, which included every mythological and real event said to have happened there. However, by the seventeenth century, language conveyed an understanding of similarities and differences in the structure of place, and the principal task of naming things was extended to the discourse about place. This involved the emergence of the concept of landscape. Once landscape was identified as an object, its evolution could then be defined (see Rosenberg, this volume). As for Foucault’s discourse on the idea of wealth, before the seventeenth century, the presumed intrinsic (but actually arbitrary and intangible) value of metal was an index of wealth. However, over the course of the seventeenth century, wealth came to define equivalent things, such as an object of desire, a measure of wheat, etc., that entered into circulation as a means to multiply wealth. Wealth, Foucault asserts, became a taxonomic character, the value of which was determined by its distribution among groups on a table of classification, just as a biological character 1 I thank Noah Heringman for this insight and for other invaluable comments on my discussion of Foucault.

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now obtains value from its distribution on a table representing different species of organisms. As the idea of wealth changed consequent to the global explorations of the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, a new merchant class appeared, based first on land ownership and then on transfer of goods. Feudalism gave way to private land ownership, centralized government, and the establishment of nation states. It was during this transformation that modern geologic thought arose. Foucault perceives the end of the eighteenth century to be the culmination of these spatial revolutions. Whereas he recognizes Aldrovandi (1522–1605; see also Vai, this volume) as an early modern taxonomist who was interested in structural characteristics of organisms, he notes that Aldrovandi included resemblances, the legends in which living things were involved, and their allegorical uses and virtues in his taxonomy (Foucault, p. 129). By the time of Linnaeus (1708–1778), “the living being, in its anatomy, its form, its habits, its birth and death, appears as though stripped naked” of these fables (Foucault, p. 129). In other words, living things became constituted solely by their form and structure (geometric attributes) distributed in taxonomic space and relative to one another (a geometric attribute of the collective). “Confronted by the same individual entity” on Linnaeus’ table (Foucault, 1994, p. 134), everyone would be able to understand the description of an object and its identity. Commonly available knowledge is inherently democratic, and Gutenberg’s innovation in printing, the accumulation of natural and humanmade objects in “wunderkammer,” and the emergence of scientific societies, although initially the prerogative of the privileged, ultimately ensured the dissemination of this knowledge. But by the eighteenth century even the boundaries of representational, anatomic categories began to dissolve. Knowledge of anatomy facilitated the comparison of living objects and it also made it possible for naturalists such as Cuvier (1769–1832) to realize that the structure and function of specified organs depended on the structure and function of other organs (e.g., the shapes of teeth were related to the digestive system) and that forms as well as the processes and functions that made life possible had “continuity,” i.e., were distributed across taxonomic categories. Ultimately, organic structures became abstract entities capable of assuming new forms (for example, the idea that the fin evolved to the walking appendage). Although Cuvier rejected the idea of evolutionary continuity in favor of a natural history wherein life was periodically replaced during cataclysmic events, Foucault asserts that Cuvier’s work was nevertheless seminal in “emancipating” life from its taxonomic categories so that it could be distributed over a new spatial-temporal field that we now call evolution. At the same time, there was an emancipation of the human condition. By the eighteenth century, the idea of the circulation of wealth was based on the concept that all wealth springs from land, and it was linked to the idea of population growth and a calculated value for the optimum quantity of coinage. It was understood that goods and money had to circulate in order to

grow wealth, but because multiple kinds of money were kept in circulation, the coinage of relatively high intrinsic (again, presumed) worth was subject to hoarding. This is Gresham’s law, after Thomas Gresham (ca. 1519–1579), and it was known in principle to Copernicus as well (Foucault, 1994, p. 172). In 1776, Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which advocated free trade and capitalism and attacked mercantilism, the idea that nations derived wealth from hoarding metals. For Adam Smith, wealth was equivalent to labor, and division of labor was a means to increase wealth. In other words, wealth became exterior to the presumptuous, intrinsic value of coinage, just as life became emancipated from the table of taxonomy. Although not inherently democratic at first, the circulation of wealth and the opening of property rights among an elite mercantile class did lead to diffusion of power through the population. As wealth circulated across traditional categories and generated new wealth, Foucault stated that “life discovered new powers,” among them, the individual’s potential to change social status, and the ability of social classes themselves to evolve. Whether or not the transformation was a matter of social Darwinism is debatable. The hallmark of the individual in a democracy is his or her potential for change, and that idea grew along with the idea that life and landscape evolve. The idea of evolution is thus inherent to democracy and to deny evolution is to deny a vital characteristic of both life and democracy. THE OBJECT OF EVOLUTION AND THE TENSION BETWEEN CREATIONISM AND DEMOCRACY Given that the Scientific Revolution was a revolution in understanding the spatial relationships and geometric structure of nature and that it was part of a larger spatial reorganization of Western civilization, how do the 20 papers in this volume fit the geoscientific revolution into this framework? The volume is roughly chronological, for it would be paradoxical for a historical science to abandon a sense of sequence, but it is not a steppingstone history of geology, and the brief discussion of the significance of the papers here does not coincide precisely with the order in which they appear. Although the authors did not set out to address Foucault’s work, their contributions do have common themes that are consistent with Foucault’s conceptualization, and his work helps put the volume into perspective. For one, this volume considers geology’s place in the development of Western materialism. Materialism is an interest in the tangible object, its structure, and its spatial and conceptual relationships to other objects. The volume focuses on what Foucault referred to as the historical shift from resemblances to identities, in other words, from a plethora of presumed “inherent” properties of objects with amorphous distinctions to a much more limited classification based on comparisons and contrasts of structure, and, specifically, the emergence of the concepts of the three-dimensional landscape and solid Earth, the descriptive characteristics of which are signs of the processes that shaped

Introduction: The revolution in geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment them and the sequence in which they changed. The papers also engage in a discourse on the cultural changes that accompanied Western materialism as it involved geology. Significantly, these involve geology’s place in the development of Western democracy as well as its relevance to modern cosmology. In his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn (1962) wrote that science progresses in two ways. First, ordinary science accumulates facts and fits them into concepts or paradigms as a means of testing those concepts or paradigms. Second, in extraordinary cases, the facts no longer fit into the paradigm and thus call it into question. This can lead to a crisis or revolution that can lead to establishment of a new structure to accommodate them. This volume shows that during the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, geology acquired a structure that anatomical or anthropomorphic concepts facilitated. It is expressed in two ways, first as an interest in the structural relationships of the human body (a material example of Renaissance humanism), which facilitated emergence of both the concept as well as the description of landscape and solid Earth. Just as during the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution it came to be recognized that the human body consists of organs that are structurally and functionally integrated, so the structural and functional integration of the elements of landscape, such as rivers, lakes, hills, soil, valleys, etc., began to be understood. This structural and empirical analogy replaced an older analogy known as the microcosmmacrocosm analogy (see following). Second, the anthropomorphic theme expressed itself in the metaphysics of geology. The papers in this vein bring geology into the debate about the “anthropic principle,” which generally has been the purview of physics and cosmology. This metaphysics defines the cosmos in terms of the human condition. In one sense, the (“weak”) anthropic principle states that the known structure of the universe is the best of all possible configurations because it was conducive to the fortuitous emergence of life on the best of all possible planets. In another, and subject to considerable debate, is the claim that the universe would not exist if it were not fit for life, and, furthermore, our understanding of nature is successful because the cosmos was constructed to accommodate us. The first version does not a priori require a creator or deny evolution or geologic time. The second is controversial because, at its most extreme, it has been used to argue for a designer or deity, in other words, God, and is not testable. Because geology is the science of landscape, the first question that comes to mind is, How did the concept of landscape appear? The idea of landscape as we now know it did not exist before the Renaissance. It was formalized in the late sixteenth– early seventeenth century when the word “landscape” entered the vernacular in northern Europe. Rosenberg (this volume) shows how Renaissance and Baroque artists depicted landscape and chronicled the development of the concept. He shows that their knowledge of anatomy facilitated their understanding of landscape as an object worthy of depiction and study, and he asserts that this helps to explain how the preeminent anatomist

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of seventeenth-century Europe, Nicholas Steno, became the founder of geology with his study of the structure of the hills of Tuscany. Rosenberg tests this hypothesis by comparing Western Europe’s concept of landscape with China’s. Even though China made significant geological and other scientific discoveries long before Europe entered the Renaissance, China did not develop a geometric sense of either anatomy or landscape until the nineteenth century. Rosenberg holds that this helps to explain why the revolution in geological sciences occurred in Western Europe rather than China, just as scholars have previously explained the occurrence of the larger Scientific Revolution in Western Europe before it occurred in China. Artists of the Italian Renaissance were the first to use geometry to depict nature, and their skill is evident in their illusionistic (“realistic”) portrayal of scientific detail (three-dimensional characteristics) of objects. In this volume, Gian Battista Vai shows that Italian artists painted geologic strata so faithfully that we can today identify the stratigraphic formations they depicted. Vai also makes the point that the rugged Italian landscape that was readily accessible to the perceptive eyes of Italian artists evidently made a deep impression on Steno, who had grown up in the flat lands of little Denmark. Vai also asserts the anatomical analogy with his statement that the interest in nature that Italian artists portrayed in their paintings expressed “a more popular and incarnated Christian religion and a reappraisal of the value of both body and natural world as basic components of the Creation.” Few historians would include Isaac Newton on a short list of the founders of geology along with canonical figures such as Steno and Hutton. Recall also that some revisionists question Newton’s membership on the list of immortals of the Scientific Revolution due to his dalliance with alchemy. One generally thinks of alchemy as an archaic obsession with magic, notably, a search for ways to turn base metals into gold or for magic elixirs to confer immortality. However, these are only part of the story, for alchemy had important structural concerns, as William Newman’s discussion of Isaac Newton’s generally unknown correspondence on alchemy reveals in this volume. Newton’s model of subterranean metal and mineral formation can be read as archaic because it reduces ore formation to the interactions and separation of the essential Platonic elements, Mercury and Sulfur. Nevertheless, Newton’s scheme reveals an interest in spatial relationships of chemical reactions on the scale of the whole Earth conceptualized with “womb-like” characteristics or composed of hylozoic materials after the ideas of Sendivogius, Grasseus, and Varenius. Interestingly, Steno also showed an alchemical interest in Mercury and Sulfur in his student notebook, Chaos, wherein he speculated on the structural relationships that the two elements held as constituents of gold (Ziggelaar, 1997; Rosenberg, 2006a). Moreover, Steno stood shoulder to shoulder with Newton in his reflections in Chaos on the internal structure of Earth (including some evidence of an interest in separation of materials by density; Ziggelaar, 1997; Rosenberg, 2006a). Such parallels remind us that in the seventeenth century, the sciences were not differentiated as they are today; Earth in

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Newton’s model cannot be assumed to have been incidental to the chemical processes he tried to conceptualize. Thus, William Newman’s work on Newton should encourage historians of geoscience to reconsider the history of Newton’s entire oeuvre, traditionally marginalized as “physics” and “mathematics,” for its relevance to geology. For example, few scientific principles have had as broad a relevance for physical geology as has Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation, which defines spatial organization at a range of scales, across which geology operates. The law of gravity explains why water and sediment flow down to the sea and why land erodes to base level; why relatively lightweight mountains float atop denser crust and mantle; why basaltic seafloor is preferentially subducted beneath less dense continental crust causing deep focus earthquakes; why density fractionation occurs at the scale of a magma chamber, a planet, and the solar system; and why convection cells in the outer core rise when they are warm and subside when they are cool and therefore why the outer core is a dynamo that generates a magnetic field. There are not many degrees of separation between Isaac Newton and geology, and thus one is led to wonder whether Newton’s scheme for Mercury and Sulfur activity is his only connection to the history of geoscience. Joaquín Pérez Melero’s paper in this volume is about mining in Spain and its New World colonies, and it introduces the reader to the romantic, anthropomorphic notions of the alchemy of ore generation that native Central and South Americans, as well as Europeans, held in the New World. At the same time, one can see that the paper relates to Foucault’s ideas on economics and the Scientific Revolution. Melero describes Alvaro Alonso Barba’s Art of Metals of 1640 as the last alchemical, but transitional, treatise on mining and ore generation in the Spanish Empire, and he shows that it had an antecedence extending back to Classical times. Interestingly, to quote Melero, Galileo’s telescopic observation of stars and planets figures into Barba’s “discarding the [Aristotelian] belief that there could be only seven metals, each one generated as a result of the influence of a star” (p. 56). Barba rejected this alchemical belief, stating that Galileo’s discovery of new stars meant that either additional metals could be generated or that the stars had nothing to do with the generation of metals. Melero further notes that Francisco Xavier de Gamboa’s Commentaries on Mining Ordinances of 1761 marks a transition to the modern understanding of ore generation and mining practices. Melero informs us, however, that great advances in mining technology and economic geology developed not in Spain but in Central Europe between 1450 and 1550 and involved use of hydraulics and subsurface mapping, which were outcomes of northern and central Europeans’ geometric skills. Melero states that Spain was slow to exploit these advances because Spanish royal authority held tight to ownership of the soil and its contents, and thus there was limited opportunity for private land ownership or private enterprise in Spain. Even Gamboa, who was versed in mathematics and who grasped the imperative of and means to modernization, advocated for the royal prerogative in his duties as a lawyer-administrator in Spanish America. The

huge influx of precious metals from its colonies into Spain, as Melero states, “…[flowed] quickly to European centers of manufacture and banking…[but] Castille retained only inflation and rising prices, pouring its richness abroad without any improvement in the Castillian economy” (p. 54). In Foucaultian terms, the flow of money did little to restructure Spanish land ownership or the flow of political power, quite in contrast to the rise of the merchant class and revolution in land ownership that occurred in Holland as previously mentioned. William Parcell takes a new look at Athanasius Kircher, whom historians of science typically dismiss for his curious assortment of interests including astrology, figured stones, dragons, alchemy, and his odd description of Earth in terms of “a living castrated being…or spherical eunuch” (p. 68). By analyzing Kircher’s “semiotics,” or use of signs to designate empirically derived and religious concepts, Parcell introduces us to the changing language of nature in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. Parcell shows that Kircher was fully capable of distinguishing meaning from observation versus religious interpretation but that some confusion about his standing in the history of science arises from his mixing of sign types (“iconic” or “symbolic,” which support a Divine origin for everything, and “indexical” or more scientifically acceptable types, which however variously call upon natural or supernatural causes) to support his holistic worldview based on the Hermetic philosophy of balance and unity of spiritualistic and naturalistic forces in the cosmos. Parcell thus concludes that Kircher’s writings, which remain largely untranslated, deserve serious reevaluation. For example, Parcell recognizes that the alchemical techniques of heating, evaporating, and hardening that Kircher used to deduce the formation of Earth are some of the same procedures that geochemists use today for the same purpose. Thus, his experimentation helped establish, in Parcell’s words, “the modern laboratory [as a] key to Earth’s past,” which Parcell offers as a corollary to Hutton’s principle of uniformity, “The present is the key to the past” (p. 68). Finally, Parcell notes that Hutton also explicitly employed an analogy of Earth as a living organism in a state of internal equilibrium in his attempt to illustrate how the planet’s dynamic processes work, and he maintains that in this perspective, Kircher is not the idiosyncratic character as generally presupposed. Nicholas Steno has always been regarded as central to the history of geologic thought, and 10 manuscripts in this volume firmly establish that he was a structuralist who made significant contributions to stratigraphy, paleontology, and crystallography because of his skill as a comparative anatomist, which grew from his interest in geometry. Much of Steno’s work remains untranslated and unexamined, and a key document, possibly the expanded version of his Prodromus that he had intended to write, has been lost. Nevertheless, a striking conclusion that the papers in this volume draw from his extant work is that, as far as is known, Steno did not formulate an expansive metaphysics that encompassed his deeply held Catholic beliefs. Elsebeth Thomsen portrays Steno as one of the first modern taxonomists. He was influenced by his visits to the great

Introduction: The revolution in geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment Baroque wunderkammer or curiosity cabinets of Europe, notably in Denmark, Holland, France, and Italy. Wunderkammer were laden with metaphysical associations; for example, displays were organized according to their presumed representation of the Aristotelian elements, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Ether, according to the utility of the objects in them (as evidence of God’s purpose), according to their ostentatious display of an artisan’s creative powers that were held to rival God’s, or according to their composition (animal, vegetable, mineral, which still were in their formative stages of identification). Thomsen shows that Steno was focused on naturalism rather than metaphysics. He was a collector and classifier. Clues to his own collection remain despite the fact that it has been for the most part dispersed. His interest in taxonomy is also revealed in his publications in which he showed his skill as a comparative anatomist. According to Kuang-Tai Hsu, Steno’s ability to demonstrate anatomy and persuade others about the validity of his anatomical inferences was due to his capacity for comparative medical jurisprudence. This involved presentation of evidence based on structure and form in order to contradict opposing theories. For example, Hsu shows that Steno correctly argued that glossopetrae or tongue stones must have grown inside a body because they had growth increments like urinary stones, and that they must have grown inside a shark because they looked like sharks’ teeth, an obvious analogy to the modern mind, but not to the common knowledge of the Baroque era, which called upon plastic forces in sediment as shaping agents. As Hsu states, Steno used similar logic in comparing the occurrence of increments in both urinary stones and glossopetrae on the one hand and the stratification of sediment on the other and correctly concluded that all were formed by a process of accretion. Hsu relates that Steno confirmed this by realizing that glossopetrae produced carbon ash when burned but that the sediment in which they were found did not, so they must have originated from different materials than the material that encased them. Nevertheless, Steno is a transitional figure, and Hsu notes that he also adopted the Baroque analogy of utility (also expressed in wunderkammer displays, as explained previously); Steno concluded that God did not make things that were useless, and because glossopetrae resembled teeth, if powdered and gargled in water, they would be good for cleaning teeth. Toshihiro Yamada discusses Steno’s contributions in the wider context of the work of Robert Boyle, Ole Borch, and Robert Hooke. The issue of Steno versus Hooke’s priority for recognizing the biologic origin of glossopetrae and stating the principles of geology has been a matter of dispute since Steno and Hooke’s time. Yamada’s thorough examination of the work of these four men establishes that all were involved in, as he describes it, the “Galenic medical and physiological tradition of the Renaissance,” which married medico-physiological and physico-chemical studies to what now are geological concerns (p. 123). As a specific example, Yamada discusses Steno’s first publication, De Thermis (On Hot Springs), which he wrote as a medical student. Hot springs were then of interest in medical training as analogies in the terrestrial macrocosm for the microcosm of the human body.

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Troels Kardel discusses Steno’s concept of molding, which was undoubtedly influenced by his father’s profession as a goldsmith. Kardel is the first to recognize that Steno explicitly stated the principle of molding and that it expresses a crucial convergence between anatomy and geology, not only in terms of structure but also in terms of the general principle of relative age dating. The principle of molding states that the sequence of formation of two adjacent objects can be derived from their spatial and structural relationships. Kardel shows that Steno explicitly applied the principle to sequencing biological as well as geological events, such as formation of the fetus in the womb, stones in the kidney or urinary tract, and fossils in sediment. To quote Kardel, in terms of structural relationships and relative age dating, “there is no cleft between [Steno’s] biological and geological works” (p. 132). Although Steno was a Diluvialist he was not a creationist in the modern sense. The bible was not the final source for his inferences about nature. His observations were. As Jesuit scholar August Ziggelaar, translator of Steno’s seminal notebook, Chaos, writes in this volume, Steno was the first person to present a chronology of Earth before the Flood, even though he accepted the Universal Flood as an event that shaped Tuscany. Furthermore, according to Ziggelaar, the Catholic Creed states nothing about the chronology or time of creation. Moreover, the significance and time of the Flood had been in any event called into question with Jesuit Martino Martini’s publication in 1658 of a history of China. Martini discovered from reading the Chinese annals that Chinese history had a long antecedence preceding the Flood of Scripture. Both Ziggelaar and Alan Cutler in this volume note that nothing in the history of Tuscany contradicted the timing of the Deluge because in the seventeenth century, there was no way of measuring the duration of natural history, and it was then important only to reconcile secular history with scripture, as scholars attempt to do yet today. Cutler adds that Steno was concerned that people would regard biblical history itself as too long for the remains of once-living things to be preserved in rock. In his paper, Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen examines the influence of René Descartes on Steno. Descartes was one of the most important figures of the Scientific Revolution, a philosopher and founder of analytic geometry. The importance of “certainty” was central to Descartes who thought that only things one could know for certain were valid constituents of a naturalistic philosophy. That position also gave rise to his famous aphorism, “I think therefore I am.” Olden-Jørgensen points out that Steno was ironically more steadfast in his insistence on certainty than was Descartes, although Steno rejected Descartes’ stringent deductive reasoning. Olden-Jørgensen expands on the fact that Steno’s certainty was based on his reliance on empirical evidence and geometry. Descartes believed he had scientific evidence for the existence of God and the immortal soul. He thought that the passions of the soul warmed the heart, which, like a heated oven, boiled vapors to the pineal gland at the base of the brain. Steno’s dissection of the heart led him to recognize that the heart was a muscle no different from other muscle, and thus Descartes’ thoughts were nothing more than speculation.

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In contrast to Olden-Jørgensen, Jens Morten Hansen identifies “uncertainty” as the crux of Steno’s philosophy, and he asserts that Steno had a modern understanding of the stochastic character of natural phenomena. Hansen relies on Steno’s aphorism that is variously translated as, “what is most beautiful is that which we do not understand.” Hansen writes that Steno broke from a creationist tradition epitomized by Newton’s insistence that we can have a complete understanding of nature, that nature is deterministic, and that the connection between the laws of nature and the first cause (God) is knowable. Hansen’s assessment of Newton is consistent with that of Westfall (2000), who has previously noted that Newton himself was so impressed with the geometric design of the cosmos that he used it as evidence of the existence of God and of His direct role in creation, for he thought that only God could bring order on such a grand scale. Newton asserted that Genesis was a true account of creation and that the story it told was consistent with the then-known principles of alchemy. Westfall also notes that, as a Protestant, Newton also used his discoveries to deny the Trinity. Hansen contrasts Newton with Steno, who he shows rejected the “infinite predictability” of creationism, meaning that Steno was an empiricist who believed that science does not proceed to divine understanding. According to Hansen, Steno maintained that there is a God who produced nature but that we see him only imperfectly. Furthermore, for Steno, nature is substance, form, and is changeable; only changeable things are of this world, and God is unchangeable and eternal. To claim to perfectly understand God is to deny God the ability to act freely, and neither nature nor man is completely tied to necessity. Hansen concludes that Steno’s semiotics, or conception of “signs” was modern. He searched for signs preserved in solid materials that were clues to the past but he denied that signs in nature could be direct proof of God. As an interesting tie-in with Kardel, Yamada, and Hsu’s work in this volume, and consistent with Rosenberg’s (2006a) statement that all of Steno’s diverse interests were united by his respect for geometry, Hansen shows that it was natural for Steno to include diagrams of crystals as well as the strata of Tuscany in the same little volume Prodromus because both were composed of layers that Steno held to be signs of growth by accretion. Frank Sobiech explores Steno’s religion and spirituality and writes that Steno left science because he felt he was drifting away from “intimate relations with God” (p. 180). Nevertheless, Steno did not abandon science after his conversion to Catholicism because he published his seminal Prodromus as well as studies on nerves after his conversion. Sobiech’s work is a tour de force exploring biblical references that influenced Steno. Most notably, Steno believed that the “light of nature” could reveal the name of God, a philosophy that can be traced to Galileo (see Baker, this volume), and back to Thomas Aquinas as well. Nevertheless, Sobiech shows that Steno held that one could not deduce the existence of God from a priori conceptions of God. For example, although he believed that veins and faults were imperfections produced in the Earth after the fall of man, one could not perceive

God’s purpose for them because the metals that they contained had only limited use (see also the comments on wunderkammer in Thomsen’s study). Also, although Steno asserted that no one but God would have created something as complex and magnificent as the human body, it was not for him the end of discovery, but the beginning, for, once again, “what is most beautiful is that which we do not understand.” In other words, and consistent with Hansen’s analysis, Steno agreed with Galileo that when studying nature one does not begin with biblical texts and search for certainty but that one’s uncertainty is an acceptance of God’s freedom of action that cannot always be understood. Vai treats Steno’s biography as punctuated by two conversions, the first from anatomist to geologist and the second from Lutheranism to Catholicism. For reasons cogently argued by Vai and other authors in this volume, these conversions did not mean Steno abandoned previously held values. Vai makes the additional point that Catholicism may have facilitated Steno’s science. He states that Galilean Catholicism facilitated the establishment of a pragmatic and liberal approach to science that contrasted to that of the British Anglican Church, which imposed a rigid Diluvianism and, until the early nineteenth century, obliged British scientists to conform to the Holy Writ. From the culture surrounding Charlotte Smith’s poem, Beachy Head, Noah Heringman abstracts a reason why the British were slow to embrace evolutionary science. His inference is consistent with Vai’s assertion that British religious conservatism was responsible, but Heringman adduces several other reasons for this resistance. He points out that early evolutionary theory (most notably Cuvier’s catastrophism) first appeared in France at the time of the French Revolution. Britain had a large poor population ruled by a small privileged class, and British naturalists thus had an incentive to distance themselves from the social disruptions across the English Channel. The founders of Britain’s Geological Society were dedicated amateur naturalists nervous about Britain’s proximity to France and resistant to the theory, in Heringman’s view, because they wished to purge the science of French egalitarianism. The founders also viewed their own Baconian empiricism as a national tradition less tainted than French thought by conjecture and philosophy. Charlotte Smith’s contemporaneous poem questions using either fossils or human artifacts such as Roman ruins to reconstruct the past. This idea is consistent with Rosenberg’s contention in this volume that contemporary creationists’ resistance to the idea of evolution reflects an anxiety over the individual’s potential for change in a democracy. As evident in William Vanderburgh’s paper (see following), fewer than 25 yr after Beachy Head, Lyell would in effect distance himself from Charlotte Smith in his Principles of Geology, wherein he compared the progression of worlds revealed in the stratigraphic record with the passage of ancient civilizations recorded in the ruins of historical monuments. Dennis Dean and Steve Rowland’s papers describe some of the contributions that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson made to the development of geology. It is not only the list and scope of these contributions or their misconceptions that

Introduction: The revolution in geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment are of interest but also the context of the contributions within the Enlightenment that are relevant here. Dennis Dean notes that Benjamin Franklin’s most enduring rumination on geology was his recognition that volcanoes can influence weather, which he surmised from the effects of Icelandic volcanism of 1783. Dean adds that Franklin also inferred climate changes from fossils found at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, which we now know are mastodons. He reasoned that the present-day climate of the North American interior was too harsh for such animals, so that the North American climate must have deteriorated since the animals died. He also speculated from fossil plants found in English coal mines that extended beneath the sea and from seashells and fish teeth found on what is now high ground that either sea level had changed or that the land had risen or fallen. From the latter supposition, and influenced by the thinking of Woodward and others who thought that Earth was zoned according to specific gravity, he surmised that Earth’s interior was not solid to the center. In fact, he concluded that the center of Earth was gaseous due to the heat generated by the pressing together “of particles of which the Earth is composed” at the time of their initial accumulation (p. 220). While the supposition of a gaseous interior was wrong, Dean relates that the idea proved to be very influential. According to Rowland, Jefferson on the other hand rejected the inference that the North American climate had been deteriorating; he rejected the Big Bone Lick fossils as remains of extinct animals and, in fact, rejected the idea of extinction in its entirety. Rowland relates that Jefferson denied these inferences, not because they ran counter to his religious beliefs, but because French naturalist Buffon had preempted them as evidence that the New World was degenerate, an assertion that Jefferson found threatening to the fledgling American democracy. Obviously, both Franklin and Jefferson’s geological contributions were made by men whose work was in the context of the American experiment in democracy, the firmament in which political power was redistributed to the common man, as Foucault might describe it. Recall also Westfall’s (2000) statement that the growing authority of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries accounts for the “whole meaning” of the Enlightenment. Dean describes Franklin as not only the consummate diplomat in Paris who secured French support for the American Revolution, but also the founder of America’s first public library and scientific society. Jefferson was author of the Declaration of Independence, influential in formulating the Bill of Rights, president of the young United States, and developer of the public land survey system that democratized land ownership in America. These combinations of accomplishments in both natural history and governance were without precedent in Europe, which had not yet extracted itself fully from its monarchies. Finally, we consider the historical perspective that geology can give to the anthropic principle, a “hot topic” in cosmology. During the Renaissance, the newly discovered geometric order of nature and the cosmos was held to be evidence of God’s design. Leonardo wrote about this divine harmony in his notebooks. Moreover, the geometric perspective that Leonardo and

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other artists used in their paintings was the same geometry that described the behavior of light and that Renaissance thinkers esteemed for its metaphysical qualities. Light became the basis of Galileo’s philosophy, “il lume naturale” or light of nature, that is, a literal expression of divine insight (Nubiola, 2004). The geometry of light came to express “the fundamental laws set down by God at the moment of Creation (Edgerton, 1991, p. 14).” God’s grace was compared to “…a ray of sunlight at high noon…which strikes the earth at right angles thus releasing its greatest intensity according to the principles of geometric optics.” Mary’s conception of Jesus was compared to the Holy Spirit coming upon her in a manner analogous “to the way light passes uncontaminated through a transparent medium” (Edgerton, 1991, p. 103, 105). By Andrea Pozzo’s time, the irony that parallel lines or light rays converge at infinity had well-established metaphysical associations. Although geometric perspective caused visual distortions that were troubling to theorists, Pozzo (1642–1709) concluded that they were irrelevant, and he equated the vanishing point with the location of God (Kemp, 1990, p. 336–337; Rosenberg, 2001). In his paper, Vic Baker explains that “il lume naturale” became the basis of Charles Peirce’s philosophy and semiotics, for example, how characteristics or signs of sedimentary strata, fossils, landscape, etc., convey meaning about the history of Earth. Baker describes Peirce as a nineteenth-century polymath and logician who distinguished himself in geodetics. Peirce proposed that abduction, rather than induction or deduction, is the most common type of reasoning used especially by historical scientists. Abduction is hypothesizing, or educated guesswork, and Peirce saw it as so successful for understanding the cosmos that he felt it was a manifestation of divine insight and evidence that the cosmos has been made for mankind, a statement at very least anticipating the strong anthropic principle. In Baker’s words (2008, personal commun.): Peirce certainly anticipated (by many decades) the kinds of issues that motivated the proposal of the anthropic principle. However, we must remember that Peirce came to this realization from a very different viewpoint than that of the modern objective materialists who have realized the need to posit the anthropic principle in cosmology. Peirce was an objective idealist, and this leads rather naturally to something that is very similar to the anthropic principle.

William Vanderburgh takes an alternative approach. He asserts that science proceeds by putting information into the “framework of known science” (p. 275); in other words, scientists fit observations into a prior conception or framework, an issue that Rosenberg also discusses in his paper on the development of the concept of landscape. However, contradicting Peirce’s philosophy, Vanderburgh asserts that “at the frontiers of new science,” there is little consensus on methodology, and that many of geology’s heroic debates, such as that between the Neptunist and Plutonic schools, were philosophical arguments about which framework most successfully explained observations, not about the data per se. Although Vanderburgh does not explicitly adopt a semiotic approach, his presentation of Lyell does have a semiotic

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character. Vanderburgh notes that Lyell analogized stratigraphic information that signifies the progression of past worlds with the progression of human-made historical monuments signifying the passage of civilizations. Vanderburgh notes, however, that human-made monuments were not produced by the events they commemorate, unlike, for example, the cross-bedding in a sandstone. Nevertheless, human activity is the basis of the analogy, and once again we have evidence that the human condition facilitated the conception of geologic time. As Rosenberg notes in this volume, the growing awareness of the passage of civilizations and time was also expressed in the images of ruins that northern European artists, including Vesalius and Calcar, depicted in the 1500–1600s, so Lyell’s analogy was by his time (1830 for the publication of his Principles of Geology) common knowledge. Michael Ghiselin’s paper draws lessons from Darwin and concludes with a rejection of the anthropic principle. By the nineteenth century, the idea of cosmic order had taken on not only the metaphysics of a designer but also a related argument that insists that the laws of nature discovered in the Scientific Revolution require there to be a lawgiver as well. According to Ghiselin, Darwin debunked both arguments as epitomized in the writings of Richard Owen and William Whewell. The former relied on the neo-Platonic concept of archetypical form that claims, as Ghiselin states in this volume, “an essential nature that every part of the body retains no matter what the modifications in size and form,” a presumed intrinsic value akin to the value of coinage or of a member of a privileged social class in Foucault’s taxonomy of Western culture. Ghiselin shows that those who subscribed to the neo-Platonic concept believed that the Divine mind planned the archetype. Ghiselin adds in his paper that others interpreted Darwin’s view of evolution to be “modification according to laws that prepared species for man.” According to Ghiselin, Whewell added that the existence of laws of nature imply a lawgiver, God. Ghiselin argues that despite the fact that laws of nature do exist even in evolutionary biology, they do not direct evolution as Owen and Whewell envisioned. It is now recognized that contingencies (stochastic or random events) play an influential role in Earth and life history, an idea which Steno began to understand according to Hansen (see previous discussion). Ghiselin adds that the laws that apply to biology do not explain the diagnostic features of taxonomic groups, and, as does Hansen, he asserts that if laws of nature are strictly necessary to explain evolution, then even God is bound by them, limiting His omnipotence. Ghiselin concludes that the anthropic cosmos is an “anachronism” (Ghiselin, 2008, personal commun.). (One might add here that the anthropic cosmos does appear to be archetypical, since the qualities of the human condition seem to be projected upon and made intrinsic to it.) Ghiselin points out, however, that in our search for predictability and order in the cosmos, old ways of thought persist “like vestigial organs” and take on new forms (an interesting employment of the anatomical analogy). He offers as examples Stephen Jay Gould, who treated the genome as a Platonic archetype, and Simon Conway Morris,

who considered organic evolution as the product of laws that justified his own religion. In conclusion, it is evident that the exploration of the history of geology in this volume takes us from the origin of the idea of landscape to the metaphysics of geology, and it raises contemporary issues that have a long antecedence. When considered in the context of an entire biography or culture, scientific discoveries reveal their full dimension. To offer a visual analogy, the structure of an object is only discernible in relation to the space surrounding it. The structure of a science requires knowledge of the culture that produced it. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson’s interests in geology and paleontology are more than historical curiosities; rather, they are exemplars of the way that science and a democratic character structure are integrated. Nicholas Steno’s student notebook, Chaos, is remarkable in that it is not a religious polemic despite the fact that it was compiled by a man who would soon convert from Protestantism, devote his life to Catholicism, and ultimately become a bishop. Steno’s role in founding geology is not simply the lucky accident of an anatomist but the rational accomplishment of a man whose understanding of the human body predisposed him to perceive the structure of the landscape. In isolation, Kircher’s organic analogies are the peculiarities of an eccentric, but, when understood holistically, they chronicle the evolution of language and conceptualization about Earth during the Scientific Revolution. Vesalius was a founder of modern anatomy, but his conflation of a progressively denuded landscape with increasingly dissected cadavers, buildings, and architectural ruins seems to signify an early entry into the idea of landscape evolution. Isaac Newton’s alchemy was not the uncharacteristic failure of an immortal of physics, but a rudimentary attempt to structure the geochemistry of Earth. Clearly, geology in the context of the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment has a fascinating structure worthy of further exploration. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Jennifer Lee, Noah Heringman, and William Schneider for review of this manuscript and Arthur Mirsky for review and cogent advice. I thank the contributors to this volume, especially Vic Baker, Jens Morten Hansen, Michael Ghiselin, William Vanderburgh, Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen, Frank Sobiech, Dennis Dean, and August Ziggelaar S.J. for correspondence that influenced this discourse. REFERENCES CITED Baker, V.R., 2009, this volume, Charles S. Peirce and the “Light of Nature,” in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(18). Butterfield, H., 1965, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800: New York, Free Press, 255 p. Cosgrove, D., 1985, Prospect, perspective, and the evolution of the landscape idea: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers: New Series, v. 10, p. 45–62, doi: 10.2307/622249. Cutler, A.H., 2009, this volume, Nicolaus Steno and the problem of deep time, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance

Introduction: The revolution in geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(10). Dean, D.R., 2009, this volume, Benjamin Franklin and geology, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(15). Dear, P., 2001, Revolutionizing the Sciences. European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700: Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 200 p. Dobbs, B.J.T., 2000, Newton as final cause and first mover, in Osler, M.J., ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution: Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, p. 25–40. Edgerton, S., 1991, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution: Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 313 p. Foucault, M., 1994, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences: New York, Vintage Books, 387 p. Ghiselin, M.T., 2009, this volume, Natural theology, design and law, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(20). Hansen, J.M., 2009, this volume, On the origin of natural history: Steno’s modern, but forgotten philosophy of science, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(12). Heringman, N., 2009, this volume, “Very vain is Science’ proudest boast”: The resistance to geological theory in early nineteenth-century England, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(17). Kardel, T., 2009, this volume, Prompters of Steno’s geological principles: Generation of stones in living beings, glossopetrae and molding, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(08). Kemp, M., 1990, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat: New Haven, Yale University Press, 362 p. Kuang-Tai Hsu, 2009, this volume, The Path to Steno’s synthesis on the animal origin of glossopetrae, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(06). Kuhn, T., 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: Chicago, Chicago University Press, 172 p. Melero, J.P., 2009, this volume, From alchemy to science: The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment in Spanish American mining and metallurgy, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(03). Mordhorst, C., 2003, Medical use and material matters. Rhinoceros horn as a museum object: Ethnologia Scandinavica, v. 33, p. 84–98. Newman, W.R., 2009, this volume, Geochemical concepts in Isaac Newton’s early alchemy, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(02). Nubiola, J., 2004, Il lume naturale: Abduction and God: Semiotiche, v. I, no. 2, p. 91–102, http://www.unav.es/users/LumeNaturale.html (last accessed 23 December 2008). Olden-Jørgensen, S., 2009, this volume, Nicholas Steno and René Descartes: A Cartesian perspective on Steno’s scientific development, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/ 2009.1203(11). Oldroyd, D.R., 1996, Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology: Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 410 p. Osler, M.J., 2000, The canonical imperative: Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, in Osler, M.J., ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution: Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, p. 3–22.

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Parcell, W.C., 2009, this volume, Signs and symbols in Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(04). Pattison, W.D., 1957, Beginnings of the American Land Survey System, 1784– 1800 [Ph.D. dissertation]: Chicago, University of Chicago, 248 p. Rosenberg, G.D., 2001, An artistic perspective on the continuity of space and the origin of modern geologic thought: Earth Sciences History, v. 20, no. 2, p. 127–155. Rosenberg, G.D., 2006a, Nicholas Steno’s Chaos and the shaping of evolutionary thought in the Scientific Revolution: Geology, v. 34, p. 793–796. Erratum published at: http://www.gsajournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-abstract& doi=10.1130%2FG22655E.1 (last accessed 23 December 2008). Rosenberg, G.D., 2006b, Nicholas Steno’s Chaos and Ole Worm’s wunderkammer: Geological Society of America Data Repository Item 2006164: ftp://rock.geosociety.org/pub/reposit/2006/2006164.pdf (last accessed 23 December 2008). Rosenberg, G.D., 2009, this volume, The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(01). Rowland, S M., 2009, this volume, Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(16). Rudwick, M J.S , 2005, Bursting the limits of time: The reconstruction of geohistory in the age of revolution: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 708 p. Saunders, J.B. deC.M., and O’Malley, C.D., 1950, The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels: New York, Dover Publications, 252 p. Sobiech, F , 2009, this volume, Nicholas Steno’s way from experience to faith: Geological evolution and the original sin of mankind, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/ 2009.1203(13). Thomsen, E., 2009, this volume, Niels Stensen—Steno, in the world of collections and museums, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(05). Vai, G.B., 2009, this volume, The Scientific Revolution and Nicholas Steno’s twofold conversion, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(14). Vanderburgh, W.L., 2009, this volume, Theory choice in the historical sciences: Geology as a philosophical case study, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(19). Westfall, R.S., 2000, The Scientific Revolution reasserted, in Osler, M.J., ed., Rethinking the Scientific Revolution: Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, p. 41–58. Yamada, T., 2009, this volume, Hooke–Steno relations reconsidered: Reassessing the roles of Ole Borch and Robert Boyle, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(07). Ziggelaar, A. (translator), 1997, Chaos: Niels Stensen’s chaos-manuscript, Copenhagen 1659, complete edition: Copenhagen, Danish National Library of Science and Medicine, 504 p. Ziggelaar, A., 2009, this volume, The age of Earth in Niels Stensen’s geology, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(09). Zilsel, E., 1978, Economic influences on the development of science, in Bullough, V.L., ed., The Scientific Revolution: Huntington, Robert E. Krieger Publishing, p. 69–75. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution Gary D. Rosenberg† Department of Earth Sciences, Indiana University–Purdue University, 723 West Michigan Street, Indianapolis, Indiana 46202, USA

ABSTRACT Historians of science have long known that conceptualization is a prerequisite for science, and geology is no exception. Art history records that the Western concept of landscape preceded the science of landscape, and it also helps explain how it could be that one of Europe’s preeminent seventeenth-century anatomists, Nicholas Steno, founded the science. The Renaissance rediscovery of Arabic and Greek geometry and artists’ unprecedented use of it to describe nature, particularly the structure of the human body, facilitated the concept of landscape as a material object of integrated parts and functions. That anatomical analogy, which Steno embraced, replaced and had far fewer associations than the earlier analogy of the human body as a microcosm for the macrocosm of Earth and the greater cosmos. In turn, the new paradigm facilitated the modern understanding of evolution of landscape and life. These developments were part of the larger, contemporaneous spatial reorganization within Western civilization that encompassed revolutions in economics, land ownership, distribution of political power, etc.—in a word, the Western experiment in democracy. They suggest that contemporary creationists’ rejection of evolution reflects anxiety over the individual’s potential for change in a democracy. These associations are strengthened by a comparison with the case of China, which eschewed geometry until the nineteenth century. China did not develop a geometric sense of either landscape or life until well after Europe had done so, despite the geological discoveries that China is credited with having made well before Europe entered the Renaissance. Nor did China undergo the geometric reorganization of its bureaucracy and power structures, as did the West. Consequently, China held fast to a very different idea of evolution of landscape and life in nature and of the individual in society. Keywords: Nicholas Steno, Leonardo da Vinci, Andreas Vesalius, Albrecht Dürer, Peter Paul Rubens, Hendrick Goltzius, Galileo Galilei, Roelandt Savery, Chinese art, anatomy, art history, history of geologic thought, Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Heart of Wisdom Sutra, I Ching, Luigi Ferdinando Marsili.

†

E-mail: [email protected].

Rosenberg, G.D., 2009, The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 13–40, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(01). For permission to copy, contact editing@ geosociety.org. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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GEOMETRY AND THE ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF LANDSCAPE Geologists accept that landscape is a coherent vista of hills and valleys, rivers and lakes, mountains and coastlines. One of the perks of a career in geology is the opportunity to travel to faraway places to see inspiring scenery. We take photographs of panoramas to facilitate our research, to enhance our teaching, and as trophies of our expeditions. This personal witness to such scenes also gives us bragging rites; whether they are famous sites that everyone yearns to see or whether they are remote terrain that we have been among the few to visit, our involvement with them has made them ours. Visualization of landscape is an act of possession of vistas, at least in Western cultures. As scientists, we accept that there is a structural continuity between rivers and the lakes that they drain, hills and the valleys that they border, and the mountains and plains from which they arise. We accept that geologic processes constitute spatial continua that transcend these structural boundaries; the water cycle, global geochemical cycles, and cycles of mountain building and erosion are outcomes of the development of the conceptualization of the continuity of space. However, the concept of spatial continuity and specifically of landscape as a continuous panorama of integrated entities—i.e., of landscape as an object that is more than the sum of its parts—is rather new in Western cultural history. Geology, the science of landscape, originated after the planet was classified alongside the other bodies revolving around the Sun and after the idea of landscape had taken shape. Conceptualization is a precondition for the ordering of facts. Gould (1983) cited Foucault (1994) in saying that the way we order facts represents the way we think, and he gave as an example Nicholas Steno’s modern interpretation of “glossopetrae” or tongue stones as the teeth of once-living sharks. Many of Steno’s contemporaries thought that fossils were molded by plastic, Aristotelian forces within the rocks that contained them. According to Gould (1983, p. 72), “Steno did not see better; rather he possessed the conceptual tools to interpret his excellent observations in a necessary way that we continue to regard as true.” Similarly, the idea of landscape preceded the science of landscape. Normal science, which is the gradual accumulation of facts and placement of them in context about nature (Kuhn, 1962), “assumes it knows what the world is like” and accepts only those facts that complement that conception (Kuhn, 1978, p. 125). Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977, p. 88) stated that “facts require contexts to have meaning” and that (p. 89), “landscape is not defined by itemizing its parts” but that the parts are clues to an integrated image of landscape already in mind. It surely is the case that knowledge of the land antedated the science of landscape. For example, survival of civilizations depended on understanding that flooding rivers cause fertile soils, or that ores could be traced by their distribution in certain rock types or by the characteristic vegetation that grows upon them, but a science of landscape that fit that knowledge into a coherent paradigm expressing a consistent metaphysical over-

lay was not possible without prior existence of the concept. The principal case in point would be the accumulation of knowledge about the land over millennia of Chinese civilization, a matter that will be discussed later. The conceptualization of landscape as a geometric object first occurred in Europe and is historically related to the European conceptualization of the organism, particularly the human body, as a geometric object with parts having a rational, threedimensional organization and integration. The European idea of landscape appeared before the science of landscape emerged, and it is no coincidence that Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, who studied the structure of the human body, also facilitated an understanding of the structure of landscape. Landscape, which had been a subordinate background to religious or historical narratives, became an independent genre or subject of art by the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth century. The word “landscape” became part of European languages at the same time landscape art achieved its independence, signifying existence of the concept in the mindset of the times. The origin of landscape art and the concept of landscape were two of the most important outcomes of the Renaissance preoccupation with geometry, and particularly the experimentation with perspective among artists. Indeed, “the Renaissance…arguably remains [art history’s] paradigmatic moment, and perspective remains [its] exemplary achievement” (Elkins, 1994, p. 189). Geometric perspective is the use of construction lines and points (representing the horizon, vanishing points, ground, etc.) to produce an illusion of distance and depth upon the two-dimensional surface of a drawing or painting. Geometric perspective confers the illusion of a rational variation in size and shape upon objects imagined to be at different distances or positions from the viewer, in other words, a sense of spatial continuity. It also provides a standardized means of depicting the structure of objects to scale. Indeed, geometry defines the material object. The consequence is democratic: anyone with a modest education can understand the structure of the depicted objects and the relationships of objects to one another within the illusionistic image (Edgerton, 1991). Space itself becomes an object of study (Cosgrove, 1985), and an object for which changes can be charted. Geometric perspective is not the only kind of perspective; atmospheric perspective is the use of color, value, and tone to evoke distance and space, but even this type of perspective is superimposed on an intuitive understanding of geometric relationships. Landscape artist J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), professor of perspective at the Royal Academy (London) and radical pioneer of abstract, atmospheric landscapes in Romantic-era England, stated that “without the aid of perspective, all art totters on its very foundations” (Wilton, 1980, p. 70). Prior to the Renaissance (arguably, the mid-fourteenth to early sixteenth century), the idea of landscape did not exist as we know it today. Individual features of the landscape were portrayed as isolated objects that were not incorporated into a unified whole. Landscapes were not “views” but accumulations of indi-

The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution vidual features (Gombrich, 1960), and space was not understood to be a measurable entity. Three examples of such imagery are shown in Figure 1. Figure 1A shows St. John on Patmos. John sits in an ethereal space (note the patterned “sky”) on the Isle of Patmos, which is encircled by a thin band of water that looks like a river flowing up- as well as downhill, but which would have signified a sea to the medieval faithful who knew the story of St. John. The image is confined to the margin of the page, within a small square, and below it, the large historiated letter (a letter decorated internally) sends a tendril into the margin as if to reach for more space. Such assertions of the image are described by some art historians as an attempt by the illuminator (artist)

A

to capture space that traditionally was reserved for the scribe (calligrapher or writer), and that involved a “shift from speaking words to seeing words” (Camille, 1992, p. 20) over the course of the Middle Ages. The sacred Word was spoken, and the progressive limitation of letters in illuminated manuscripts to elements of a system of visual signs separated “the terrifyingly promiscuous medieval imagination” from vision, which, until then, was equated with imagination and deemed a force capable of creating forms. (For example, pregnant women were urged not to look at monkeys for fear of delivering deformed fetuses; Camille, 1992, p. 90.) Separation of vision from imagination ultimately enabled the forms of nature to exist independent of human imagination.

B

C

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Figure 1. Examples of depiction of landscape in the Middle Ages. (A) St. John on Patmos, Bible Historiale. Attributed to the Master of Jean de Mandeville (Illuminator; French, active 1350– 1370). The J. Paul Getty Museum (84.MA.40.2.216). St. John sits on the isle of Patmos in an ethereal space (note the nonrepresentational sky), and the scene is confined to a square isolated from the script. The sea surrounding the island of Patmos appears to be a river because it is not to scale. It exists as a design element, and it is understood that the sea isolates the island rather than illusionistically conveying that impression. (B) The Crucifixion, Sacramentary. Illuminator Unknown (ca. 1025– 1050). Germany. J. Paul Getty Museum (83.MF.77.19). Landscape as background and design element. The lower two green bands represent the ground, the middle two brown bands depict hills in the background, and the top two blue bands represent the sky. There is no illusion of depth, and the landscape appears to exist entirely on the plane of the page. (C) St. Anthony Abbot in His Cave. Gualenghi-d’Este Book of Hours. Taddeo Crivelli (Illuminator, Italian, died ca. 1479, active ca. 1451– 1479). The J. Paul Getty Museum (83.ML.109.204v). Although well into the Renaissance, this image has the medieval characteristic that the cave and St. Anthony are not to scale. The cave is used as a theatrical element that is not integrated into the landscape. Furthermore, the shape of the cave and hill immediately to its left and slightly behind are Byzantine in character.

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There are three pairs of horizontal bands in the Crucifixion in Figure 1B. The lower (green) pair signifies the ground, the middle (red) pair signifies distant hills, and the upper (blue) bands signify the sky. Like many medieval illuminations, the image represents a spiritual concept, here redemption, rather than a secular event at a specific location. The landscape serves as a background, not the subject, of the image. Landscape is rarely illusionistic or three-dimensional, let alone the subject of illuminations in medieval manuscripts. The third image (Fig. 1C) is of St. Anthony in his cave and is actually Renaissance by date (ca. 1469) and style. Even though the image has an illusionistic sense of depth, it nevertheless retains the medieval characteristic of using disproportionate size to signify the importance of the personae depicted and to focus the narrative. Consequently, both St. Anthony and his cave on the one hand and the surrounding landscape on the other appear to exist as separate entities and in separate realities. This sense of isolation is explicit in medieval renditions of the hortus conclusus or walled garden, in which Mary is shown with the infant Jesus separated from the world of mortals. It is a medieval holdover in the Renaissance work of Van Eyck (Montgomery, 1996; Branagan, 2006), which does show the scientific detail of rock layers in an outcrop, but it is an outcrop that is not integrated into the landscape (lacks the spatial continuity of a scenic view in the modern sense; Rosenberg, 2001). “The ancient Near East, classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and indeed any archaizing art…all more or less completely rejected perspective for it seemed to introduce an individualistic and accidental factor into an extra- or super subjective world” (Panofsky, 1991, p. 71). Further, the use of perspective facilitated the development of “free landscape scenery and…the ‘correct’ deployment and measurement of the individual objects found therein… [making it possible to construct] an unambiguous and consistent spatial structure of…infinite extension, where bodies and the intervals of empty space between them were merged in a regular fashion into a corpus generaliter sumptum, ‘body taken in a general sense’”…and which enabled abstract thought to “break…with the Aristotelian worldview” [of a closed cosmos with concentric zones walled off from one another] (Panofsky, 1991, p. 63, 65). A point of immediate relevance in Panofsky’s quote is the statement that perspective permitted the integration of measurable objects into a coherent scene that had infinite extension. This is tantamount to saying that the invention of linear perspective was crucial to the origin of the idea of landscape as understood in Western culture. Landscape painting “as we know it might never have developed without the perspectival theories of the Italian Renaissance” (Gombrich 1978, p. 107). Perspective is derived from the Italian word, prospettiva, and it is the geometric method of projection as described already. It came to signify both a commanding view and a prospect, or looking forward into time and space, and at the same time that the word “landscape” came to be incorporated into language, “perspective” was being used for “point of view,” as we still use it today (Cosgrove, 1985). Italian artists were the first to use perspective to depict objects as illu-

sionistic, three-dimensional entities (Alpers, 1983). Furthermore, the Italians became interested in the ways in which objects were situated in the space around them, in other words, not simply as isolated objects but within space, which itself had measurable volume, or length, width, and depth, and which complemented the objects it contained. It must be noted that the first applications of Alberti’s perspective grid were for religious images in which the artist sought to involve the viewer by making the illusionistic space of the picture continuous with that of the viewer,1 but city views were the first views of landscape in perspective (e.g., Fig. 2, which is also an architectural view). Country views came later, indicating that the idea of landscape first suited urban values, notably control or possession of the land (Cosgrove, 1985). The reason is that perspective produced an ordered view in which all objects maintained proportional relationships to one another and to a viewer for whom the image of landscape was created and thus to whom it belonged. From Italy, perspective and the idea of landscape spread northward into Germany and also into what are now Belgium and Holland. It was in northern Europe that the idea of landscape was fulfilled, and it was northern European artists who also excelled at producing illusionistic, three-dimensional images of natural and artificial (man-made) objects in remarkable “scientific detail” (Alpers, 1983; Montgomery, 1996). The closed Aristotelian cosmos to which Panofsky refers was finite and hierarchical (Fig. 3). The imperfect planet Earth sat at the center of a series of concentric zones, each of which was walled off from those adjacent to it. The zones were regarded as increasingly perfect outward. Adjacent to Earth was the zone of the Moon, then the planets, the Sun, the stars, and finally and outermost, the heavens. Each zone was subject to its own laws (Hill, 1997; Koyré, 1957). Even in the face of mounting facts to the contrary, most notably, the Copernican-Galilean heliocentric reorganization of the solar system, the Aristotelian model resisted replacement into the seventeenth century, but the “breaching of the walls” was completed in 1687, when Isaac Newton published his Principia, in which he postulated absolute and indeterminate space subject to the uniformity of natural laws. The polemics of perspective constitute a huge literature, and although some art historians question whether geometric perspective really organized space as Panofsky and others claimed, the very size of the literature speaks to the importance of spatial relationships in art history. Gombrich lamented the number of words art historians devoted to the history of visualization of spatial relationships, even though many of them were his, and he wished that art historians could develop a historical discourse based on other aspects of art such as texture and volume. However, no alternative theme in art history has sustained as much discourse as perception of spatial relationships. Chief among modern iconoclasts is Elkins (1994), whose book, The Poetics of Perspective, claims that much of the significance ascribed to perspective is a projection of what perspective 1

I thank Jennifer Lee for this insight.

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Figure 2. Francesco di Giorgio Martini (attributed, 1439–1502), ca. 1490–1491, Architectural Veduta (Ideal City). The work is an early city and architectural view of landscape. Photo: Joerg P. Anders . Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York. Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.

Figure 3. The Aristotelian cosmos in the sixteenth century was a system of concentric zones, each sharply demarcated from adjacent zones, and each subject to its own laws. From Petrus Apianus (Peter Apian), Cosmographia (1551). The order of the planets from Earth is due to Ptolemy and differs slightly from that of Aristotle. Excerpted from Peter Dear (2001, p. 12), public domain.

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has come to signify, not what it signified during the Renaissance. In particular, Elkins asserts that Renaissance artists had no notion of space and that the concept was not widely used until the seventeenth-century writings of Descartes and Newton. Further, Elkins insists that no architectural treatise used the concept before the eighteenth century, and, although Renaissance space was extended (not closed like the Aristotelian cosmos), the principal interest of Renaissance artists was the depiction of objects, not spatial homogeneity. Elkins also asserts that perspectival constructions are difficult to master for even the most accomplished artist and that they can distort spatial relationships as easily as they can simplify and organize them. As a prime example, Elkins offers Albrecht Dürer, who, he insists, made errors in his use of perspective so consistently that he can hardly be considered to have used perspective at all. Elkins’ arguments ignore the fact that spatial relationships within Renaissance art are substantively different than the paradigm in medieval art; simply stated, there is a difference in style between medieval and Renaissance art, and geometry has a lot to do with it. The sense of depth and proportional variations in size, shape, volume, and distinctness of objects with position in Renaissance landscapes add up to an intuitive application of geometry, even if we are forced to concede that geometry of the masters was rife with error, as Elkins asserts. Although it may be true that Renaissance artists did not universally and explicitly perceive landscape as an integral whole, Leonardo da Vinci is surely an exemplar of those who did, for he made it clear in his writings that he valued geometry for the harmony it conferred upon the cosmos as evidence of God’s design (Rosenberg, 2001, 2006a). Leonardo specifically applied that concept to landscape in the very first art work he is known to have produced and in his notebooks as well (see following). Furthermore, there is abundant evidence that the concept of space in general and landscape in particular began as anatomical, geometric analogies in the minds of Renaissance artists and their successors. This evidence makes sense of the fact that Nicholas Steno, a Baroque anatomist and devotee of geometry, founded geology, the science of landscape, with his formal statement of the principles of stratigraphy. It is this connection between anatomy and the idea of landscape that is the subject of this paper, and it is maintained here that the origins of our science are evident in that connection. EVIDENCE FOR THE ANATOMICAL ANALOGY OF COSMOS AND LANDSCAPE Many images of astronomy that Renaissance writers evoked relied on the same “formal structure” or geometry that anatomists used in their drawings of the human body (Kemp, 1990, 2006a, 2007). The position here is that the same “formal structure” underlies Renaissance images of landscape, sometimes manifest as a rigorous application of perspectival construction lines, and other times as a more intuitive application of geometric relationships. There are numerous examples of Renaissance artists who exhibited in their notebooks and/or in their art an understanding

of geometry, excelled at portraying the human form, and who at the same time created modern depictions of landscape. As Foucault explained (see Introduction, this volume), the understanding of structural integration preceded and was prerequisite to the understanding of functional integration, which occurred at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In one sense, the analogy of an anatomy of the landscape is a manifestation of mankind’s eternal search for himself throughout the cosmos, and one can presume that Renaissance humanists would have valued any technique that facilitated conceptualization of the human condition in nature. In a more literal sense, the use of geometry to organize the cosmos was bound to have anatomical associations because the human body has always been a rational reference for volume and structure, and Renaissance humanism, for which man was the measure of all things (Kemp, 2007, 1990; Tuan, 1977), is the most evident example. This was especially true for spatial quantities, particularly length and volume (e.g., “foot” and “big,” the latter of which Tuan [1977] cited as deriving from Latin, meaning “puffed cheek.”). Anatomical references are still much in use in geology today, e.g., the “limbs” and “nose” of folds, “footwall” of faults, “head” and “mouth” of a river, “augen” (German, eyes) of gneiss, “toe” of a glacier, “face” of a cliff. The root of the word “world” is “wer,” which means “man” and implies a body or space that is humanly construed (Tuan, 1977). One of the most striking examples of this conceptualization is the Renaissance analogy of the microcosm for the cosmos, in which the human body was used as a model for interpreting characteristics of Earth and the greater cosmos. Leonardo da Vinci referred to it often in his notebooks, for example, rocks as the bones of the Earth, and water cycles through Earth as fluids through the human body. As Albus (2000, p. 175) pointed out, the original meaning of the word “cosmos” was “harmonious order and arrangement,” the world as a unified whole rather than an assemblage of individual parts. Panofsky (see previous) defined landscape as a corpus generaliter sumptum, “body taken in a general sense,” and it is this “body” that Cassirer (Manheim, 1955, p. 89, 92) took to be anthropomorphic, stating that “The whole spatial world…[no matter what the scale, whether at the level of the cosmos, the world, or smaller]…appears to be built according to a definite model…Thus, just as there is a magical anatomy in which particular parts of the human body are equated with particular parts of the world, there is also a mythical geography and cosmography in which the structure of the Earth is described and defined in accordance with the same basic intuition. Often the two, magical anatomy and mythological geography, merge into one.” The anatomical analogy was evident from the seminal moment of the Scientific Revolution if we study Copernicus’ letter, De revolutionibus, which he sent to Pope Paul III in 1543, and in which he stated that Earth and other known planets traveled around the Sun (see Introduction, this volume). The letter includes a complaint that the proponents of the geocentric model made erroneous calculations, which prevented them from discovering “…the main point, which is the shape of the world and the

The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution fixed symmetry of its parts; but their procedure has been as if someone were to collect hands, feet, a head, and other members from various places, all very fine in themselves, but not proportionate to one body, and no single one corresponding in its turn to the others, so that a monster rather than a man would be formed of them.” There is a paradox here, however, for Copernicus’ heliocentric model displaces man from the center of observation (a perspective that Leonardo da Vinci never adopted, for he was committed to the geocentric model; Kemp, 2006b, p. 322). Yet another milestone of the Scientific Revolution conflates the cosmos and the body. In 1628, William Harvey (1578–1657) wrote a letter now known as De Motu Cordis to Charles I of England informing him that the heart circulates blood through the body but does not create it, an almost heretical proposition because it contradicted Galen. In the letter, Harvey referred to the heart in all animals as “the sun of their microcosm” and further compared it to the King, “[who] in like manner, is the foundation of his kingdom, the sun of the world around him…the fountain whence all power and all grace doth flow” (Rothman et al., 1995, p. 68–69). Landscape, our specific interest here, has a history of taking on anatomical references. Figure 4 is a woodcut that Petrus Apianus (1495–1552) used to demonstrate the difference between Ptolemy’s definitions of geography and chorography. He defined the former as a map of a general area analogous to distribution of features on the human face, in contrast to chorography or local view as a study of the individual features themselves (Alpers, 1983, p. 167; Edgerton, 1991; Cosgrove, 1985; Sauer, 1925). Sauer, in his classic paper, The Morphology of Landscape, traced the origin of the word “morphology” to philosopher-poetnaturalist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who used the word in reference to biological form. Sauer credits glacial geologist Albrecht Penck (1858–1945), who pioneered in the description of glacial features and was the author of Morphology of the Earth’s Surface in 1894, as one of the first to apply the term to comprehensive study of landscape. According to Sauer, Penck also believed that every map is a kind of morphologic representation in the biological sense, in other words, that landscape has an organic quality of integral forms or structures and functions, and that a landscape of singular, disorganized, or unrelated features has no scientific value. Early maps had an organic quality that was sometimes exaggerated. Perhaps most famous was Leo Belgicus, the leonine caricature of the shape of the United Provinces (predecessor of the Netherlands). Northern European cartographers of the sixteenth century were well aware that their two-dimensional maps distorted three-dimensional geography, and they used Renaissance studies of the human form in perspective to understand the deformations. One was most likely Abraham Ortelius (Flemish, 1527–1598), who in 1570 produced the first cartographic atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Ortelius owned a copy of Albrecht Dürer’s (1537) Symmetria partium…humanorum corporum, a treatise on perspectival variations in the human form (Fig. 5; Edgerton, 1991, p. 177). These are, in other words, studies of

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Figure 4. A comparison of geography, chorography, and human anatomy. Geography or regional view of landscape is compared with the entire head (top), whereas chorography or local view is compared with its organs, in this case, the ear and the eye (bottom). Petrus Apianus (Peter Apian), Cosmographia (Paris, 1551). Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

distortions of the human form that arise when viewing it from different positions. Although they were not based on anatomical (internal structural) relations, they were studies of “visual shapes in standardized locations” (Ivins, 1938, p. 42) and, as such, were exercises in analytic geometry, the study of shape using common coordinates. Thus, in addition to their influence on understanding distortions of map projections, they anticipated Descartes’ formal foundation of analytical geometry in the seventeenth century and D’Arcy Thompson’s (1961) groundwork in allometry in On Growth and Form (Rosenberg, 2006a). Thompson in fact referred to Dürer’s studies in his book, where he showed that differences in shape of related species were due to different growth rates along common geometric coordinates of the body,

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Figure 5. A page of perspectival studies of the human form from Albrecht Dürer’s Symmetria partium…humanorum corporum (1534), a copy of which was owned by Abraham Ortelius. Chapin Library of Rare Books, Williams College.

just as perspectival distortions of the body could be generated by elongating or foreshortening the body along selected axes. A circular sunfish grows at similar rates along the dorso-ventral and anterior-posterior axes, whereas a needle-shaped fish grows faster in the anterior-posterior direction. The principle of allometry has proven to be fundamental to the concept of biological evolution, and Renaissance art is an undeniable antecedent given Thompsen’s acknowledgment of Dürer. Albrecht Dürer similarly played with distortion of landscape forms, conflating them with anatomy, so he also earns credit as an antecedent of structural geologists interested in tectonic deformation of landscape (see following). ARTISTS AND THE IDEA OF THE ORGANIC LANDSCAPE: LEONARDO DA VINCI AND ANDREAS VESALIUS During the Renaissance and subsequent Baroque period, artists began to depict landscape as an object of integrated parts. Their knowledge of geometry, and in some cases specifically their knowledge of the structure of the human body, facilitated their bringing

together parts of landscape into a unified entity. There are indications that these artists understood what they were doing. Preeminent among them would be Leonardo da Vinci (1452– 1519). Leonardo made numerous anatomical studies. Despite the fact that many were in error (Kemp, 2006a), they remain studies of three-dimensional structural relationships of organs, muscles and bone, and arteries and veins, and the value Leonardo put on geometry is proven by a quote from his notebook (MacCurdy, 2004, p. 910) under the heading, “On the error made by those who practice without science.” By science he meant, geometry, and he continued, “Those who are enamored of practice without science are like a pilot who goes into a ship without rudder or compass and never has any certainty of where he is going.” In his notebook, which he titled Chaos, and which he compiled in 1659 when he was a student at the University of Copenhagen, Nicholas Steno wrote, “To tackle the physics of medicine without geometry is to sail over the ocean without a compass” (Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 362, adapted from anatomist Jean Pecquet, 1622–1674). Nicholas Steno was an anatomist who earned renown throughout Europe for his demonstrations in anatomical theaters. In his publications, he explicitly and repeatedly mentioned the importance of geometry for understanding the structure of animal forms (Rosenberg, 2006a), and he rejected the pronouncements of even his most distinguished forebears, most notably those of Galen and Descartes, if they were not based on correct observation. One of the most important cases was his comparison of the structure of muscle fibers of the heart with that of other muscle. His studies led him to conclude that “nothing is found in the heart which is not found in the muscle, and nothing is missing in the heart that is found in the muscle” (Kardel, 1994, p. 24), and he thereby went a step beyond Harvey and proved that the heart was a muscle that pumped blood through the body. Most importantly, this corrected Descartes’ speculation that the heart was an oven that boiled the blood and passions of the soul through the body (Rosenberg, 2006a; Cutler, 2003). Steno’s findings met strong opposition from Descartes’ followers who adhered to Aristotelian doctrine. His claim that skeletal muscles have a pinnate structure was forgotten until the 1980s, and his contemporaries objected to his model that muscle shortening is caused by fiber shortening without a change in volume, in spite of the apparent swelling. Both the structural and functional claims are now, however, the basis of computer simulations of the geometry of muscle contraction (Kardel, 2002, and 2008, personal commun.). The similarity of Leonardo and Steno’s statements about geometry is striking. It suggests that Leonardo’s notebooks, which include abundant references to geology (Vai, 1995; Rosenberg, 2001), may have been more widely known after his death than modern art historians have presumed (Rosenberg, 2006a; also see Vai, this volume). Alternatively, Leonardo may have paraphrased other sources in his own notebooks, just as Steno did in his notebook Chaos. It was common and acceptable practice during the Renaissance to use others’ material without attribution. However, thanks to August Ziggelaar’s diligent research, the sources of

The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution comments in Steno’s notebooks have been identified (Ziggelaar, 1997, Rosenberg, 2006a). It remains to be seen whether attributions can be identified in Leonardo’s notebooks. In any event, Leonardo and Steno’s shared insistence that knowledge of geometry is necessary to reveal the structure of all of nature in general and of the human body in particular conjoins their mindsets. Leonardo da Vinci’s oldest known work of art is a little drawing titled, “The Hills of Tuscany” (Fig. 6). It is arguably the first pure landscape (Clark, 1988), an artwork in which landscape is the subject of the work, and not simply a background for a religious or historical narrative. Rosenberg (2001) discussed the work as such and more importantly showed how Leonardo visually presented Steno’s three founding principles of stratigraphy nearly 200 yr before Steno formally published them. Kemp and Elkins (Monastersky, 2002) criticized Rosenberg’s analysis, but it should be noted that Kemp (2004, personal commun.) later admitted that he had not actually read Rosenberg’s paper before reviewing it. Rosenberg published a rebuttal (letters, Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 March 2002, p. B21–B22). Leonardo wrote “August 5, 1473” on the drawing, and art historians believe that is the date he sketched the scene as he walked over the Tuscan hills. There is speculation as to the location of the view, but none has been confirmed. Art historians have also stated that the landscape is geometric (Clark, 1988), meaning that it has a horizon and a vanishing point on the horizon toward which lines appear to recede as they project into the distance. Linear perspective is a type of applied geometry that is constructed with reference to an assumed viewer who is meant to imagine himself surveying the vista from a specific vantage point, as though through a window. The window separates the viewer from the scene, and it represents the two-dimensional

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surface upon which the three-dimensional scene is projected by the rules of geometry. This separation from nature also confers a scientific objectivity upon the viewer, though Elkins (1994) insists this is a modern interpretation, and not one understood by Renaissance artists who used perspective. Such landscapes portray a static scene forever frozen in an instant of time. They also establish a present, the position of the viewer, and his future, if one assumes that the viewer will travel toward the horizon, or his past, if one assumes that the viewer has come from there. In other words, these landscapes establish the narrative of the passage of time and demonstrate that one’s concept of space influences one’s understanding of time. Did Leonardo understand his landscape as an object of integrated parts? He certainly used geometry to construct it, and the result may be without precedent in art history, a drawing in which landscape is the subject and not simply a background for a religious or historical narrative (Clark, 1988). The drawing depicts the hills and valleys of Tuscany from atop the edge of a quarry or ravine. A castle at left sits on a bluff that projects into the distance. There is a small lake in the middle ground and behind it lie fields and hills that recede toward the horizon. Layers of rock outcrop in the ravine in the foreground. The layers are thin at the bottom, thick in the middle, and moderately-bedded at the top. They are horizontal, laterally continuous across the ravine, and they project into the distance and reappear in distant hills. As stated earlier, some of Leonardo’s notes indicate that he was aware of these relationships, but they were left to Nicholas Steno to state explicitly in his Prodromus of 1669. Elkins (Monastersky, 2002; Monastersky 2005, personal commun.) objected to the construction lines Rosenberg drew across the scene, claiming that it cannot be proven that the artist actually used such a construction

Figure 6. Leonardo da Vinci, 5 August 1473. View of the hills of Tuscany with perspectival analysis of Rosenberg (2001, p. 136) superimposed. Scala/Art Resource, New York. Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe, Uffizi, Florence.

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in the drawing, in spite of Clark’s (1988) prior assertion to the contrary (see previous), and in spite of the fact that the edges of the fields converge toward the horizon. Moreover, any student of geology with a basic understanding of Steno’s principles would view, project, and match the thickness and other characteristics of strata from exposure to exposure across Leonardo’s ravine, compensating for distance in his minds eye just as Rosenberg (2001) has shown in Figure 6. That is geometry. Leonardo’s landscape is oddly similar to Andreas Vesalius’ drawing of a dissected cadaver (Fig. 7; Rosenberg, 2001). The chin of the cadaver points to the left, as does the brow or chin of the hill above the cliff in Leonardo’s drawing. Leonardo carves open the hill to reveal the rocks, which, as previously stated, he called the “bones of the Earth,” just as Vesalius opened the cadaver to reveal the ribs scaffolding the thorax. Thus, even though Leonardo did not know Vesalius (1514– 1564), who was 5 years old when he died, and there is no evidence that Vesalius knew of Leonardo’s little landscape, there is strong circumstantial evidence that both perceived the landscape the way they perceived the human body. As Kemp wrote (2006, p. 132–133), “Leonardo mapped the human body. He charted its skeletal rocks, the course of its “rivers” and its fleshy soil, both within and without. He dissected the world, teasing out its bony rocks, its earthly flesh and its watery veins, both in its surface topography and deep within its core…Always, looking at his drawings of real sites, we can sense his urgent concern with the body of the Earth as a functioning system.” Likewise, Vesalius. Figure 8 shows four of Vesalius’ “muscle men” as they are commonly known. There are 14 of these men standing in a landscape, and they constitute two series of progressively dissected cadavers. Eight constitute a succession of frontal views, and six constitute a sequence of rear views. This depiction of cadavers in a landscape is unique in Vesalius’ oeuvre. The images were printed separately—one to a page in Vesalius’ treatise on anatomy published in 1543—and, consequently, the landscapes appear to be subordinate to the dissections and independent of one another. However, Cavanagh (1983) conjoined the images and showed that the landscapes of adjacent panels

matched like puzzle pieces. (Note how the landscapes and architectural features appear to match in the two pairs of images in Fig. 8.) Cavanagh concluded that Vesalius originally conceived the landscape to be a continuous vista. It is further noted here that the landscape is more than a setting incidental to the figures. On the contrary, close examination reveals that progressive denudation of the landscape accompanies the progressive dissection of the “muscle men.” Moreover, buildings in the landscape are closest to the viewer in the drawings of the least dissected man (upper left), and they become more distant as the dissection progresses. The most dissected, skeletal remains stand in a barren landscape adjacent to ruins (lower right). This suggests that Vesalius and his artist (possibly Jan Van [Jan Steven Van] Calcar, ca. 1499–1545) intended to have both the architecture and landscape reinforce the metaphor of life’s passage that the progressively dissected cadavers convey. Architectural ruins commonly appear in Renaissance and later art, wherein they symbolize the passage of time, man’s fate, and the decay of civilizations (e.g., Kuretsky [2005] for Dutch landscape art). In other words, in the presentation of Vesalius’ muscle men, we have visual evidence of the conflation of anatomy, landscape, architecture, and time at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution in 1543, the very same year that Copernicus sent his letter to the Pope complaining that the Earth-centered cosmos was a case of bad anatomy. Consequently, these images argue for tracing the idea of the evolution of landscape through Vesalius’ accomplishments, which have heretofore never been associated with the founding of modern geologic thought. Vesalius’ treatise is important not only for revealing the structure of the human body, but also for naming each structure (note letters on different structures) and forever linking the name to a picture, in other words, for creating the first “grammar of the human body” as per Foucault’s (1994) writings (see Introduction, this volume), and for doing so with a book printed from unchanging wooden blocks (Ivins, 2001). The printing press enabled distribution of exactly replicable images that could be used for comparison and that enabled scientific classification dependent upon comparisons of structure. The printing press thus facilitated

Figure 7. Vesalius, ca. 1545. Écorché image of a cadaver (from Saunders and O’Malley, 1950, public domain).

The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution

Figure 8. Vesalius, 1543. Four écorché figures from a series of increasingly flayed cadavers known as the “muscle men,” from De Humani Corporis Fabrica of 1543. Top: Two views of the least dissected “muscle men,” the first and adjacent images in a series of principally frontal views. Note that the landscape of the two images fits together, is vegetated, and the city lies close behind the muscle men in the middle ground. Lower: The last two adjacent images of the most dissected figures, seen from behind. Note that the figures stand against a barren, sparsely vegetated landscape that is conjoined, and that the city is obscure in the background. Images are from Saunders and O’Malley (1950), Dover Publications, public domain. Both are restorations after Cavanagh (1983).

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the development of modern natural science (Ivins, 1938, 2001). The images were widely available in identical form and, inversely, independent of the individuals who viewed them. In that sense, their distribution and visualization were democratic. The grotto in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks (ca. 1483– 1484; Fig. 9) is evocative of the human form in another way. The painting depicts the Virgin Mary receiving the infant Jesus. An archangel in the foreground, commonly identified as Uriel, announces the birth, and the infant at left welcomes Jesus with his hands outstretched and clasped in prayer. In another version of this painting, Leonardo portrayed the infant as holding a cross portending Jesus’ crucifixion, and thus identifying him as John the Baptist, Christ’s cousin. The religious personae are seated upon a thinly bedded layer of rock that is laterally continuous across the bottom of the image in the manner of the rock layers depicted in the Hills of Tuscany (see also Vai, this volume). However, the grotto is improbable. Precariously balanced boulders constitute the arches and its ceiling, which frame the two distant vistas at top. This curious construction is resolved if the grotto is compared with Leonardo’s drawing of the skull done in the interval of 1472–1519 (Fig. 9B). Although it cannot be determined whether Leonardo deliberately intended the correspondence, the arches evoke the orbits, and, by implication, the form of the skull determines the placement of the holy personae. The Madonna is at the sinus of the nose, and John, Jesus, and Uriel are positioned

along the curved distribution of the sockets of the teeth. If the resemblance is deliberate, it is another example of Leonardo’s propensity to anthropomorphize the landscape visually as he did in writing in his notebooks. ALBRECHT DÜRER Although Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) is best known for his woodcuts and engravings of religious personages and narratives, he also wrote on theoretical aspects of perspective, the most important of which is his Unterweysung der Messung of 1538. Dürer traveled to Italy twice, the first time to learn the technique of perspective from Italian masters (Panofsky, 2005). He never fully understood it, and he made errors in applying it in his finished works, with a “consistency [that]…amounts almost to a methodical denial of the homogeneity of space” (Ivins, 1938, p. 42; seconded by Elkins, 1994). In other words, Dürer distorted form and the space in which it was depicted. If Dürer’s denial was methodical, then the question arises whether he was unaware of these distortions as Ivins and Elkins imply, especially considering his geometric studies of deliberate transformations of the human form with changes in perspective of the viewer. At any rate, there is evidence that Dürer applied his understanding of the human form and its perspectival changes to perception of the form of landscape.

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Figure 9. (A) Leonardo da Vinci, ca. 1483. Madonna of the Rocks. Scala/ Art Resource, New York. Louvre, Paris. (B) Leonardo da Vinci, ca. 1472–1519. The Skull Sectioned. The Royal Collection © 2008 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution As he crossed the Alps on his return from his first trip to Italy, he produced watercolors of landscapes and Steinbruckerei, quarry scenes or rock outcrops that are remarkably modern. The landscape panoramas are representative of the vistas one sees when traveling today by train near Nuremburg, Dürer’s home, through southern Germany and into Austria, and clearly are based on his observations of real places. Like Leonardo’s Hills of Tuscany, the

Figure 10. Albrecht Dürer, 1495–1500. (A) Landscape study: a rocky cliff. © The Trustees of the British Museum. (B) Albrecht Dürer, ca. 1495. Quarry (“Steinpruch” written at top in Dürer’s hand). © Biblioteca Ambrosiana Auth. No. F 77/08.

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quarries and outcrops are illusionistic, three-dimensional representations of rock layers that can be traced across the plane of the page, establishing stratigraphic continuity (Figs. 10A and 10B). In Figure 10A, the lithology is identifiable, a sandstone cliff with thin shale interbeds possibly representing channeling (though Dürer would not have known that fact). The plants growing on the walls of the quarries depend on the rock for their foothold,

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and thus the works represent a convincing view not simply of an outcrop, but of a habitat, that is, of plants integrated into their rocky environment.2 This interest in verisimilitude and structure is not a fluke. Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf (Fig. 11) is a clump of common plants binding the earth, and they are rendered so carefully that they are taxonomically identifiable. The assemblage is typical 2 The Museum Bayonne, France, owns a drawing of a quarry (Winkler, 1936, Catalog #106) that they attribute to Dürer and that is remarkable in its obvious use of geometric perspective to show rocks outcropping in a notch in a quarry entrance. The style, notably the strength of the line, is unlike the freely done quarry sketches more definitively attributed to Dürer, and its attribution to him is debated (Giulia Bartrum, 2008, personal commun.). It is mentioned here for its undeniable geometric construction and, hence, for its potential importance if its date can be confirmed, even if Dürer’s authorship is conclusively disproved.

Figure 11. Albrecht Dürer, 1503. The Great Piece of Turf. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, New York.

of a meadow in southern Germany in May (Foister, 2004). The drawing qualifies as an early scientific study of sod, arguably, the first in art history, as well as of a community of plants. Scientific observation may not have been its sole intent, as common plants figure in many of Dürer’s later works where they may have been symbolic of the divine creation of nature or of Christ’s suffering and crucifixion (Foister, 2004). The outcrop in Figure 10A is anthropomorphic, giving literal meaning to the term “rock face.” The cliff jutting out to the left suggests a head, and one can almost make out facial features in its profile. This reading is supported by the fact that Dürer had a penchant for seeing human faces in the landscape. For example, both an outcrop and a log in Crumbling Mountain House, another watercolor in the same series, are undeniably anthropomorphic

The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution (Moser, 2003, p. 41). Dürer’s View of Arco (Fig. 12) is an unsurpassed second example. It is a view of a landscape near the town of Arco in the Italian Alps. Two heads are immediately evident (arrows), and, with careful study, one can see portions of several more. These heads are distorted; in a little known book devoted to Dürer’s geometry, Leber (1988) calls the tall cliff and vertically stretched head at far left, the “Adenauer head,” and the head at center, the “large rock face” or “King’s face.” The work is a visual pun, and it is clearly an applied study of variations in the form of the human head, after the manner of the artist’s studies of the human form in his Symmetria (Fig. 5). This watercolor establishes that the understanding of vertical exaggeration of the landscape, now taken for granted by every geologist familiar with the rudiments of structural geology, was at one time coupled with an understanding of the perspectival distortions of the human form. In short, just as Albrecht Dürer’s “methodical” distortion of form bears on the science of allometry, so his anthropomorphic distortions of landscape establish landscape as an object capable of geometric transformation—a precursor to our understanding of distortions induced by tectonism. Such spatial distortions progress further subsequent to the Renaissance in work by Mannerist artists such as Rubens.

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PETER PAUL RUBENS Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) was a post-Renaissance, Flemish artist who is best known for his dramatic religious, historic, and mythological narratives populated by fleshy (Rubenesque) women and muscular men in dynamic contortions. One of the features of Baroque and Mannerist art was the contortion of human form, twisting the geometric coordinates of the body to evoke movement and energy. Rubens handled contortion of the landscape for the same purpose. Figure 13A is Rubens’ (ca. 1611–1612) rendition of the legend of Prometheus as told by Ovid in The Metamorphosis. Prometheus, son of the titan Iapetus, created man from clay but angered Zeus when he stole fire and gave it to the mortals he created. As punishment, Zeus chained Prometheus to a mountain and sent an eagle to eat his liver, which the eagle is about to do in Figure 13A. Prometheus’ misfortune was manifold, however. His liver regenerated daily, and he would have suffered the eagle’s attacks every day for the rest of eternity had it not been for Heracles, who took pity and released him. Rubens achieves the writhing form of Prometheus by twisting and stretching him on the diagonal from upper left to lower right.

Figure 12. Albrecht Dürer, 1495. View of Arco. Louvre, Paris. Among several “hidden,” anthropomorphic features, at far left (black arrow), vertically exaggerated “Adenauer Head,” which constitutes the tall cliff, and middle (white arrow), “King’s Head,” both names as per Leber, 1988. Photo: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, New York.

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The geometry of the Renaissance produced a crystalline sense of space, but it was static, a consequence of the fact that construction lines were orthogonal to the edges of the picture plane. Note how the day in Leonardo’s Hills of Tuscany (Fig. 6) appears to be frozen in time. On the other hand, Baroque and Mannerists’ stretching of human and landscape forms along the diagonal deforms space and gets the narrative moving and the landscape changing. Rubens’ Stormy Landscape with Philemon and Baucis (Fig. 13B) is one of the few landscapes he created, and it is quite different in spatial organization and in movement from Leonardo’s Hills of Tuscany. The story that Stormy Landscape tells also comes from Ovid’s Metamorphosis (Stechow, 1940/41). The gods Jupiter and Mercury travel to Earth disguised as weary travelers in order to test the honor and generosity of mortals. They seek help in a village where they are summarily refused at every

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Figure 13. Peter Paul Rubens. (A) Prometheus Bound (eagle by Frans Snyders), ca. 1611–1618. The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York. (B) Landscape in a Thunderstorm. Philemon and Baucis, Jupiter and Mercury, ca. 1620. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, New York.

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door they knock upon—except one, the house of an old married couple, Philemon and Baucis, who grant them rest, wine, and food. The gods decide to punish the villagers with a devastating flood but save Philemon and Baucis and grant them other favors. The painting shows the two gods leading the married couple to safety up a mountain path at right while the deluge destroys the town in the distance. The legend occupies only the rightmost 20%, of the painting whereas the flood dominates the other 80%, indicating that Rubens’ intent was to make the environmental catastrophe the real subject of the painting and to use the myth as a subordinate counterpoint (Renger, 2003). The two narratives are transformed and the topography is stretched and vertically exaggerated along the diagonal from lower left to upper right. A torrent of water surges down the mountain slope in the background, inundating the village in the distance before improbably turning and rushing toward the viewer, cas-

The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution cading downward toward lower left, carrying with it a dead villager and the carcass of a dead ox. Another villager at lower left clings to a tree for his life. Renger goes so far as to claim that Rubens’ Stormy Landscape is the first of its genre, the environmental catastrophe. That is certainly not the case. For example, St. Elizabeth’s Flood, the Night of 18–19 November 1421 (Fig. 14) by the Master of the Elizabeth Panels, was painted ca. 1490–1495 to commemorate the bursting of dikes in Holland and the ensuing flood that swept away villages some 70 yr earlier. The artist’s mastery of geometry was limited; the painting has a sense of illusionistic depth, although the recession in size with distance from the viewer and the change in shape with respect to position (e.g., the oblique views of the buildings) are inconsistent. Consequently, this work displays people, man-made and natural objects, and the flood as isolated entities that appear not to be interacting with each other. The dike is breached at upper right but it does not seem to have caused the rise in water at the bottom of the painting, which in

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any case appears to be at a higher elevation. Like Leonardo’s Hills of Tuscany, St. Elizabeth’s Flood is more static than Rubens’ Stormy Landscape, and the contrast is due to Rubens’ ability to deform an entire landscape just as he was able to distort the human form. The difference in perception is consistent with the growing awareness of the landscape as a dynamic entity. HENDRICK GOLTZIUS AND GALILEO GALILEI Hendrick Goltzius’ (1558–1617) engraving The Great Hercules (1589; Fig. 15A) is the most extreme example of the artist’s “bulbous style,” or exaggerated and unnatural figurative works (Orenstein, 2003, p. 106). The work may be a second visual metaphor for the Dutch nation in addition to Leo Belgicus, the lion-shaped caricature of the outline of the United Provinces, mentioned previously. At the time of this work, the Dutch were compared with Hercules in their rebellion against Spain (Orenstein, 2003, p. 108).

Figure 14. Anon (Master of the Elizabeth Panels). St. Elizabeth Day Flood, November 18–19, 1421 with the Broken Dike at Wieldrecht. Painted ca. 1490– 1495. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Figure 15. Hendrik Goltzius. (A) Hercules with a Club, 1589. Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. (B) Mountain Landscape or Mountain Pass, 1594. Teylers Museum, Haarlem, the Netherlands.

Goltzius crossed the Alps to Italy in 1590–1591. The trip undoubtedly piqued his interest in landscape, not simply because he saw imposing mountain views, but also because he met several other Netherlandish (generally speaking, Dutch and Flemish) artists in Italy, some of whom had already distinguished themselves with their landscape art. Goltzius became friends with Karel van Mander (1548–1606) (Goddard and Ganz, 2001), a fellow artist and writer who, among other literary distinctions, authored one of northern Europe’s most important treatises on painting, The Schilder Boeck. Van Mander chronicled the emergence of naturalism in Dutch art and, according to Melion (1991, p. 263–264, no. 19), encouraged his painter colleagues to “…leave the workshop, rise early, and journey into the countryside, ‘Siet’ [look attentively]…,” so that they could see the sights on their travels. This exhortation is oddly reminiscent of that of Danish physician Peter Severinus (1542–1602), who is listed by Geike (1962) as a founder of geology, and whom Geike quotes (p. 49) as saying, “…buy yourselves stout shoes, get away to the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the shores of the sea, and the deepest recesses of the Earth; mark well the distinctions between animals…among plants…kinds of minerals…mode of origin of everything that exists…in this way, and no other, will you arrive at a knowledge of things….” Goltzius’ Mountain Landscape (Fig. 15B), done shortly after he returned from Italy in 1594, may have been the first pure landscape done in Holland (Reznicek, 1986). Although certainly inspired by the scenery that he saw, it is aggrandized for effect. The rocks of the massif are “bulbous” and fit together like the muscles of Goltzius’ “Hercules.” The work is believed to show the influence of Italian art theorist, Federigo Zuccaro, who advised artists to combine their poetic imaginations with deceptive emulation of nature (Reznicek, 1986). More immediately, it is

likely that Goltzius took some cues from his friend, van Mander, who wrote, “Just as the body’s silhouette must consist of… contours in complementary opposition, and must [sway sinuously], so landscape must comprise…serpentine topographical features….and landscape zones must join like…flexed muscles whose graduated rise and fall combines the virtues of strength and grace” (Melion, 1991, p. 98). From 1603 and thereafter, Goltzius created a few naturalistic, topographic views of Dutch landscape that were apparently done en plein air (out of doors), although he continued with his imaginary landscapes as well (Plomp, 2003, p. 201). One of the surviving works is Landscape Outside Haarlem (Fig. 16A), in which Goltzius’ use of geometry (the recession of the fields and the use of a series of horizontal lines to imply planes receding with distance for example) is evident. The work is an example of the growing tendency of Dutch artists to portray landscape realistically, as pleasant and identifiable places (Gibson, 2000). In this way, the Dutch formalized the concept of landscape. Although “[they] are a swallow which did not make a summer immediately, [nevertheless they were] a harbinger of one of the most splendid developments in Dutch art of the seventeenth century” (Reznicek, 1986, p. 62). Flemish artists who emigrated en masse to Holland during the war with Spain may have initiated the trend to naturalism, but it was Goltzius and other Dutch artists who brought it to fulfillment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries under the influence of their young nation’s singular geological and social environments. Adams’ (1994) discussion shows how these issues are intertwined. When Holland declared its independence from Spain in 1579, Protestantism replaced Catholicism as the official religion. Both Luther and Calvin exhorted their flocks to stop idolizing images of religious personae in paintings. At the

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Figure 16. (A) Hendrick Goltzius, Landscape near Haarlem, 1603. Collection Frits Lugt, Institut Néerlandais, Paris. (B) Galileo Galilei, ca. 1603–1609. Telescopic Drawing of the Venetian Lagoon, Florence (detail), Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Ms. Gal. 48, fol 54v. By concession of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali della Repubblica Italiana/Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

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B same time, the Dutch purchased scenes of identifiable places in their little nation as an act of patriotism. With the unprecedented adoption of an open-market economy and rise of a merchant class, all social levels grew more affluent, and with it, so did their ability to afford such work. By 1688, Holland had the highest per capita income of any major northern European state. A revolution in land ownership occurred as well. Dune and bog land, which constitutes much of Holland, had been of little interest to feudal lords. Peasant ownership of land rose to 100% in some areas. Depictions of farming were common in Flemish landscape art in illuminated manuscripts and paintings from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, but most Dutch landscapes showed dunescapes, churches, river views with boats, and privately owned property. Dutch landscapes simply existed as illusionistic representations of a unified view with all parts of the landscape integrated; they evidently have no moral, political, religious, or historical content. Although one could argue that Protestant churches and cows that appear in drawings and paintings of recognizable places are symbols of the United Provinces and quiet assertions of the pride of nationhood following northern Netherlands’ independence from Spain, such issues were nevertheless subordinate to the verisimilitude of the terrain and the changes it experienced, erosion and flooding being notable examples (Gibson, 2000). The increasing affluence and immigrant influx (which produced a threefold increase in population from 1500 to 1650) created a strong demand for new land, and from 1590 to 1664, the Dutch reclaimed 425 square miles from the sea. The sea was a continual threat to this new low land, and it was natural that the Dutch developed the subject of flooding into an independent subgenre of landscape art (Wheelock, 2005), although, as shown previously,

Flemish artists such as Rubens also brought attention to floods with dramatic narratives. It is worthwhile to compare Goltzius’ late view of the Haarlem landscape (Fig. 16A) with another artist’s landscape, a view of the Venetian lagoon (Fig. 16B) done at approximately the same time; it is a masterful work of simplicity, a quiet sketch of a few well-placed lines that establish a series of ever more distant planes, in the manner that Goltzius used to establish distance in his Haarlem panorama. No vanishing point is evident in the view of Venice. It would appear that this little work has nothing to do with geometry, let alone the human form. However, it was done by the Italian Galileo Galilei (1564– 1642) while looking through his telescope over the Venice lagoon (Camerota, 2005). The telescope was one of the founding instruments of the Scientific Revolution, and both the Italians and Dutch were familiar with lenses and well aware of the geometry of light by which it and the related microscope functioned and revealed nature. That knowledge facilitated the Dutch portrayal of scientific detail in their art (Alpers, 1983) and, as evident in both Goltzius’ and Galileo’s landscapes, the spatial continuity of the terrain.3 Galileo initially studied medicine (anatomy) but sought the company of painters from whom he gained a sophisticated knowledge of “secondary light” or light reflected from one body upon another. Galileo “compared the true scientist to a great artist” (Reeves, 1997), and he wrote (Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, III, p. 395–396, fide Reeves, 1997, p. 11), “…there are those who 3 It is, however, a matter of dispute whether or not Dutch artists routinely used lenses or “camera obscura”—darkened rooms with a tiny hole in one wall to admit light and to project images that could be traced in order to directly copy nature (Hockney, 2006; Dupré, 2005).

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never do take up drawing from Nature…such that they fail not only to become perfect painters, but are also unable to distinguish great art from bad, and good representations from poor ones, through the recognition in thousands and thousands of natural examples the true effects of foreshortening, contours, lights, shadows, reflections, and the infinite variety of different viewpoints.” Thus, in his experience with anatomy and art, Galileo is much like Goltzius, and his little view of the Venice lagoon anticipated the landscape art of northern Europe as much as his “chiaroscuro washes [studies of secondary light reflected from Earth upon the surface of the Moon, for which he famously concluded that the Moon is a planet like Earth] …anticipated the landscape in the history of art” (Edgerton, 1991, p. 245). In a more general way, Galileo used the phrase, il lume naturale, in his notebooks to express his esteem for the power of light to reveal nature. Some have interpreted Galileo to mean common sense or natural insight in the sense of logical simplicity (Nubiola, 2004) (a philosophy akin to Occam’s razor, which says that of two explanations for a natural phenomenon, the simplest explanation consistent with all evidence is the correct explanation). However, Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) and his students and adherents (see Introduction, this volume; Baker, this volume; Hansen, this volume) have taken il lume naturale to mean divine insight, mankind’s instinctive genius to correctly hypothesize (abduct) the divine laws of nature or lessons of God because man’s mind has evolved under the influence of those laws (Nubiola, 2004). Although this metaphysical interpretation is destined to further debate (see Introduction, this volume; Baker, this volume; Ghiselin, this volume), it points out that the minds of the Scientific Revolution remain potent influences today. The presentations of the artists herein reveal at the very least a ray of truth in Peirce’s statement (Peirce Edition Project, 1998, p. 193, quoted by Baker, this volume), “…let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for.” FORM AND FORMLESS: GEOMETRY IN WESTERN EUROPE AND LACK OF IT IN CHINA Western Europe’s embrace of geometry contrasts markedly with China’s disinterest. As a new spatial sense pervaded Western European culture, China held fast to its traditional ways. The difference explains, according to Edgerton (1991, p. 1), “Why… capitalist Europe after 1500 [was] the first of all civilizations in the world to develop what is commonly understood as modern science, moving rapidly ahead of the previously more sophisticated cultures of the East.” As will be shown here, the contrast makes it very clear how important geometry was for the founding of modern geologic thought in Europe and further clarifies how our science could have been established by a man who earned his reputation with his studies of the geometry of the human body. Although the Chinese made important technological contributions and geological insights over the course of a millennium before Europe entered its Renaissance, their disinter-

est in geometry hindered the consolidation of their accomplishments into the coherent structure or paradigm that we now call modern geoscience.4 Long before Europe’s Scientific Revolution, the Chinese had invented gunpowder, the compass, the printing press, and the seismograph, they had engaged in geobotanical prospecting, they had understood the circulation of blood through the body, and they had undertaken large-scale hydrological works, among other technological accomplishments. Nevertheless, Sinologists and other historians such as Needham (1959, 1986), (Temple, 1986), Edgerton (1991), Lloyd and Sivin (2002), and most recently Elman (2006) have written many words about the manifestation of China’s disinterest in geometry throughout its culture. Needham’s huge studies of science in China (1986, p. 10) anticipate Foucault’s writing: The fact is that in the seventeenth century we have to face a package deal; the Scientific Revolution was accompanied both by the Protestant Reformation and by the rise of capitalism, the ascendancy of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. Distinctively modern science, which then developed, was a mathematization of hypotheses about nature and relentless experimentation. The sciences of all the ancient and medieval worlds had an indelibly ethnic stamp, but now nature was addressed for the first time in a universal and international language…mathematics, a tongue which every man and woman, irrespective of colour, creed or race, can use and master if given the proper training. And to the technique of experiment the same applies. It was like the merchant’s universal standard of value.

In other words, Needham, and subsequently Temple (1986, p. 158), found that China’s lag in modernizing its science was due to its failure to develop and exploit analytical geometry the way that Fermat, Descartes, and their followers did starting in seventeenth-century Europe (Temple, 1986, p. 158). Edgerton (1991) contrasted the art history records of both cultures and agreed that China’s disinterest in applied geometry hindered its attainment of modern science and also manifested itself elsewhere in Chinese culture. Rosenberg (2001) simply adapted Edgerton’s approach to his exploration of the history of the science of landscape in Europe versus China, and he asserted that Renaissance art records Western Europe’s growing interest in the revolutionary, geometric concept of landscape, which proved conducive to the development of the science of landscape. On the other hand the even longer tradition of landscape art in China shows China holding fast to an altogether different concept of landscape that was not structural in the same sense as in Western Europe, and that fostered a very different concept of evolution of landscape. China did not begin to develop an interest in visualizing spatial relationships geometrically until the 1800s (Lloyd and Sivin, 2002; Elman, 2006), some four centuries after the revolution in spatial understanding began to take hold in Western Europe. The 4 The same could be said of other cultures, notably the Greeks and Arabs, who discovered and developed geometry, and also the Persians, who maintained an interest in it. The point is that other cultures did not apply geometry to reveal the structure of nature as did Renaissance Europeans.

The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution contrast in spatial sense between China and Western Europe was manifest in the conceptualization of man’s place in the cosmos, in class structure, and the directions of flow of political power, as well as in conceptualization of the organization of nature. As Europe developed a sense of the three-dimensional structure of the cosmos and of landscape and the body, China held to an epistemology of formlessness. In fact, formlessness was for two millennia central to Chinese epistemology and integral to the daily existence of Buddhists, and it is explicitly stated in their most important lesson or sutra, the Heart of Wisdom (Gyatso, 2005, p. 60–61): Form is emptiness, emptiness is form…all phenomena are emptiness; they are without defining characteristics; they are not born, they do not cease…There is no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, and no mind. There is no form, no sound, no smell, no taste, no texture, and no mental objects…there is no suffering, origin, cessation, or path; there is no wisdom, no attainment, and even no non-attainment.

This appraisal of the absence of form is the antithesis of Western materialism founded on definition and valuation of the geometric object; the Heart of Wisdom invokes anatomy in a manner diametrically opposed to the Western analogy. Further, for the Chinese intelligentsia, formlessness facilitated a metaphysics of “resonance” or transformations of objects throughout nature as an expression of the harmony of the cosmos, but it was quite unlike the Western concept of evolution, involving conversions of what in the West would be considered unrelated objects, such as sheep transforming into the boulders in their field and trees transforming into mountains (Rosenberg, 2001). Western taxonomy is founded on structure and materiality, the prerequisite for modern evolutionary thought. In China, all knowledge was referred to and was mediated by the emperor, and, consequently, Chinese taxonomy, its “order of things,” was “rooted in ceremonial space” throughout its culture, and it avoided the kind of classification that would have facilitated naming (Foucault, 1994). The Chinese were not ignorant of geometry, but for two centuries after Jesuits introduced European accomplishments in geometry to China in the seventeenth century, the Chinese use of that knowledge was only modest (Elman, 2006). Instead, for millennia since its origins in ca. 800 B.C., the I Ching or Book of Changes, dominated Chinese intellectual activity until ca. 1800 (Lloyd and Sivin, 2002, p. 266). It began as a divination manual, though after A.D. 200, it became a poetic meditation on time and change embedded in a medical doctrine that equated cosmic and somatic processes, and it had a “multifaceted and open ended” mystical interpretation (Elman, 2006, p. xii). The Chinese microcosmic-macrocosmic model of the cosmos was not structural in the same sense as the European’s. Not until the end of the eighteenth century did even a few Chinese physicians take anatomy based on dissection of human corpses seriously (Elman, 2006, p. 110). Instead, they analogized the organs of the body to the offices of the central bureaucracy, not as anatomical features (Lloyd and Sivin, 2002, p. 218).

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The Chinese also lacked a stable geometric concept of the constituent elements of the cosmos (Elman, 2006). As metaphysical as were Aristotle’s elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Ether, Western Europeans nevertheless represented each by a different geometric solid, the identity of which was static for centuries, and each held a constant position in their epistemology. On the other hand, the Chinese conceptualized the constituents of the cosmos as five phases that were continually transforming to one another due to vital energy. Moreover, the identities of the principal phases changed over the centuries from wood, fire, earth, metal, and water to metal, wood, leather, jade-like materials, and clay, and ultimately they became abstract concepts in the cycle of change (Lloyd and Sivin, 2002, p. 200). More generally, the Chinese did not have a word for the physical or material universe before the mid-nineteenth century (Lloyd and Sivin, 2002). A central idea to Chinese epistemology was the concept of ch’i, the vital energy of nature that made it possible for all matter to grow and change and find consciousness (Lloyd and Sivin, 2002, p. 9). This concept had no counterpart in Western materialism, and its influence in China was pervasive. For example, by the second century B.C., the Chinese understood the circulation of the blood through the body, nearly two millennia before British naturalist William Harvey published on it in De Motu Cordis in 1628 (Temple, 1986) and Dane Nicholas Steno conclusively demonstrated that the heart was a muscle that pumped the blood through the body (see previous discussion). Yet, for centuries after they understood circulation, the Chinese held fast to the idea that the lungs pumped ch’i throughout the body via invisible tracts, and that its flow was as important as that of the blood. This dual circulation remains today as the basis of acupuncture (Temple, 1986). Form, when it is considered in China, differs from the concept in the West (Tuan, 1977). In the East, form refers to an object’s equilibrium or transformative relationships with nature, whereas in the West, it is equivalent to substance, shape, volume, and materiality. For the Chinese, it was not the substance that gave objects their identity, but their transience. Stone is the monument of choice in Western culture, whereas wood, which undergoes perceptual change within a single lifetime, is the material of choice in China and Japan. With few exceptions such as the Great Wall, there are no old structures in China. In general terms, Western technological society is a built environment, with less cosmic or transcendental significance than Eastern society (Tuan, 1977). Nevertheless, China is much more provincial than Western Europe, and the Chinese sense of place is rooted to the history of the local place. The entire history of what happened locally defines the place, an idea that the Europeans shed in the course of the Scientific Revolution (see Introduction). Chinese society was more anthropocentric, one in which its people believe in their centrality. Historically, the Chinese were more rooted to their locations, especially after the Age of Exploration began in Western Europe during the Renaissance and expanded in the Scientific Revolution. All such anthropocentric cultures tend to regard landscape as permanently in equilibrium with nature, not

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subject to change (Tuan, 1977). In the West, the concept of landscape developed along with a sense of possession and control of it. Western geometric perspective in art at once fostered a sense of ownership (as landscape was conceptualized as having been created for the viewer) but also of a sense of uncertainty (because perspective changes with position). Ultimately, this uncertainty contributed to the Cartesian philosophy of doubt and to the disputative character of Western science (Lloyd and Sivin, 2002). In China, older knowledge was held to be inherently more valuable than newer knowledge, and it was the task of a scholar to emulate the history of the masters’ acquisition of wisdom in his Daoistic journey or way toward enlightenment and harmony with the cosmos. The Chinese valued intellectual harmony, unlike the argumentative Greeks, who thrived on dispute (Lloyd and Sivin, 2002, p. 77). China centralized power by 100 B.C. (Lloyd and Sivin, 2002), and all knowledge was directed toward the emperor, whose job it was to ensure continual equilibrium with the cosmos. Figuratively speaking, the Emperor faced south and thereby defined the spatial geographic field, with each cardinal direction dissimilar to the others, unlike in Western epistemology, where north, south, east, and west were different directions in a homogeneous spatial field. It was only the emperor who could afford scientific innovations; for example, the seismograph, which the Chinese invented in A.D. 132, resided only in the palace. The Chinese spatial sense manifested the aristocracy and bureaucracy unlike the Western concept, which manifested democracy. In Europe, innovation literally was in the hands of the artisan. There, created objects (artifice) became metaphors for the body as a source of creation capable of emulating or even surpassing the creation of God (Smith, 2004; Newman, 2004). Material objects were valued to the extent that they imitated or surpassed nature, and even found natural objects were enhanced by artisans (placed in precious metal frames, shaped into jewelry, used as adornment of exquisite decorative and mechanical objects, etc.). They were displayed in wunderkammer as evidence of the artisan and collector’s ability to outdo nature and God and as proof of the artisan’s ability to extract knowledge from nature (Newman, 2004; Rosenberg, 2006b). Nature was regarded as primary and residence of certain knowledge (Smith, 2004). In Western Europe, it was the lower classes who worked with their hands—artists, goldsmiths, toolmakers, for example. These were people who adopted geometry, not simply because it facilitated conceptualization and manufacture of their craft, but also because it facilitated the transmission of that knowledge to others. Geometry made it possible to draw natural and manmade objects and machines to scale, and anyone with only a modest education could comprehend their form and structure (Edgerton, 1991) and thus duplicate or improve upon them. The ability to conceptualize space is often accompanied by mechanical acuity or an ability to sculpt (Tuan, 1977), and these skills came to be highly valued by Renaissance artisans and their successors in the West. It should also be noted that Nicholas Steno’s father was a goldsmith, and that Steno himself was the consummate artisan of anatomy in the seventeenth century, demonstrating dissections in

anatomical theaters across Europe. For Steno, truth to geometry was the paradigm by which he judged all observations and inferences (see previous discussion). The Chinese recognized that ch’i was an essentially indefinable, vitalizing force of the Dao or way to enlightenment, but it was not simply “rhapsodic.” There was a “firm conviction” that such a universal spirit existed (Sze, 1956, p. xvii). For centuries, scholars had written about the method of rendering rocks, and indeed all aspects of landscape, in order to depict the existence of ch’i (Bush and Shih, 1985), and their writings were canonized in 1679 with the publication of the Mustard Seed Garden Manual, which subsequently became the most widely used textbook of painting in China (Sze, 1956). The book is a manual of calligraphy that prescribes styles of brushstrokes in order to imbue their works with ch’i and that subsequent artists attempted to emulate as a metaphor for their journey to enlightenment. Running throughout these texts are exhortations to use the “laws” of painting to subordinate form of rocks and landscape to their spirit resonance; for example, “[Painters of antiquity]…sought for what was beyond formal likeness in their paintings. This is very difficult to discuss with vulgar people.…even if [today’s painters] attain formal likeness, they do not generate spirit resonance…[and]…as for transmission by copying, or reproduction by imitating, this should be the painter’s last concern” (Chang Yen-yüan [ca. 847 A.D.] in Bush and Shih, 1985, p. 54–55). Figure 17A is an example of rock rendering in the Mustard Seed Manual. It is a model to facilitate the portrayal of the “three faces” of a rock. The three faces are “are to be found in the depths of its hollows and the height of its projections…[by]… giving attention…to light and shadow (yin and yang)…” in order to transmit the ch’i, which is “beyond the material.” Thus, the three faces are not equivalent to length, width, and height but are symbolic of the cosmogonic theory that the “One [the rock or mountain] became Two, Two became Three, and out of Three the multiplicity of things issued” (Sze, 1056, p. 128–129). Contrast such renditions and philosophy with Abraham Bosse’s depiction of quarry stones in Figure 17B (Bosse, 1686, his Fig. 120). Bosse (1602–1676) was a leading figure in architectural draftsmanship in France (Hersey, 2000) who published a treatise that exemplified Girard Desargues’ (1591–1661) “universal method” of geometric projection, first published in 1636. Desargues was “the first mathematician to get the idea of infinity properly under control…[to use] the concept in a precise mathematical way” (Field, 1997, p. 196), and he also developed the geometry for projecting three-dimensional objects onto twodimensional surfaces in such a way that the actual dimensions of the object were retrievable despite their apparent reduction in size (diminution of scale) with distance from the viewer. Desargues insisted that anyone using his method could see the object not only as projected upon the picture plane but also from other sides hidden from view in the projection (Hersey, 2000). It certainly is true that Bosse’s projective rendition of quarry stones is exceptional, and rarely did Western artists so rigorously

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Figure 17. (A) “Method of indicating the three faces of a rock in order to depict their quality of spirit, or ch’i, which lies beyond the material, and in order to depict the rocks as alive.” Public domain (from Sze, 1956, p. 129, Bollingen Foundation, Princeton University Press). (B) Perspectival method of depicting quarry stones after Desargues (from Abraham Bosse, 1686, his Figure 120). Public domain. Image courtesy of the Ruth Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

apply geometry to their visualizations of rocks and landscapes. Yet his efforts are not without precedent. Albrecht Dürer attempted it in Unterweysung der Messung, and even though his geometry was wrong in detail, his attempt to render verisimilitude of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface stands in stark contrast to Chinese aesthetics that valued rendering the vitalizing force within all objects. Most depictions of mountains and other landforms in China are stylized and calligraphic, emulating writing, the action of the hand of the artist, where the process of creation is a metaphor for his journey to enlightenment. They are not meant to depict a specific place but to generalize mountains as well as their ch’i (Murashige, 1995; also discussed in Rosenberg, 2001). It is true that the general form of numerous Chinese landscapes emulates the karst topography of Gui Lin province, but few of the artists of the time actually traveled to what was then an out-of-the-way place, relying instead on reports of the area. Moreover, the landscapes that they produced show little interest in the three-dimensional structure of the mountains, and even these depictions are calligraphic and two-dimensional. Few if any of the landscapes of the time that are titled to place are titled to the Li River area of South China, indicating that the artist was more interested in depicting an emotional response to the landscape rather than verisimilitude (James Robinson, 2007, personal commun.). Figure 18A (from Needham, 1959, plate XCII facing p. 598) is a rare exception that proves the rule. It is a painting by Li Kung-Lin (ca. A.D. 1100) that portrays an anticline in Anhui, just north of the Yangtze between Hankow and Nanking.

However, it is a two-dimensional rendition with no evidence of an interest in the structure’s lateral continuity, and thus it shows an object that is isolated from and exists independently of the rest of the landscape. In this sense, it is akin to medieval European renditions of landscape elements. Quite in contrast is Roelandt Savery’s drawing of a scene in southwestern Bohemia (Fig. 18B; Spicer-Durham, 1979). It is one of a series done in approximately 1606 when Savery (1576–1639) traveled into the Alps at the behest of the Habsburg Emperor, Rudolph II, the “first great patron of art to interest himself in landscape on a princely scale” (Spicer-Durham, 1979, p. 48). The Emperor had ceased to travel at this time and, instead, sent his artists out to record views of the realm. Like others in this series, which depict waterfalls and rapids, rock strata, eroded crags, and canyons, this drawing was probably done in the field, not from memory, and is not a fantasy of an imagined place (Spicer-Durham, 1979). The artist is seen sketching at the lower left, and Spicer-Durham believes that he deliberately chose his vantage point to best show the structure that he witnessed, obviously a syncline, although he certainly did not identify it as such. The three-dimensional continuity of the structure is evident, and the drawing is a remarkable testament to the acuity of his observation. Spicer-Durham (1979, p. 55–56) remarked that, in this drawing, more than any other in the series, “…Savery was interested in portraying the structure of the rock, or perhaps one should say the structure of erosion. The consistent specificity with which the repeated patterns of parallel fractures and joins in the vertical bedding are outlined produces a surrealism similar to that of a flayed anatomical

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Figure 18. (A) An exposed anticline at Lung-Mien Shan near Thung-chhêng in Anhui, just north of the Yangtze between Hankow and Nanking, a painting by Li Kung-Lin (ca. A.D. 1100+) (from Needham, 1959; facing p. 598, plate XCII, Cambridge University Press). (B) Roelandt Savery, ca. 1606, Mountain Landscape with Draftsman (Limestone Cliffs, Extended Valley View between Two High Cliffs), Louvre, Paris. Photo: Michele Bellot, Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York.

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B model drawn in minute detail.” Thus, the connection between landscape and anatomy is once again asserted. Not coincidentally, Savery earned his fame principally for his depictions of animals, fanciful and real, assembled in the peaceable kingdom of paradise, and not for his depictions of landscape. Perhaps his most famous painting as far as naturalists are concerned is his rendition of the now-extinct dodo, and thus Savery is yet another exemplar of an artist concerned with the forms of both landscape and life.

EPILOGUE: ON THE VERGE OF PARADIGMATIC GEOLOGY Figure 19 (from Vaccari, 2003, p. 181) is a sketch by Italian Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (1658–1730) titled, Della strotura delli monti, “On the different types and subtypes of mountain structures,” which Marsili had seen in the Swiss Alps. Marsili was an Italian polymath with achievements in cartography, oceanography, zoology, and botany, and who founded the

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Figure 19. Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, ca. 1705, On the Structures of Mountains. Photo: Ferrieri-Vai from Ezio Vaccari (2003, p. 181) after Gortani (1930, p. 259). Permission for reproduction granted by Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, Dr. Biancastella Antonino, Director, with kind assistance of Gian Battista Vai.

Academy of Science of Bologna in 1711. He was influenced by the taxonomic work of Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522– 1605) (Marabini and Vai, 2003), and he was a contemporary and friend of Italian naturalist Antonio Vallisneri (1661–1730), professor of practical medicine at the University of Padua, who had studied at the university of Bologna under the famous anatomist Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) (Vai, 2003, p. 236). Vallisneri told Marsili in a letter in 1705 that, “The anatomy of the Earth, of the strata of the mountains as well as their positions, is also a worthy subject for your high learning” (Vaccari, 2003, p. 181). The anatomical analogy evidently resonated with Marsili. He was one of the first to systematically organize geological observations in stratigraphic columns, draw sketches of outcrops and landscapes, and prepare geologic maps (Marabini and Vai, 2003, p. 188, 194–197; Franceschelli and Marabini 2006; Vaccari, 2006). Marsili may well have been the first to classify mountain structures (Fig. 19; ruined, massive, and stratified mountains [top row], and [lower rows] eight subtypes of stratified mountains, respectively, vertical, inclined, perpendicular, horizontal, circular– inclined at the horizon, circular–almost perpendicular at the horizon, winding, and like regular bricks; Vaccari, 2003, p. 182–183), and he later extended this information to conceptualize the internal structure of Earth. In a series of unpublished papers, Marsili refers to “the organic structure of the terraqueous globe,” and that the globe was constituted of a “substrate of alive and hard rock,

covered by a skin of ‘terra mole’” (i.e., the soils and the soft detrital covers), and that the geologist’s task was “equal to that of an anatomist who works with human bodies and takes off their skin to investigate what is inside of them” (Franceschelli and Marabini, 2006, p. 132). Marsili’s studies influenced the work of Johann Jackob Scheuchzer (1672–1733) and that of his younger brother on the structural geology of the Alps and were the main source of diagrams of folds in Vallisneri’s own dissertation on the origin of springs (Vaccari, 2003, p. 183–184). Marsili employed vertical exaggeration in illustrations that constitute the earliest scientific suggestions of the principle of isostasy (Vai, 2006, p. 98). Marsili’s work stands at the threshold of paradigmatic geology. His association with one of Italy’s leading anatomists, who was also interested in the structure of landscape, together with his own writing prove that the anatomical analogy of landscape facilitated his description of geologic structure over a range of scales. His deformation of the coordinates of landscape, in other words, his use of vertical exaggeration, recalls Albrecht Dürer’s precedent-setting view of Arco. Marsili’s use of vertical exaggeration to demonstrate the principle of isostasy was contingent upon his ability to conceptualize landscape as something that is more than an assemblage objects, each with independent existences. Rather, Marsili, as modern geologists do to this day, perceived landscape as anatomists perceive the human body, a coherent geometric structure of rationally integrated parts.

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CONCLUSIONS A revolution in understanding spatial relationships swept through Western civilization from the Renaissance, through the Scientific Revolution, and on to the Enlightenment. Consistent with Foucault’s thinking, the rediscovery of Arabic and Greek geometry that launched the Renaissance led to the revolution in understanding the structure of nature, influenced the reorganization of nation states, helped redirect the vectors of political power, and ultimately led to the Western experiment in democracy. The flow of meaning within vernacular language changed, the modern structure and dynamics of wealth and the merchant class, and Western mankind’s relationship to the cosmos shifted. Modern geologic thought emerged as the spatial-temporal coordinates of Western mankind’s existence changed, just as every other aspect of his modern existence did. Stated a little differently, the emergence of modern geologic thought was part of this flow. The recognition of living things and landscape as geometric objects led to the recognition that those objects and the space or environment around them could evolve. At the same time, it became clear that the individual and his or her social environment could evolve. From this historical perspective, it is clear that modern creationism really reflects an anxiety over the individual’s potential for change in a democracy. Geology, the science of landscape and of Earth’s interior, is one of the most visual of human endeavors, and art history privileges us with the opportunity of witnessing the emergence of the idea of landscape during the formative period of the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. The issues are much the same for evolutionary biology, the science of organic form, and it is no coincidence that artists of the period who produced what we now perceive to be modern images of landscape were also adept at depicting human beings and other living things. At the very least, these artists, who include Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Peter Paul Rubens, Hendrik Goltzius, Galileo Galilei, and Roelandt Savery, began to understand that they were portraying landscapes and living things geometrically, as rationally constructed objects of integrated parts, which included hills, valleys, rocks, lakes, rivers, sky, and vegetation on the one hand and the heart, brain, lungs, stomach, and kidneys on the other. Whether or not their renditions of spatial relationships were correct in every detail is another matter, and it may well be argued that use of geometry to render verisimilitude of landscape and the human form was only briefly a concern of artists. Nevertheless, the role of geometry in establishing landscape as a coherent form in the mindset was a prerequisite to the establishment of the science of landscape, and the subsequent history of the language of landscape, with its organic connotations, demonstrates that the organic analogy has always been integral to the idea of landscape. Just as the concept of allometry, or relative growth, so essential to understanding organic evolution, would not have been possible without the idea of geometric form that Renaissance artists and their suc-

cessors developed, the idea of a dynamic landscape evolving in response to natural processes would have been impossible without the geometrization of the terrain that artists facilitated. The sequence—formalization of the science of landscape following the origin of the concept of landscape as an object with structure—is consistent with our understanding of how all other modern sciences evolved and progressed. It is not a coincidence that an anatomist enamored with the virtues of geometry played a vital role in the development of modern geoscience. The spatial distortions of Rubens and his contemporaries were predicated on conceptualizing landscape as well as the human form as geometric objects, and it is not surprising that a growing interest in the impermanence of the landscape and the natural processes that caused transformations of the terrain was concomitant with interest in the dynamism of the human form. A comparison of the history of visualization in the West with that in China underscores how dependent the taxonomy of landscape and of life and ultimately the concept of evolution are upon the prior conceptualization of the geometric object. Geometric form was of little interest to the Chinese. Thus, even though the Chinese conceptualized a dynamic cosmos, their concept of form was far more amorphous than that in the West, and so the geometric structure of objects did not serve the taxonomic function that it did in the West. Our understanding of the evolution of Earth and of life is a logical outcome of our understanding of geometry. As Samuel Edgerton has written, geometrization of nature produces representations of natural entities that are to scale. Such standardized images can be understood with only modest education and thus are accessible to scrutiny and reevaluation even if challenging to comprehend in detail. Open scrutiny facilitates dispute and the adversarial character of modern science. The geometrization of nature was thus inherently revolutionary because it exposes observations and inferences to continual reevaluation. It fostered disregard of tradition as a basis of authority. In answer to Congressman Vernon J. Ehlers’ (2007, Geotimes, April, p. 7) question, “Why do [students] have to learn geometry?” the response is that geometry is Western civilization. Stated a little differently, geometry defines the human condition in Western civilization. The idea of evolution of life and landscape and of the individual is integral to that order. To deny evolution is to deny democracy. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to numerous colleagues whose comments and assistance facilitated this paper. Noah Heringman (University of Missouri, Columbia), Jennifer Lee (Herron School of Art, IUPUI), Arthur Mirsky (Department of Earth Sciences, IUPUI), Jim Robinson (Indianapolis Museum of Art), and William Schneider (History Department, IUPUI) reviewed the manuscript. Troels Kardel (Copenhagen) and Gian Battista Vai (University of Bologna) commented on specific sections. Elizabeth Scarborough Vidon (Department of Geography, Indiana University–Bloomington) suggested important references in

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Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Geochemical concepts in Isaac Newton’s early alchemy William R. Newman† Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Goodbody 130, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47401, USA ABSTRACT Isaac Newton developed an unusual and little-known theory of subterranean metal and mineral formation by integrating concepts drawn from his own alchemical experimentation and reading with the mechanical philosophy that he inherited from other seventeenth-century figures such as René Descartes and Robert Boyle. Until recently, Newton’s geochemical theory has been known incompletely, since the primary text in which it is found, Smithsonian MS Dibner 1031B, had only been published in a fragmentary form. Thanks to the 2006 edition of the complete manuscript appearing on the online Chymistry of Isaac Newton site (www.chymistry.org), it is now possible to arrive at a far more complete understanding of Newton’s early theory of metallogenesis than before. The present paper provides a concise analysis of Newton’s views on this subject, showing how he integrated themes from alchemy and the betterknown parts of his natural philosophy to arrive at a novel theory of the production of metals and minerals within the earth. Keywords: Newton, Sendivogius, Grasseus, Varenius, chymistry, alchemy. INTRODUCTION

analogies with Earth’s processes of geological formation were mere plausible explanations among many others. They were, in fact, examples intended to suggest that there were more possible explanations for geological phenomena than Burnet had considered. Additionally, the analogies brought up by Newton in his correspondence with Burnet relate mainly to the formation of physical features on Earth, such as mountains, stones, and oceans. They did not address the “chymical” character of the actual minerals and metals out of which Earth is made. Where, then, do we turn if we wish to know Newton’s own thoughts about the material composition of the terrestrial globe and the chemical interactions between its components? Interestingly, Newton did have his own theories about the material composition of the globe and its parts, although his comments on this subject have received little scholarly treatment. The dearth of historical comment on this subject relates, no doubt, to the fact that Newton’s geochemical ideas are found among his voluminous and little-studied alchemical papers. One of the documents in question, now found in the

Despite his stature as a foundational figure in physical science, Isaac Newton is not widely known for contributions to anything resembling the modern science of geology. If one thinks of Newton at all in a geological context, the thought will probably relate to his brief but interesting exchange with Thomas Burnet on the subject of the latter’s Telluris theoria sacra, part of which Newton read as a manuscript in 1680–1681. There Newton draws a number of analogies between the formation of mountains and other irregular features out of the putative primordial chaos and the crystallization of saltpeter in water, the deposits formed by molten tin cooling in a pot, and the curdling of milk when beer is added to it.1 However, Newton explicitly recognized that these 1 Newton to Burnet, January 1680–1681 (Turnbull, 1960, p. 329–335). For more on the Newton-Burnet exchange, see Mandelbrote (1994).

†

E-mail: [email protected].

Newman, W.R., 2009, Geochemical concepts in Isaac Newton’s early alchemy, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 41–49, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(02). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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Smithsonian Institution (Dibner MS. 1031B) was printed in 1991 by the Newton scholar B.J.T. Dobbs, but it has received little further study after its initial publication. This text is called “Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation,” after the first words in the work (Newton, 2006b). Primarily on the basis of its handwriting, Dobbs dates the manuscript to the first years of the 1670s, when Newton would have been in his late twenties or early thirties (Dobbs, 1991, p. 257). The other document, also found in the same Smithsonian manuscript, was recently edited by the online Chymistry of Isaac Newton project (http://www.chymistry.org). This second document is a short Latin text written backward from the end of Smithsonian MS. 1031B. In my view, it was probably composed before the English part of the manuscript, both on account of physical, codicological concerns and because it seems to be closer to its sources than the remainder of the pamphlet. It begins with the cancelled Latin phrase “Humores minerales continuo decidunt [Mineral humors continually fall],” and it has therefore received the name “Humores minerales” from the editors. In the present essay, I will describe the content of these two texts, at least insofar as it pertains to geology, but because of the unfamiliarity of alchemical theories of generation to most readers, it will be necessary first to say something about the alchemical, or rather “chymical” background to Newton’s ideas. (For justification of the term “chymistry,” see Newman and Principe, 1998.) SOURCES FOR NEWTON’S THEORY OF MINERAL AND METALLIC GENERATION Both “Humores minerales” and “Of Natures Obvious Laws” represent abbreviated jottings and personal beliefs rather than fully worked out theories intended for publication. Hence, any attempt to flesh them out must contain elements of educated guesswork and conjecture. Nonetheless, it is possible to place Newton’s ideas within a context supplied by his likely sources. “Humores minerales” contains what appears to be Newton’s own fusion of the popular early modern sal nitrum theory of metallic generation with a solution theory of metallic genesis drawn mainly from the work of an alchemist who has received very little treatment as a Newtonian source. The immediate author from whom Newton drew this solution theory was a German lawyer and advisor to the powerful bishop-prince Ernst von Bayern, namely Johann Grasseus, whose Arca arcani Newton heavily annotated in his comprehensive Index chemicus and in separate manuscripts.2 Before describing Grasseus’s work, however, let me give a brief recounting of the sal nitrum theory in its more common form. Although the sal nitrum theory has a long and tortuous history, the classic account of it, and one that Newton knew very well, lay in the Novum lumen chemicum (1604) of Michael Sendivogius, a Polish courtier and mining official in the entourage 2 Cambridge University, King’s College, Keynes MSS. 30 passim and 35, folios 2r ff (the manuscript lacks reliable foliation). For Grasseus, see Lederer (1994, 1992). I thank Hiro Hirai for alerting me to Lederer’s dissertation (1992). See also Priesner and Figala (1998, p. 165–166).

of the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II.3 Sendivogius developed an elaborate theory in the Novum lumen chemicum, in which saltpeter (sal nitrum) is used as a sort of model for explaining mineral growth and generation more generally. At the same time, Sendivogius’s theory employed the traditional alchemical principles of mercury, sulfur, and salt to explain metallic generation, but he typically interpreted these as Decknamen (“cover-names”) referring to various aspects or stages in the development of his “philosophical sal nitrum.” Moreover, Sendivogius thought of the alchemical principle sulfur as being a more active, mature form of his philosophical mercury, which is itself identical with the sophic niter. Despite its confusing profusion of synonyms, Sendivogius’s theory has hard empirical evidence at its core. Sendivogius’s theory is partly based on the fact that saltpeter “grows” naturally by efflorescing out of earth and basement walls, and it is derived in part from a branch of Neoplatonic alchemy. According to the Novum lumen chemicum, every body has a center, a “point of seed or sperm,” which is always that body’s “1/8200 part” (Sendivogius, 1702, p. 466). The elements project their sperma (literally “sperm”), the bearer of their virtues, into Earth’s center, which is a hollow place rather like a womb (Sendivogius, 1702, p. 465–466). This sperma is itself the “mercury of the philosophers,” so-called because of its heaviness, fluidity, and ability to conjoin with all things, just as common quicksilver amalgamates with other metals (Sendivogius, 1702, p. 468). Following the alchemical custom of employing many names for the “first matter,” Sendivogius also calls this sperm the “central salt” or sal nitrum.4 The womb-like hollow at Earth’s center then digests the seed of the elements, ejecting their excrementitious superfluity in the form of stones. This expulsion is due to the fact that at the center of Earth exists a sol centralis, another sun, which has a force driving matter outward toward Earth’s surface, just as the celestial sun projects its own rays down to Earth (Sendivogius, 1702, p. 473). Thus, the elemental sperm after digestion is driven upward through the pores of the earth in the form of a vapor: there it combines with a philosophical sulfur resident in the soil. Depending on the impurities and the degree of heat encountered there, different metals and minerals are formed. However, where the pores of the earth are open, and there is an absence of “fat” or sulfur in the crust of the earth to combine with the philosophical mercury, the vapor passes out to the surface and serves to nourish plants (Sendivogius, 1702, p. 467). Having passed through the pores of the earth, the vaporous sperma of the elements congeals into “a water, from which all things are born” (“Est enim terra porosa, & ventus stillando per poros terrae resolvitur in aquam, ex qua res nascuntur omnes”; Sendivogius, 1702, p. 466). On the surface of Earth, Sendivogius says, “rays are joined to rays”; that is, the elemental sperm imbued with the virtues 3 For the most recent work on Sendivogius, see Prinke (1999). This should be supplemented by Julian Paulus’s entry on Alexander Seton, with whom Sendivogius is often confused, in Priesner and Figala (1998). 4 “...quamvis haberes primam materiam secundum Philosophos, illud Sal centrale, tamen sine auro multiplicare impossibile tibi foret...” (Sendivogius, 1702, p. 469).

Geochemical concepts in Isaac Newton’s early alchemy of the central sun now receives the powers of its celestial counterpart, and the two “produce flowers and all things” (“In superficie terrae radii radiis junguntur, & producunt flores, & omnia”; Sendivogius, 1702, p. 473). This conjunction of rays occurs by the following means: the philosophical mercury, or “water,” is driven into the atmosphere, where it receives a vital power from the air— When it rains, [the water] receives the power of life from the air, and combines that with the sal nitrum of the earth (because the sal nitri of the earth is like calcined tartar, attracting air to itself by its dryness, which air is resolved in it into water: this sal nitri of the earth, which was itself an air, and is conjoined to the fatness of the earth, has such an attractive power) and the more abundantly the solar rays strike it, the greater the quantity of sal nitrum is produced, and consequently a greater crop grows, and this occurs continually.5

Hence, the sal nitrum joins with the “power of life” imparted to the atmosphere by the celestial rays. It returns to the earth thus actuated and in turn combines with “the fatness of the earth” to yield ordinary niter. Later commentators have referred to the volatile substance carried down by rain as “invisible” or “aerial” niter, which bonds with the sulfurous fatness to form solid niter (Figala, 1984, p. 175–177). The growth of metals in their mines is due to the same process as that of plants on the surface of Earth. Both depend on the descent of a vital power brought down by rain, which joins with the volatilized sal nitrum: the combination of this vital power and the sal nitrum acts like a universal fertilizer. Rather than dismissing Sendivogius’ theory as sheer fantasy, let us consider its coherence and explanatory power. First, Sendivogius was able to draw on chymical and physical analogies in order to explain the sal nitrum’s attractive power—the sal nitrum acts like hygroscopic calcined tartar (anhydrous potassium carbonate) in attracting the fertilizing humidity from the heavens. Sendivogius made this attractive power of the sal nitrum still more compelling by invoking magnetic metaphors as well, and therefore he speaks elsewhere of the attracting sulfurous fatness as a chalybs (Latin for “steel”), which draws the mercurial moisture out of the air just as an ordinary piece of steel attracts and is attracted by a magnet (magnes in Latin).6 Second, Sendivogius thought sal nitrum to contain a principle of life. This is without a doubt the origin of John Mayow’s (1641–1679) nitro-aerial spirit, a forerunner of oxygen in Mayow’s theory of respiration (Partington, 1961). Mayow used Sendivogius’ theory to explain 5 The two terms sal nitrum and sal nitri, “saltniter” and “salt of niter,” appear to be equivalent. I have not been able to check the editio princeps to see if both forms appear there. The Latin follows: “Propterea quando pluvia fit, accipit ex aere illam vim vitae, & conjungit illam cum sale nitro terrae, (quia sal nitri terrae est instar calcinati Tartari, sua siccitate aerem ad se trahens; qui aer in eo resolvitur in aquam: Talem vim attrahendi habet ille sal nitri terrae, qui etiam aer fuit, & est conjunctus pinguedini terrae) & quo radii solares copiosius tunc feriunt, eo major salis nitri quantitas fit, & per consequens major frumenti copia crescit, & hoc de die in diem fit” (Sendivogius, 1702, p. 473). 6 For vis magnetica, see Sendivogius (1702, p. 466–468, 481). For chalybs and magnes, see Sendivogius (1702, p. 470, 472–473, 483).

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why respired air becomes foul: the nitrous particles contained in it are gradually used up. Cornelius Drebbel (1572–1633) supposedly used the thermal decomposition of saltpeter to release enough “nitrous spirit” (in this case clearly oxygen) to sustain the crew of his “submarine” that made a descent under the Thames.7 This vital power imbedded in niter could also be used to explain the effectiveness of saltpeter in preserving meats, on the assumption that what keeps the body from decay after death must exercise the same agency during life (Guerlac, 1954, p. 248). A third advantage of Sendivogius’ theory lay in its ability to explain the remarkable combustibility of gunpowder. Gunpowder can deflagrate without the help of ambient air precisely because it contains an inordinate amount of sal nitrum (Hubicki, 1962). Mayow again used the fact that sal nitrum was the active ingredient of gunpowder to explain muscular contraction: to simplify his theory, the inhaled sal nitrum, present in the blood, was exploding (Guerlac, 1953, p. 334). This leads us to a fourth consideration: since sal nitrum was known to exist in the ambient, and since it was the most inflammable ingredient of gunpowder, it was not unreasonable to suppose that thunder and lightning were caused by the explosion of the aerial niter in the atmosphere. Thus, Newton himself maintained in his Opticks that atmospheric sulfur combined with the airborne niter “cause Lightning and Thunder, and fiery Meteors” (Guerlac, 1954, p. 254–255). Finally, we come to the point of our departure into Sendivogian theory, the fact that niter could be used as a fertilizer. As a source of abundant nitrogen, all the existing forms of “niter” are indeed effective in that role (Merrill, 1904, p. 306–312; Lilley, 1936, p. 679–685; Johnstone, 1961, p. 429–432), but to Sendivogius, the ability of saltpeter to stimulate plant growth was one more indication of its vital power: obtained from the heavens and transmitted by rain to the earth, the fertilizing agency was acquired by terrestrial saltpeter to a greater degree than any other substance. Now let us turn to the solution theory of Johann Grasseus, Newton’s second major source in “Humores minerales” and “Of Natures Obvious Laws.” As we have observed, Sendivogius referred to “sulfur” and “mercury” as principles or components within the earth and at times even employed these terms as synonyms for his philosophical niter. Here, Sendivogius was appropriating and updating a medieval theory of metallic generation according to which the metals were formed within the earth by the combination of ascending fumes of sulfur and mercury, much in the way that cinnabar can be made by subliming those two materials in a flask. The earliest form of the sulfur-mercury theory appeared in the Book of the Secret of Creation, a work written in Arabic, possibly in the eighth century, and ascribed to one Balīnās. This fundamental doctrine, probably based on the observation that most of the then-known metals would amalgamate with mercury and that the common sulfide ores of metals tend to deposit sublimed sulfur in the flues of refining furnaces, was accepted in 7 Figala (1984, p. 176). Cf. Henry Guerlac (1953, p. 332–349), and Guerlac (1954, p. 243–255). For more sources on Drebbel’s “submarine,” see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online version, sub voce, consulted 12 December 2007.

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altered form until the end of the eighteenth century.8 Unlike Sendivogius, Grasseus did not assimilate the traditional principles of mercury and sulfur into a geochemical theory modeled on the properties of saltpeter. Instead, his Arca arcani, the work that Newton copiously annotated, adds another step to the sublimation process forming the empirical basis of the sulfur-mercury theory. The Arca arcani in effect fuses the classical exhalation theory in which sulfur and mercury vapors combine directly to form the metals with a solution theory, the ultimate source of which was a text that is sometimes called the Bible of the medieval alchemists—the Summa perfectionis of Geber, written around the end of the thirteenth century by an occidental author. The Summa accepts the basic concept of the sulfur-mercury theory but adds that the sulfurous and mercurial vapors must first cool and be dissolved in a subterranean humidity, which transports the dissolved principles away from their respective points of origin by flowing through subterranean passages, and is then sublimed, cooled, and gradually converted into various metallic ores, depending on a variety of factors.9 This theory had the advantage of explaining the otherwise embarrassing fact that metal ores are not usually found in conjunction with large deposits of mercury and sulfur, a condition that one would otherwise expect to follow from the sulfur-mercury theory in its usual form. In his Arca arcani, Grasseus argues like Geber that the metallic veins within the earth drip down (stillant) sharp, salty, vitriolic waters, which can be observed in mines. These waters, which also contain a hidden mercury, sink downward within the earth, where they encounter the sulfurous vapors that are always rising up from Earth’s core, “but if the salty waters are pure and clear, and the sulfurous vapors pure, and they embrace one another upon meeting, a pure metal is thence generated” (Grasseus, 1661, p. 305–307). Things are not so simple when the initial ingredients are less pure, however. In such a case, the mercurial substance within the sharp, salty water and the sulfurous exhalations gradually coalesce within subterranean interstices and emit a vapor. This vapor eventually thickens to become an immature “mucilaginous and unctuous” material called “Gur” (probably from the German “Gärung,” a ferment), which looks at first like white butter, but which eventually matures into ores.10 Grasseus argues that the ores themselves gradually mature into the noblest metal, gold, but that in their immature form, they all begin as lead ore, which is therefore the closest of the ores to the primordial Gur. Hence, one can see that Grasseus’s system, unlike the rather mechanical one presented by the medieval sulfur-mercury theory, added a pervasive hylozoic content to the theory of metallic gen8 Kraus (1942, p. 1). For more on the sulfur-mercury theory, see Norris (2006). 9 For the theory in Geber, see Newman (1991, p. 664–665). For Geber’s observation that certain mines contain a corrosive humidity that “distills” down, see Newman (1991, p. 731). 10 Grasseus has explicitly borrowed the term “Gur” from the Sarepta oder Berg-Postill (Nuremberg, 1564) of Johann Mathesius, an important sixteenthcentury German writer on mineralogy (see Grasseus, 1661, p. 306). On gur, see Norris (2007), especially p. 72, no. 11. Newton employs the term “Gur” twice in Of Natures Obvious Laws: on 1v and 2v.

eration. As we will observe, this emphasis on hylozoism would have a pronounced effect on Newton. Perhaps surprisingly, a third source for Newton’s alchemical theory of metallogenesis is Bernhard Varenius’s well-known Geographia generalis, a work that Newton edited and published in Cambridge in 1672 (Warntz, 1989). Varenius is known primarily as a geographer, of course, but the Geographia contains scattered comments on the generation of metals and minerals, as well as statements about the character of the ocean’s salinity and on salts more generally, which Newton took quite seriously. Varenius often acknowledges his source in chymical matters to have been one “Thurnheuserus,” who may well have been the prolific alchemical writer Leonhard Thurneisser zum Thurn (born before 1531–died 1596). Among Thurneisser’s bewildering array of publications was one on the nature of mineral waters, which could well have been known to Varenius.11 At any rate, the author of the Geographia displays a keen interest in the formation of mineral waters, which leads Varenius into the related area of metallogenesis as well. Like Grasseus, Varenius proposes that underground water can dissolve salts and vitriol—he adds sulfur as well—and this water is thereby impregnated with such minerals. Having a pronounced atomist streak, Varenius says that such mineral waters can in turn dissolve the metallic granules that they encounter into atoms, which they then unite with. As a result, “corporeal mineral waters” are formed, “which contain solid particles of minerals (fossilia), but so small, minute, and thoroughly mixed that they cannot be made out by sight,” although they can settle in due time, like “the chymical waters in which metals [are] dissolved” (Varenius, 1672, p. 189). The meaning of “corporeal mineral waters” becomes clearer when Varenius passes to the generation of metals proper. The metals themselves are generated beneath the surface when “vapors and fumes are condensed on the protruding angles of the rocks, to which they adhere; first they come together into a soft substance, and then they are condensed.” Hence, although Varenius does not use Grasseus’s term “Gur,” he too thinks that the metallic vapors can pass through a soft, immature stage on their way to becoming full-blown metals (Varenius, 1672, p. 190). Moreover, Varenius adds that waters can penetrate into the areas that contain these immature metals and metallic fumes, with the result that “they are impregnated by them, and they thus become spiritual, metallic, mineral waters.” In other words, a volatile, metallic component derived from the still-imperfect metals can penetrate into the water to produce volatile, metallic solutions. In contradistinction to the “corporeal mineral waters” formed by acid dissolution, the “spiritual mineral waters” are fully volatile—they do not leave behind a fixed residue when evaporated. In sum, Varenius allows for two modes by which 11 For bio-bibliographical information on Thurneisser, see Priesner and Figala (1998, p. 360–361). References to “Thurnheuserus” may be found in Varenius (1672, p. 45, 159, 192–193, 197). According to Ferguson (1906), Thurneisser published a work entitled Pison... Von kalten, warmen, minerischen und metallischen Wassern... in 1572 in Frankfurt an der Oder. Discovering whether this is the work used by Varenius would require further research.

Geochemical concepts in Isaac Newton’s early alchemy metallic waters can be generated: either by direct solution of the immature metallic fumes in water, or by solution of the fully formed metals in subterranean acidic solutions. In the former case, a totally volatile solution is formed, while in the latter, metallic waters of a fixed nature arise. As we will see, these ideas resurface in Newton’s “Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation” and “Humores minerales,” along with elements taken from Varenius’s discussion of sea salt, but they are intertwined with the theories of Sendivogius and Grasseus. NEWTON’S THEORY OF METALLOGENESIS IN “HUMORES MINERALES” Let us now turn to Newton’s brief “Humores minerales,” a document that contains elements from both of the previous solution theories and also from the classical account of sal nitrum. The text begins with seven short paragraphs laying out an argument that metals must be continually generated within the earth, followed by seven additional paragraphs that comment on the previous argument. Newton’s initial argument points out that all metals are soluble in one corrosive or another, and that solutions of the metals are found naturally occurring in fountains and ponds on the surface of Earth. These metallic solutions, moreover, are found dripping down on the walls of mines (Newton may have copper and iron sulfate in mind), which shows that they gradually sink down toward the center of Earth. Next, Newton brings in his own experience from the laboratory, pointing out that the distillation of metals corroded in acid solutions does not cause the metal to ascend, but simply drives over the much more volatile acids. Hence, he continues, “with the metals continually drawn downwards, never ascending so long as they remain metals, it would be necessary that in a few years the greatest part would have vanished from the upper earth, unless they are conceded to be generated there de novo” (Newton, “Humores minerals,” 2006a, fol. 6v). This counterfactual argument points out that the dissolved, descending metals would soon be depleted from the surface of Earth unless they were somehow replenished there. Having thus established the necessity of metallic replenishment within the earth, Newton then considers how the metals may in fact ascend back up to the upper regions of the subterranean world. Because the metals in their normal state are too fixed to ascend back to the upper strata, Newton concludes that they must be radically altered in order to make such an upward passage. As he puts it on the same page, “Metals may by no artifice be drawn into so great a volatility that they can ascend in the manner of vapor by means of a gentle terrestrial heat, unless they lose their metallic nature … through destruction of the metallic form.” In other words, the metals qua metals must be destroyed in order for them to rise back up to their former position in Earth’s crust. Having presented these preliminary thoughts, Newton then fleshes out his arguments with further details. First, he reiterates the major conclusion of his preceding discussion—that “fumes or metallic spirits ascend to the upper [levels], in which they generate.” So far so good, but in the following paragraph, it is clear

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that Newton has something far more complicated than a simple theory in which the fumes of the metals reconstitute themselves into full blown metals or minerals without additional help. At this point Newton introduces Grasseus’s idea that the descending corrosive, metalliferous waters encounter the rising fumes or spirits that are making their way back toward the surface of Earth. As Newton puts it (fol. 6v)— Indeed, these spirits meet with metallic solutions and will mix with them. And when they are in a state of motion and vegetation, they will putrefy [and] destroy the metallic form and convert [it] into spirits similar to themselves. Which can then ascend again and thus a perpetual circulation of metals takes place.

Here, one can see how Newton has adopted the hylozoic tendencies of Grasseus and other contemporary alchemists. The terms “vegetation” and “putrefy” reveal that Newton has a sort of biological process in mind, according to which the interaction of the rising metallic fumes and the descending metalliferous waters results in a process of growth and corruption. The end result of the process is that the metallic spirits win out and convert the waters to yet more spirits, which then continue their upward trajectory toward the surface of Earth. Why then does this process result in “a perpetual circulation” instead of a runaway conversion of metalliferous waters into spirits which in turn convert other waters into spirits? Did Newton fail to see the possibility of a chain reaction ensuing here? In fact, the following three paragraphs reveal that this possibility did not escape his attention, for he now explains how the process of putrefaction in turn leads to a regeneration of the metals— But in such a putrefaction, the mercurial spirit is separated from the sulfur and the sulfur is too fixed to ascend. Whence the magnet or saturn becomes lame [lit.: wounded in the foot], and this spirit is not digested into a metal for a very long time, thanks to the lack of metallic sulfur. ¶ But if those sulfurs should fall into the proper places, they are quickly cooked by spirits into a metal again, and they are led into the highest volatility by them and then they can again ascend, which happens especially in the sign of Aries. ¶ And this material (the mystical chalybs[)], if it finds a commodious place, quickly passes into sol. But if the place should be cold, it ceases to vegetate and in course of time it either passes into fumes or is coagulated, perhaps, into iron on account of impurities.

In this passage, Newton lays out a rather complicated series of events. First, the putrefaction brought on by the interaction of the rising metallic fumes and the descending metalliferous waters causes the sulfur and mercury of the metals to separate. Newton then relies on the fact that his putative mercury principle is less fixed than the sulfur principle to explain why the mercury rises while the sulfur does not. Employing the magnes–chalybs language of Sendivogius, Newton proceeds to argue that the more mature, more fixed sulfur can mature independently into a metal, while the mercury has great difficulty doing so. Employing imagery derived from Sendivogius and other alchemists, Newton refers to the mercury as Saturn, sometimes depicted as missing a leg, and hence “lame.” As for the sulfur, once it becomes a

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metal, it can be volatilized again by spirits, presumably the same metallic spirits that caused the initial putrefaction to begin with. Hence, the cyclical nature of the process is assured. To recapitulate the entire sequence, corrosive waters within the earth first attack metals and presumably their ores, carrying them down to the subterranean depths in dissolved form. Some of these metalliferous waters make it as far as the temperate heat at the core of Earth, whereupon their corrosive solvent evaporates, abandoning the metallic material. Subjected to Earth’s central heat, this material gradually gives off fumes, which in turn rise up and encounter more descending waters. The corrosive, metal-bearing waters are continually attacked by the rising metallic fumes, which in turn leads to a putrefaction that causes the metallic principles to separate. This separation is followed by a maturation of the principles into metals or their ores within the earth, followed by the repetition of the entire process (see illustration Fig. 1). The distinction between fixed metallic solutions caused by the subterranean action of acids on the one hand and volatile dissolutions of metallic fumes on the other brings to mind the bifurcation that Varenius drew between “corporeal” and “spiritual” mineral waters, and of course the influence of Grasseus is evident throughout the text. However, the final paragraph of “Humores minerales” reveals more than any of the preceding lines the degree to which Newton has grafted the sal nitrum theory of Sendivogius onto the solution-based ideas of Grasseus and Varenius. In describing the interaction of the sulfur and mercury that ascend all the way to the surface of Earth, Newton says, “These two spirits above all wander over the earth and bestow life on animals and vegetables. And they make stones, salts, and so forth.” Thus, we have passed from a theory of mere metallic generation to one that is intended to explain the totality of life on Earth, as well as

Corrosive waters drip down from Earth’s surface

the production of all mineral materials, not just metallic ones. This is precisely the view that Sendivogius expressed when he argued that the sperma of the elements, which he equated with the alchemical principles mercury and sulfur, produces “flowers and all things” on the surface of Earth. It is fitting that Newton would end “Humores minerales” with this Sendivogian concept, for it obviously allows him to pass from a theory of metallogenesis to something much broader. This is precisely what he proceeds to do in the English part of Dibner MS. 1031B, namely, “Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation.” The remainder of this paper will be devoted to a brief overview of the parts of that text which deal with geochemical processes on and below Earth’s surface. MECHANISM AND VEGETATION IN “OF NATURES OBVIOUS LAWS & PROCESSES IN VEGETATION” If we now turn to “Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation,” several of the themes introduced in the foregoing analysis of “Humores minerales” will re-emerge in greater detail, but with very different emphases. In particular, we will see that Newton here tries to distinguish between purely mechanical processes and those that he links to a principle of “vegetation.” The text begins with a comparison of generative processes across the three kingdoms of nature—animal, vegetable, and mineral. As in “Humores minerales,” Newton focuses on the idea that metals grow, putrefy, and regenerate themselves within the earth, much after the fashion of trees on Earth’s surface. This rather intricate discussion quickly passes to a consideration of “the production of the upper region from mineralls.” Newton begins this section in a way reminiscent of Grasseus and Varenius, saying that “mettalls

Corrosive spirits recondense into corrosive waters

Mercury and Sulfur fumes wander surface of Earth, causing life and generating stones and salts

Mercury fumes ascend

and dissolve metals and minerals within Earth

Sulfur generates new metals, which are in turn vaporized

and thus form vitriolic waters

Corrosive waters then vaporize, abandoning the metals

which encounter heat

which then putrefy and divide into Sulfur and Mercury

Rising fumes encounter descending vitriolic waters Abandoned metals become metallic fumes, which rise

Figure 1. Newton’s circulatory schema for the generation of metals and minerals.

Geochemical concepts in Isaac Newton’s early alchemy dissolve in divers liquors to a saline or vitriolate substance.” Instead of launching into a consideration of the putrefaction induced by fumes meeting these vitriolic liquors, however, Newton now takes the discussion in a different direction. He launches into an apparently quite original treatment of the formation of sea salt and niter by means of a putative interaction between water and the metallic fumes that rise up from Earth’s depths. It is likely that Newton’s introductory lines about saline generation are loosely inspired by Varenius’s discussion of sea salt, for both Newton (fol. 1v) and the author of the Geographia generalis make the claim—prima facie paradoxical—that the sea is saltier in the tropics, thanks to the higher volume of freshwater evaporated off by the sun there, and yet that seawater cannot be rid of all its salt by means of distillation. (For these two claims, see: Varenius, 1672, p. 109 and 112.) Indeed, Newton’s words (fol. 1v) betray the direct influence of Varenius’s assertion that seawater contains both a fixed and a volatile salt: “Because the sea is perpetually replenished with fresh vapours it cannot bee freed from a salin tast by destillation, that salt arising with the water which is not yet concreted to a grosser body.” This passage surely recapitulates the following words of Varenius— Even if salt is left behind in the bottom of the vessel in both distillation and decoction (which are the same) nonetheless the water separated by distillation or decoction is still found to be salty, so that it is not fit for human drink, which seems a wonder to those ignorant of the cause. But chymistry, that is, true physics, has taught this, by whose help it is known that there is a double salt in bodies; or two genera of salts, which even if they agree in taste yet differ greatly in [their] other qualities: the artificers call one [of them] “fixed” salt, the other “volatile.” The fixed salt is not elevated in decoction and distillation on account of its weight, but remains in the bottom of the vessel. But the volatile is a spiritual salt, and is nothing other than a very subtle spirit, which is raised by a very mild fire, and hence it ascends with the sweet water in distillation, and is tightly united [to it] on account of the subtlety of [its] atoms. (Varenius, 1672, p. 112)

The attentive reader will note that Varenius is employing much the same line of reasoning that he used in his discussion of volatile “spiritual metallic waters” and “corporeal metallic waters.” In nature, tiny atoms of light weight are found mingled in with larger, heavier ones; distillation merely separates the two types of particles by raising the smaller and leaving the bigger behind. Hence, it is possible for the smaller atoms of the volatile salt to ascend, while the larger, fixed ones remain behind, just as the spiritual metallic waters could be completely distilled, while the corporeal ones left a residue upon their distillation. The same ideas linking subtlety to volatility and grossness to fixity pervade Newton’s reasoning as well, and it is quite likely that Varenius’s influence in “Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation” extends well beyond the discussion of mere sea salt. However, Newton differs markedly from Varenius in bringing niter into his discussion of salts. Probably stimulated in a general way by Varenius’s claim that sea salt contains components of varying volatility, Newton asserts that niter is a looser, less fixed salt than sea salt, and that the difference between the two salts

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arises not from a chemical diversity between their ingredients, but rather from the fact that the niter is made when the metallic fumes combine with “subtile invisible” water vapor, whereas sea salt originates from the combination of the volatilized metals with liquid water or mist. A preponderance of water causes the fumes to be “overwhelmed & drowned,” which kills their fermentative activity and results in the immediate formation of sea salt. Newton lays out his justification for this interesting theory of niter and sea salt by invoking evidence drawn both from the laboratory and from the world at large. First, he asserts that “the fixt salt left in ignition returns to [niter] by dissolution.” This is surely a reference to Robert Boyle’s famous analysis and synthesis of saltpeter, first described in Boyle’s 1661 Certain Physiological Essays, and then elaborated in his 1666 Origin of Forms and Qualities. Boyle’s experiment worked by injecting a red-hot coal into saltpeter, thereby igniting it. The product of this ignition, what we now call potassium carbonate, was then dissolved in nitric acid to produce further saltpeter. Boyle recognized that the initial and final products were the same, and therefore called the process a “redintegration” (resynthesis) of niter. Interestingly, Newton here seems to focus solely on the physical features of the experiment—the fact that the fixed salt left by ignition is “dissolved” into saltpeter, without considering the chemical fact that the solvent has to be nitric acid. This omission on Newton’s part is a calculated move intended to bring the experiment into conformity with his theory, whereby the looser, more subtle niter is formed by mere “dissolution” of the more fixed and impassible potassium carbonate. Newton then launches into a detailed comparison of niter and sea salt in the world at large in order to confirm his idea that the latter is merely a more fixed version of the former (fols. 2r–2v): Hence also little or no [niter] is in the sea becaus the grosse water stifles all or the far greatest part of the exhalation the aire indeed is replenished with this exhalation from neibourig regions & so may impregnate rain water with niter & so it may receive niter from rivers but the proportion is inconsiderable compared to all those vapors that arise into it. And all this will appear more then conjectur by considering 1 fumes do arise plentifully, 2 they will abide with water in a pellucid form & 3 therefore appear in evaporation of a saline forme. 4 they must therefore produce something like salt copiously 5 there are noe such products but [sea-salt] & [niter] generally found: 6 These are generally washed down by the descent of water hence [niter] is most copious in houses & dry places, hence also the sea is salter then the earth 7 these salts would therefore soone vanish if they were not constantly new generated & this is further confirmed by their bee plentifully produced in places where there was none before & where they could not bee had but out of the vaporous air nay that it descends with rain yet in that saline form it descends is two gros to ascend with it (that tis noe stranger for it to praecipitate out of vapors upon rock then out of waters upon the sides of a vessell.) They are therefore constantly generated & that out of a most subtil vapor that ascends with as little heat as water.

The upshot of this passage is once again that the metallic fumes permeate water or water-vapor to produce either sea salt or niter, respectively, but here Newton buttresses this claim with the argument that these two chemicals would soon be washed

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down into the depths of the earth and therefore disappear from its surface unless they were in fact regenerated constantly. This counterfactual passage is quite reminiscent of the ideas already discussed in “Humores minerales,” where Newton argued that metals and their ores were constantly being washed downwards and were too fixed to resublime as such, and they therefore had to be regenerated from the interaction of fumes and metalliferous waters just as niter and sea salt are generated from water-vapor and water descending in the form of rain. There are many interesting and diverse features to the remaining folios of Newton’s “Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation,” but a particularly enlightening aspect of the text lies in Newton’s emphasis on what we would today call a physical theory of salt formation as opposed to a chemical one. As we have seen, Newton wants to locate the essential distinction between sea salt and niter purely in their texture. Niter is more volatile and subtle, whereas sea salt is more fixed and gross, and this distinction arises from the respective combination of the same metallic fumes either with water vapor on the one hand or with liquid water or dense mist on the other. Although Newton’s reputation lies mainly in his work as a physicist, this is not some sort of empire-building move on the part of a reductionist natural philosopher intent on leading all change back to physical principles such as brute, passive matter and motion. To the contrary, Newton is keenly aware of the fact that not all chemical phenomena can be reduced to what he calls “gross mechanical transposition of parts.” As its name implies, a major theme throughout “Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation” lies in the analysis of what Newton calls “vegetation,” but what exactly does this word denote? In early modern English, “vegetation” was not limited to plants, but it meant more broadly “growth” or the act of growing. Newton, however, uses “vegetation” to distinguish a sort of organic growth from mere mechanical accretion. To him, vegetation implies a goal-directed process guided by tiny semina or “seeds” implanted deep within matter. The processes of salt production that we have analyzed so far are manifestly not instances of vegetation, since they involve only a mechanical change in texture brought on by corpuscular interaction between metallic fumes and water. Newton classifies these changes with such mechanical operations as the mixing of differently colored powders to produce new colors (as when jumbled blue and yellow granules give the appearance of green), the dissolution of metals in mineral acids, and the separation of cream into butter, curds, and whey by churning. In addition, any laboratory process that allows one to retrieve the initial ingredients from what we would call a “chemical compound” reveals, for Newton, that the compound in question was a mere mechanical mixture rather than a product of vegetation. As he puts it (fol. 5v), “Nay all the operations in vulgar chemistry (many of which to sense are as strange transmutations as those of nature) are but mechanicall coalitions or seperations of particles as may appear in that they returne into their former natures if reconjoned or (when unequally volatile) dissevered, & that without any vegetation.” In

other words, all ordinary reactions that we would classify within the realm of inorganic chemistry (“vulgar chemistry”) are mere mechanical interactions, and this is demonstrated by the retrievability of their ingredients. A good example of what Newton means would be the case of silver dissolved in nitric acid and then precipitated by the addition of potassium carbonate. The fact that the precipitate could then be heated and the original silver regained would reveal to Newton that the acid dissolution was really a sort of microlevel grinding rather than a genuine process of vegetation. Newton goes on to define vegetation in the following terms (fol. 5r)— Natures actions are either vegetable or purely mechanicall (grav. flux. meteors. vulgar Chymistry<)> The principles of her vegetable actions are noe other then the seeds or seminall vessels of things those are her onely agents, her fire, her soule, her life, The seede of things that is all that substance in them that is attained to the fullest degree of maturity that that is in that thing so that there being nothing more mature to act upon them they acquiesce. Vegetation is nothing else but the acting of what is most maturated or specificate upon that which is less specificate or mature to make it as mature as it selfe And in that degree of maturity nature ever rests.

Here once again we encounter Newton’s distinction between the vegetable and the mechanical, but now fleshed out with examples that include gravity, fluidity, meteorological phenomena, and “vulgar Chymistry” among the latter. To the young Newton, who had not yet discovered the principle of action at a distance that marked his mature Principia, the phenomena exhibited by falling bodies, melting materials, changes in the atmosphere, and inorganic chemical reactions were all explicable by means of microlevel particles acting blindly on one another. What is interesting about the passage is Newton’s clear description of what vegetation entails as opposed to mechanism. As he puts it, vegetation is a goal-directed process whereby a more mature seed leads a less mature material into a state of maturity equivalent to its own. In other words, vegetation is the procedure whereby generation and growth occur in the natural world. In Newton’s mind, it is clearly the operation by which nature retains and replenishes the species of the world around us. Even if the phenomenal world may appear to operate by mechanical means, nature employs vegetative processes at a deeper level to drive the corpuscular interactions that result in generation and growth. Hence, in reiterating the distinction between mere mechanism and vegetation, Newton says (fol. 5v), “And this difference is vast & fundamental because nothing could ever yet bee made without vegetation which nature useth to produce by it.” CONCLUSION Perhaps the most interesting thing about the texts found in Smithsonian MS. 1031B lies in the way that Newton attempts therein to integrate his more general natural philosophical concerns with alchemy. We see this explicitly in his endeavor to

Geochemical concepts in Isaac Newton’s early alchemy work out the relationship of mechanism, which he had inherited mainly from Cartesian and Boylean sources, and what he calls vegetation, which he derives principally from the hylozoic chymistry of early modern alchemists. Smithsonian MS. 1031B’s hitherto unnoticed debt to Varenius’s Geographia generalis is also testimony to Newton’s integration of natural philosophy and alchemy. The use of Varenius in a chymical context was a perfectly natural move for Newton to make, given that Varenius himself had already employed chymistry in the service of geography. In addition to tracking down Newton’s textual sources, it is also of great interest to see how he incorporated experimentally derived information with this more theoretical material. Hence, we find him puzzling out the relationship between fixed minerals and volatile acids on the basis of his own knowledge gained in the chymical laboratory in “Humores minerales,” and in “Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation” he relies in part on Robert Boyle’s analysis and resynthesis of saltpeter to develop his own theory of the relationship between niter and sea salt. The two texts in Smithsonian MS. 1031B share another obvious feature as well: both are deeply informed by alchemical theories of metallogenesis that allow for the continual degeneration and recomposition of metals and minerals within the earth, hence allowing for a circulatory theory in which Earth itself is seen as constantly undergoing renewal and regeneration. Newton found this idea to be deeply congenial for two reasons, one more obvious than the other. First, as he says in both of the texts found in Smithsonian MS. 1031B, the minerals and metals found in Earth’s crust would be exhausted by continued solution and draining downward if they were not perpetually renewed by some means. As we have seen, the young Newton found that means in his unusual combination of the alchemical theories propounded by Michael Sendivogius, Johann Grasseus, and Bernhard Varenius. Second, it is clear that Newton was already thinking in synthetic terms of a “theory of everything” that would explain organic life, the origin of heat and flame, the mechanical cause of gravitation, cohesion, the generation of metals and minerals, and so forth, by making an appeal to circulatory processes involving the interaction of metallic vapors, the atmosphere, and various forms of ether at the time of composing this manuscript. Many of these ideas would also appear in the 1675 “Hypothesis of Light,” Newton’s letter that contains his early explanation of Newton’s Rings.12 It would carry us too far afield at present to consider the integrated picture of the cosmos that Newton tries to draw there. One thing, however, is quite clear. At this early stage in his career, Newton was deeply committed to a picture of the cosmos that would use alchemy to arrive at the deep structure of matter and hence penetrate to a more profound level than that supplied by the “gros mechanicall transposition of parts” of Cartesian natural philosophy. The details of the connection between this project of the youthful Newton in the early to mid-1670s and the author of the Principia and Opticks remain to be determined. 12

Newton to Oldenburg, 7 December 1675 (Turnbull, 1959, p. 362–391).

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REFERENCES CITED Dobbs, B.J.T., 1991, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 300 p. Ferguson, J., 1906, Bibliotheca Chemica, Volume 2: Glasgow, James Maclehose and Sons, 598 p. Figala, K., 1984, Die Exakte Alchemie des Isaac Newton: Verhandlungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Basel, v. 94, p. 157–227. Grasseus, J., 1661, Arca arcani artificiosissimi de summis naturae mysteriis, in Theatrum chemicum, Volume 6: Strasbourg, Haeredes Eberhardi Zetzneri, p. 294–381. Guerlac, H., 1953, John Mayow and the Aerial Nitre: Jerusalem, Actes du VII Congrès Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, p. 332–349. Guerlac, H., 1954, The Poet’s Nitre: Isis, v. 45, p. 243–255, doi: 10.1086/ 348336. Hubicki, W., 1962, Michael Sendivogius’s theory, its origin and significance in the history of chemistry: Actes du XII Congrès Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, 26 VIII 1962–2 IX 1962 II, p. 829–833. Johnstone, S., and Johnstone, M., 1961, Minerals for the Chemical and Allied Industries: New York, Wiley, 788 p. Kraus, P., 1942, Jābir ibn Hayyān: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam. Volume 2: Cairo, Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 406 p. Lederer, T., 1992, Der Kölner Kurfürst Herzog Ernst von Bayern (1554–1612) und Sein Rat Johann Grasse (um 1560–1618) als Alchemiker der Frühen Neuzeit: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Paracelsismus [Inaugural Dissertation]: Heidelberg, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität. Lederer, T., 1994, Leben, Werk und Wirkung des Stralsunder Fachschriftstellers Johann Grasse (nach 1560–1618), in Kühlmann, W., and Langer, H., eds., Pommern in der Frühen Neuzeit: Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, p. 227–237. Lilley, E.R., 1936, Economic Geology of Mineral Deposits: New York, H. Holt, 811 p. Mandelbrote, S., 1994, Isaac Newton and Thomas Burnet: Biblical criticism and the crisis of late seventeenth-century England, in Force, J., and Popkin, R., eds., Books of Nature and Scripture: Dordrecht, Kluwer, p. 149–178. Merrill, G.P., 1904, The Non-Metallic Minerals: New York, J. Wiley and Sons, 414 p. Newman, W.R., 1991, The Summa Perfectionis of Pseudo-Geber: Leiden, Brill, 785 p. Newman, W., and Principe, L., 1998, Alchemy vs. chemistry: The etymological origins of a historiographic mistake: Early Science and Medicine, v. 3, p. 32–65, doi: 10.1163/157338298X00022. Newton, I., 2006a, Humores minerals: http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/ mss/norm/ALCH00081 (last accessed 12 December 2007). Newton, I., 2006b, Of Natures Obvious Laws & Processes in Vegetation: http:// webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/mss/norm/ALCH00081 (last accessed 12 December 2007). Norris, J.A., 2006, The Mineral Exhalation Theory of Metallogenesis in Pre-Modern Mineral Science: Ambix, v. 53, p. 43–65, doi: 10.1179/ 174582306X93183. Norris, J.A., 2007, Early Theories of Aqueous Mineral Genesis in the Sixteenth Century: Ambix, v. 54, p. 69–86, doi: 10.1179/174582307X165434. Partington, J.R., 1961, A History of Chemistry, Volume 2: London, Macmillan, p. 577–614. Priesner, C., and Figala, K., eds., 1998, Alchemie: Lexikon einer Hermetischen Wissenschaft: Munich, C.H. Beck, 412 p. Prinke, R.T., 1999, The twelfth adept, in White, R., ed., The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited: Hudson, Lindisfarne, p. 141–192. Sendivogius, M., 1702, Novum lumen chemicum, in Manget, J.J., ed., Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa, Volume 2: Geneva, Chouet et al., 904 p. Turnbull, H.W., ed., 1959, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, Volume 1: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 468 p. Turnbull, H.W., ed., 1960, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, Volume 2: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 552 p. Varenius, B., 1672, Geographia generalis, in Isaac Newton, ed., Bernhardi Vareni Geographia Generalis: Cambridge, Henricus Dickinson, 511 p. Warntz, W., 1989, Newton, the Newtonians, and the Geographia Generalis Varenii: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, v. 79, p. 165–191, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8306.1989.tb00257.x. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008 Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

From alchemy to science: The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment in Spanish American mining and metallurgy Joaquín Pérez Melero† Instituto Universitario de Historia Simancas, Universidad de Valladolid, Casa del Estudiante, C/ Real de Burgos s/n, 47011 Valladolid, Spain ABSTRACT The time between 1640, when Álvaro Alonso Barba published his Arte de los metales (Art of Metals), and 1761, when Francisco Xavier de Gamboa published his Comentarios a las ordenanzas de minas (Commentaries on Mining Ordinances), was a transitional period in which scientific mining and metallurgical knowledge in Spanish America became operative and practical and replaced the long-standing Spanish (and European) medieval tradition of the theory of minerals and metals. Barba was the last representative of this tradition, inheriting the complex world of the classical writers, the medieval alchemists, the first news from the new American lodes, and the first steps of the Scientific Revolution. On the contrary, Gamboa did not worry about classical and medieval theories, nor did he worry about the problem of metal generation. He was concerned only about the most effective system with which to profit from mining using all the paraphernalia that the science and experience of two worlds could furnish. Both handbooks, very successful in their respective times, show clearly two different approaches to the principal question: how to best manage, from two such different perspectives, the American treasures. Keywords: Álvaro Alonso Barba, Francisco Xavier de Gamboa, Spanish colonial mining and metallurgy, alchemy, scientific thought. THE SPANISH BACKGROUND

profitable silver and gold mining system existed, both from native metals and from the lead and copper lodes in the so-called “pyrite belt” spreading from the Alemtejo, in the south of Portugal, to the Strait of Gibraltar. Several other ores, such as hematite from Somorrostro Mountain in Biscay, were not worked on a measurable

From antiquity, Spain has been a source of ores, both real and imaginary. The wealth of Iberian ore was extolled by almost all the classical sources, from the Bible and its accounts of the wealthy Tharsis1 to Strabo2 or Polybius.3 This wealth of ore, considering the limited knowledge of classical and early medieval writers and scholars, and the handful of commodities that they managed, could be taken as an imaginative exercise. Certainly, the Iberian subsoil is rich in lead, copper, graphite, and cinnabar; there still exist today huge reserves of all of them, mainly in the southern peninsula. During Roman times, a

1 Jeremiah 10:9: Hammered silver is brought from Tarshish. Ezekiel 27:12: Tarshish did business with you because of your great wealth of goods; they exchanged silver, iron, tin and lead for your merchandise (both quotations from the New American Standard Bible). Tarshish, Tharsis, Tarsis (Spanish), or Tartessos (Greek, Τα´ ρτησσος) has been located as a real kingdom in the southwestern Iberian Peninsula flourishing ca. 700–650 B.C. known in classical antiquity by its richness in all kind of metals, especially copper, bronze, gold, and silver, and presumed to have been the transit station to the Cassiterides islands and, thus, a depot of British tin; the classical source is Schulten (1971). 2 Geography, 3. 3 Histories, 34, 14.

†

E-mail: [email protected].

Melero, J.P., 2009, From alchemy to science: The Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment in Spanish American mining and metallurgy, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 51–61, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(03). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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scale until the middle and late Middle Ages (thirteenth-fourteenth centuries), when an intensive export-import trade was established between Castille, in Spain, and northern Europe (Flanders and the Hansa Confederation) consisting of iron and wool being traded from south to north, and timber and grains going from north to south. As in other warm-weather countries, there were several salt works widespread throughout the peninsula, and charcoal was common as fuel until the nineteenth century. A few famous mines about which much has been written serve to establish the general characteristics of the Spanish mining system. One of the foremost was the mine of Almaden, a former propriety of the Military Order of Calatrava from 1286 until 1497, when the King of Castille was appointed by Pope’s decree as Perpetual Administrator of the Military Orders. It was one of the richest mercury fields in the world, so much so that a new and large mercury site discovered in California in the nineteenth century was called New Almaden. The mine was known and worked as early as Roman times, when it supplied all the cinnabar used to make vermillion, a red powder much appreciated as a cosmetic and as pigment in artworks. The city of Sisapone, the pre-Roman village of Almaden, minted coins under the Roman rule. The name “Almaden” means “The Mine”— Al-ma’daniy’yun—in Arabic. It was the biggest mine that Arabs exploited in Spain (Sánchez Gómez, 1989, I, p. 68–73). Mercury from cinnabar was not produced in large scale until the sixteenth century, when the Spanish American silver mines were worked with the patio method,4 although it was (and it is) very easy to obtain mercury simply by heating the crude ore and accumulating the flowing metal, and in fact some quantities were produced (Sánchez Gómez, 1989, I, p. 101). The main productions were of vermillion and soliman, a mercury sublimate used in skin tanning and as a cosmetic. The other great individual mine in Spain was Riotinto, in the southwestern pyrite belt, which hosted a huge deposit of pyrites that both the Romans and Arabs worked, exploiting its small quantities of gold and silver. It was not until the fifteenth century that it was exploited for copper, although the production was so limited that copper was preferentially imported from northern Europe (principally Sweden) until the nineteenth cen4 The “patio’s method” (Spanish método de patio) was one of the most curious contributions of the Spanish Empire to the metallurgical works. It involved treatment of huge quantities—several metric tons at a time—of crushed crude silver ore with mercury, salt, water, and some quantities of other chemical products—mainly magistral or copper sulfate—all well mixed in big tortas (cakes) and placed in wide courts (or patios, hence the name) until the decomposition of silver chloride—the main silver compound in the ores—and its natural amalgamation with mercury. Once amalgamated, washed, heated, and distilled, the process recovered silver as pure as 99.99% from ores that usually had no more than 3% silver. This process was introduced by Bartolomé de Medina in Pachuca (Mexico) in 1554, and it quickly spread widely amongst all the Spanish realms in America. In fact, the process was not new—amalgamation of gold and silver was known from antiquity—but the enlarged scale was a singular improvement, and together with the Spanish control of the principal sources of mercury in the Western world—Almaden in Spain, Huancavelica in the viceroyalty of Perú and Idria, and Slovakia, handled by the Austrian branch of the Hapsburg family—this process defined Spanish control of metallurgical works for almost three centuries.

tury, for use in not only household equipment but also for arms (bronze for cannons), and especially for coinage and covering of ship hulls. In the fifteenth century, the number of minerals and metals exploited in the peninsula was limited: copper, iron, silver, tin, brass, antimony, lead, and mercury among the metals; alum, caparrosa (ferrous sulfate), azul (bluestone or blue vitrol), salt and saltpeter, cinnabar and vermillion among the salts.5 Several interesting texts on mineralogy and metallurgy were known in Spain during the Middle Ages. First, there were sources commonly known throughout Europe: De coloribus et artibus romanorum (On the Colors and Arts of the Romans) by Heraclius (ca. twelfth-thirteenth centuries), and the Diversium artium schedula (List of Various Arts) by Teophilus (ca. 1100), both of which described amalgamation processes, methods of refining and welding gold and silver, some furnace types, and processes for making crockery and bells. Principally devoted to the production of objects of worship, they deal with an evident alchemical issue, sometimes intentionally disguising the true procedure for elaboration and extraction of metals from ores with symbolic language (Sánchez Gómez, 1989, I, p. 111–112). Both books were surpassed in importance only by De Mineralibus (On Minerals) by Albertus Magnus (thirteenth century, later published in Spain only after the fifteenth century). The Muslim alchemical tradition had been established in Spain from the time of De Mineralibus (On Minerals) by Ibn Sina (or Avicenna, 980–1037) and Sirr al-Asrar (Secret of the Secrets) by Abu Bakr al-Razi (or Rhazes, 865–925), and it had been devoted to discriminating between stones, metals, brimstones, and salts. King Alfonso X The Wise (1221–1284) commanded the translation of several books on stones and gems, which comprise the Lapidario de Alfonso X (Lapidary of Alfonso X; from the Latin lapis, stone), in which are described and commented the properties of magnetite, pearls (aljófar, from the Arab al-ğawar, the pearl; the name still remains in Spanish), diamond, coral, iron, gold, silver, lead, cinnabar (piedra de argento vivo, stone of quicksilver), marble, copper, rock salt, sodium carbonate (natrón), jet, ferrum oxide (almagre), talc, gypsum, emeralds, ruby, and quartz (cristal), among many others. However, these too were considered from an alchemistic point of view, namely, the links between stones and planets and diseases (Alfonso X, 1991). Don Juan Manuel (1282–1348) in the Libro del caballero et el escudero (Book of the Knight and the Squire) suggests a metallogenesis inherited from both the early medieval alchemists and the Arabs, concluding that metals (the eight he knew: gold, silver, mercury, brass, copper, iron, lead, and tin)6 grow inside Earth just as plants grow on the surface, influenced by the planets which ruled them (Manuel, 1981). Finally, Arnau de Vilanova, a physicist and alchemist born in Valencia (1235–1311), and especially Raymond Llull (1904) established the canon of Spanish metallurgy and metallogenesis. In the sixteenth century, Llull became an icon to whom almost every suc5

Salt was a common name for any ore that was not a pure metal. Brass, as is well known, is an alloy of copper and zinc; historically, brass was produced as a nonpure form of zinc; similarly, the first bronzes were produced as a nonpure form of copper—arsenical copper. 6

From alchemy to science cess of medieval science was attributed, including metallogenesis and some smelting processes such as cupellation—casting in a dome-shaped furnace—known since antiquity. The great technological change in European mining and metallurgy happened between 1450 and 1550 in central Europe in Freiberg, Goslar, Mansfield, Trento, and Chemnitz, which had already been established as outstanding centers of silver mining since the thirteenth century. Silver production multiplied by five, attaining figures not reached again until the nineteenth century; copper ores, often associated with silver ores, were then mined in some places never before worked (Hungary, Tyrol, Carinthia, Lorraine, and Saxony). Styria and Carinthia, in Austria, became the first world iron producers. This mining boom was closely linked to the use of hydraulic power, which was easily possible and cheap, and to the introduction of technology, either well known and improved or absolutely new: systems of subterranean planning, pumping, water driving, use of draft animals inside the mines, railway transportation, systems of massive vertical haulage, etc. All this technology appears in Agricola’s work De Re Metallica (On Metals, 1556), which remained the standard reference mining handbook until the eighteenth century, together with Vanoccio Biringuccio’s De Pyrotechnia (On the Technology of Fire; Biringuccio, 1990) and Lazarus Ercker’s Beschreibung der allerfürnemsten Mineralischen Erzt und Bergwerksarten (An Account on Assaying Minerals and the Art of Mines, known as The Treatise of Ores and Assaying; Ercker, 1951). Mining in Castille lagged far behind the improvements of central Europe both in technique and organization. The structure of the royal authority, which held tight to the rights over the subsoil since the thirteenth century, prevented the development of mining companies. In the States of the Holy Empire, a far distant Emperor did allow the local princes to regulate mining with uneven results: mining rights could be transferred to companies with high investment levels in some states, or, on the other hand, mining works could be reduced to simple pits in others (Sánchez Gómez, 1997a, p. 23). In Castille, the production of mines of the Royal Heritage was a little better than in the rest of the country. In some cases, namely Almaden, the King rented the mines to capitalists with high investment capacities (Sánchez Gómez, 1989, 226 ss; Matilla Tascón, 1958, p. 18–28). This was the case of the Fugger of Augsburg in the silver mine of Guadalcanal, in which the Crown reserved the right to work the mine; it was rented to the Fugger bankers, who in turn brought in German mining technicians who had already been imported to work the mine of Almaden, which the Fugger bankers had rented from Charles I since 1525 (Matilla Tascón, 1958, p. 37; Sánchez Gómez, 1989, p. 526–532; Sánchez Gómez, 1997a, p. 47–48; Kellenbenz, 2000, p. 333). MINING AND METALS IN EARLY SPANISH AMERICA One of the main objectives that drove the Spaniards to America was the possibility of access to luxuries of the Far East, monopolized at the time by the Arabs who had been the obligatory

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intermediaries in the trade with Asia since the fourteenth century. African gold was monopolized by Arabs of North Africa, and the European stock flowed to the Orient by way of Italian merchants who exchanged it for spices, silks, and other luxuries. Portugal controlled the western African coast from 1497, enjoying a direct link with India, the source of spices (Céspedes del Castillo, 1992, p. 48–53). In the first stages of the Spanish settlement in America, travelers and chroniclers stressed the importance of the quest for gold, silver, and precious gems and metals. Even Columbus on his first day in America, 13 October 1492, wrote, “I did pay attention and I did work in order to know if there was gold” (Colón, 1991, p. 31–32). The Spanish pursued traces of gold and silver throughout America from northern Mexico to Paraguay. The pursuit became a true obsession, eloquently recorded in the works of the cronistas de Indias (Chroniclers of the Indies; Sánchez Gómez and Pérez Melero, 2002, p. 182–184). Gold was the first mineral sought, based on both aboriginal use and reports and also on the relative ease of its acquisition. Since the first moment of European arrival, little pieces of gold were readily observed, even in the Caribbean, where alluvial processes supply small quantities. The Spanish contact with the major civilizations of Mexico and Peru increased the amount of known gold—among them the legendary treasury of Atahualpa, sent by Francisco Pizarro to Charles I, which, when smelted, amounted to more than 5.5 tons of gold and more than 11 tons of silver (Xerez, 1891, p. 153).7 Spaniards made contact with the first aboriginal mining and metallurgical works circa the 1530s, and Spanish chroniclers attest to early discoveries of silver mines in New Spain and in Peru through the 1560s. Pre-Columbian mining and metallurgy were poorly developed, the first even less than the second (Sánchez Gómez, 1997b, p. 47–56). Indigenous people from the Caribbean produced only little pieces of hammered gold obtained from alluvial deposits or from trade with the Guyanas. However, Andean peoples did know both mining and metallurgy. Although their mining techniques were rudimentary, they were skilled masters at metallurgy. They worked gold, silver, and copper, pure or alloyed with arsenic and tin, producing several varieties of bronzes, which were very useful for tools. It is probable that their methods of producing bronzes were learned by accident, when they smelted copper in the presence of cassiterite, a tin ore. Metal smelting was carried out in guayras (in Peru), which were vertical-holed furnaces placed in wind streams for draft, or in little furnaces called muflas, which were supplied with draft from tubes through which the workers blew. Gold- and silverworks were especially impressive in the major cultures of Peru, but also in the region of Colombia where the Chimu people were accomplished at smelting, cold welding, the lost wax method, hammering, and perhaps true welding as well. Andean peoples conceived of gold and silver as decorative materials and as elements of worship, and they referred to them, respectively, as the sweat of the Sun and the teardrops of 7

Ton is here metric ton, 1000 kg.

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the Moon, in a more symbolic and religious than material way (Martínez de la Torre, 1999, p. 13). Aztecs had a slightly less sacred concept; gold is teocuítlatl in náhuatl, the excrement of the Gods, related not only to goldworking but also to the agricultural process of renewal and to war, a logical structure that links the ideas of metal (yellow gold), the yellow color8 of the skin of the individuals sacrificed and skinned to Xipe Totec (the god of human sacrifices, agriculture and goldsmiths), and the yellow color of corn (Baquedano, 2005, p. 360–361). Spanish chroniclers came to America imbued with the cosmology of the late Middle Ages. Juan López de Velasco associated the richness of silver mines located in the western sides of mountains with the “bareness and sterility of pure stone.” He conjectured that the earth beneath the western slopes of mountains was better able “to receive the influxes of the sun and heavens which were presumed to generate metals” as opposed to the eastern slopes, such as the Rio de la Plata or the jungles of Brazil, which were shaded and richer in vegetation (López de Velasco, 1971, p. 12). Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo thought that the alluvial gold found in the West Indies came naturally from high mountains, in which it was generated like subterranean plants and down which it was carried by streams (Fernández de Oviedo, 1959, p. 162). Father José de Acosta wrote that metal veins grew and spread in the ground, just as plants do on the surface, and he concluded that sterile lands consequently were better at generating metals than fertile ones; the idea was that the absence of vegetal cover allows a better and deeper penetration of the celestial flux that, following Acosta, was involved in the generation of metals in the subsoil (Acosta, 1954, p. 4, I, III). In this regard, he followed Fernández de Oviedo’s theory of streams carrying gold from the sterile, west-oriented mountains and spreading it all over the Americas (Acosta, 1954, 4, p. 156). Most of the Chroniclers of the Indies devoted much time and many pages to the description of lodes, working systems, location, wealth, and sources of labor for working American mines. Cervantes de Salazar,9 Gutiérrez de Santa Clara,10 Baltasar de Ovando,11 Mariño de Lobera,12 Capoche,13 the aforementioned López de Velasco, Fernández de Oviedo, and Acosta, among others, all focused on the practical effects of mining and metallurgy, especially of gold and silver. Iron was imported from Spain, and copper was not of similar economic or sociologic importance. The great milestones in the history of mining in Spanish America, including the discovery of the mines,

the introduction of the patio method and the mercury system by Bartolomé de Medina in 1554,14 and the reorganization of the Kingdoms of the Indies in order to maximize the silver production and exportation,15 all lacked significant technical support. Furthermore, the major works of natural history in Spanish America apparently pay little interest to mineralogy. Such is the case with Francisco Hernández’s monumental Historia Natural de la Nueva España16 (Natural History of New Spain), with its superb botanical and zoological sections, respectively, Historia de las plantas de la Nueva España (History of Plants of New Spain) and Historia de los animales de la Nueva España (History of Animals of New Spain). Neither of these can be compared with the section Historia de los minerales de la Nueva España (History of the Minerals of the New Spain), which has been described as “very, very short, with limited scope” (Moreno, 1986, p. 20). The silver river that flooded Europe contributed more to practical, economic matters than to theoretical interest. It is estimated (Céspedes del Castillo, 1992, p. 130) that there arrived in Seville, the sole legal port authorized for commerce with the Americas, no less than 155,000 kg of gold and almost 17,000 tons of silver between 1531 and 1660 that were legally registered; if smuggled silver were to be included, the figures could increase to 18,000 or 19,000 tons. All the precious metals did pay the enormous expenses of the Spanish empire, flowing quickly to European centers of manufacture and banking. Thus, Castille retained only inflation and rising prices, pouring its richness abroad without any improvement in the Castillian economy. In fact, the economic relationship between Europe and the rest of the Old World was transformed; silver was more scarce and expensive in the Far East than in Europe, and European merchants could buy oriental commodities with a very favorable exchange rate, paying for them with American silver. Some of that silver did remain in Europe, treasured for noneconomic use—for example, jewels and silverworks—all of which made possible the flourish of the Baroque age. The origins of capitalism occurred previous to the discovery of America, but its development accelerated due to the precious metals and the transatlantic commerce generated from Spanish America (Céspedes del Castillo, 1992, p. 129–135). Only the introduction of the amalgamation process aroused some interest beyond purely applied practice, but even this fo14

See note 3. The Spanish realms in America were organized from the early sixteenth century into two viceroyalties, New Spain (including North and Central America, capital in Mexico) and Peru (South America, capital in Lima); in the eighteenth century, two more were created, New Granada (Caribbean south, capital in Bogota) and Rio de la Plata (southern cone, capital in Buenos Aires). The latter two were created for defensive needs; the first two mainly organized the silver exportation to Spain. During the Spanish dominion, several economic, administrative, and political measures were taken in order to improve the extraction and exportation of silver (cf. Lavallé et al., 2002, p. 15–32). 16 Francisco Hernández (1517–1587), Spanish physician, botanist, and naturalist, one of the most influential scientists of his age. He sent sixteen volumes of Mexican plants and curiosities to the Royal Library at El Escorial, which were lost in the fire of 1651. Some of his works were published after his death (Mexico, 1615). 15

8 The skin of the sacrificed people was quickly tanned in yellow due to the sudden and massive loss of blood. 9 Crónica de la Nueva España (Madrid, 1971). Spanish scholar (1514–1575). He became the first rector of the University of Mexico City in the 1550s. 10 Historia de las guerras civiles del Perú or Quinquenarios (Madrid, 1963). Spanish adventurer and chronicler (1521–1603). 11 Descripción breve de toda la tierra del Perú, Tucumán, Río de la Plata y Chile (Madrid, 1968). Also known as Reginaldo de Lizárraga, his religious name (1545–1615). Dominican friar, bishop in Chile and Paraguay, and writer. 12 Crónica del reino de Chile (Madrid, 1960). Soldier and chronicler, one of the conquerors of Chile (1528–1594). 13 Relación general de la Villa imperial de Potosí (Madrid, 1959). Spanish miner and writer (later sixteenth century).

From alchemy to science cused on the priority of discovery and not the process itself. The amalgamation process rests today as a subject of technical controversy; the theoretical basis is clear, but the specific application depends much upon local factors—the kind of silver veins and ores, the effect of weather on the amalgamation plants (haciendas de beneficio), the expertise and skills of the quicksilver master or azoguero. The practical procedure of amalgamation had been well known since the time of Strabo, Pliny, and Vitrubius, and quoted too in the Libro del Tesoro (Book of the Treasure), later thirteenth century, a Spanish translation of the Le livres du tresor by Brunetto Latini—commissioned by King Sancho IV of Castille (1257–1295), and subsequently described as well by Biringuccio, Agricola, and the German probierbüchlein or assaying booknotes (Bargalló, 1955, p. 108). Large-scale amalgamation was introduced as beneficio de patio (the patio method) in the silver mines of Pachuca, Mexico, by Bartolomé de Medina in ca. 1554, spreading quickly from there throughout all the haciendas of the Viceroyalty, and making Medina a rich man. Structurally, amalgamation remained substantially unchanged until the nineteenth century, when it was replaced by cyanide processing; it works only with very finely ground ores treated with mercury, water, and salt. In his book titled Tratado sobre el beneficio de los metales de plata por azogue (Treaty on the Work of Silver Metals with Quicksilver), published in 1825, Frederick Sonneschmidt filled four pages with a detailed account of practical procedures, following 159 pages devoted to theoretical discussions, in order to describe the system “with so much clarity that the process could be imitated” but adding that the technique could hardly be accomplished without the experienced help of some skilful azoguero. In addition Sonneschmidt thought that the theory explaining how amalgamation worked was of little use to extraction of the ore (Sonneschmidt, 1825, p. 91–92). The process was introduced in Peru by Pedro Fernández de Velasco as beneficio de cajones (boxes method)17 in 1571–1572. Only minor modifications were made in the general method in brief instances throughout the Spanish colonial era. These include the addition of iron (as slag or fillings) and the addition of magistral (ground copper sulfate), or lime in other cases. One variation was introduced in the 1630s (the heating pan method of Álvaro Alonso Barba),18 and another was introduced in the 1780s (the cask method of Austrian Ignatz von Born).19 In summary, the patio process remained virtually unchanged as an empirical process, with little theoretical understanding, for 350 yr (Puche et al., 1996, p. 96–97). 17 The box method was essentially the same as the patio method; the only difference was the scale of treatment, tons in the first, kilograms in the second; the cool Peruvian weather required the mix of ores, mercury, and other ingredients to be heated more so than in the warm sunny climate of Mexico. 18 Barba’s method of heating pans employed copper cauldrons to mix and heat mercury, ground silver ores, salt, and water with mechanical copper shovels; in fact, the addition of copper sulfate was replaced because the copper came off from cauldrons and shovels (Barba, 1640, passim). 19 The method involved a big, hydraulic-driven machine with several (a dozen or more) casks filled with the mix of ores, mercury, and copper sulfate, basically the same system as the boxes method but mechanically driven.

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ÁLVARO ALONSO BARBA: THE LAST IN THE ALCHEMISTIC TRADITION After the conquest period (1492–1550), Philip II reorganized all his American realms with a loyal, careful, and hardworking bureaucracy in order to ensure his royal dominion, threatened by the descendants of the first conquistadores, the distance from the Spanish metropolis, and by the global interests of the Hapsburg monarchy in Europe. The first viceroyalty was established in Mexico (1535), profiting from Spain’s previous experience with the European viceroyalties (Aragon, Navarra, Naples), and beginning the tradition of nominating Castilian nobles to head them. Then, in 1544, the viceroyalty of Peru was established with the same structure, and it quickly became de facto the first in importance. The first viceroys (Antonio de Mendoza, count of Tendilla, 1535–1550, and Luis de Velasco, marquis of Salinas, 1550–1564, in Mexico; and, above all, Francisco de Toledo, son of the count of Oropesa, 1569–1581, in Peru) ruled, shaped, organized, and definitively established the Spanish dominion in America. At the same time, the bureaucratic machinery started to develop the new American branches, including viceroys, audiencias (district courts), and corregimientos (local districts), all supervised by the Council of the Indies and ruled by the Leyes Nuevas (New Laws, 1542). From mid-sixteenth century, mining became the core of the Spanish empire; the discovery of the Cerro Rico of Potosí in Peru—now Bolivia—and the mines of Zacatecas in 1546 filled the royal treasury, allowing Spain to became a world power. American silver amounted to 25% of the royal income in the late sixteenth century, two-thirds from Peru, and 90% of that from the single mine of Potosi—(Céspedes del Castillo, 1982, p. 102). Despite the several English, French, and Dutch sea dogs patrolling the Atlantic routes, the Spanish empire in America appeared to be solid and rich in the first half of the seventeenth century. Álvaro Alonso Barba was born in Lepe (Huelva, Spain) in 1569. He served as a priest in 1615 in Tiahuanaco, viceroyalty of Peru. Two years later, he served in the province of Lipes and later in the Saint Bernard parish of the Imperial City of Potosí; there is little known about him. In 1640, he published Arte de los metales (Art of Metals; Barba, 1640; Fig. 1), which immediately became a classic, essentially a practical treatise on silver mining and metallurgy in colonial Peru. The book had several editions in many countries: at least four editions were published in Potosí, one in Frankfurt (1739 as Berg-Büchlein or Mining Book), one in Hamburg (1676, Berg-Büchlein by Johann Lange), one in Paris (Traité de l’art métallique [Treatise on the Metallic Art] by Charles Hautin de Villiars, 1730), two in London (The First and The Second Book of the Art of Metals, 1669–1670, and The Art of Metals, translated by the earl of Sandwich, 1674), and two in Vienna (1749 and 1767, as Docimasie oder Probir- und Schmetlz-Kunst [Docimasie or The Art of Assaying and Melting]; Rodríguez Carracido, 1892, p. 28). As recently as the nineteenth century, the book was considered the main contribution to the development of mineral knowledge in Spain and Spanish America (Sonneschmidt, 1825, p. vii).

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Figure 1. Title page from Álvaro Alonso Barba’s Art of Metals (1640).

Barba’s treatise is made up of several clearly different parts. The first book espoused a general theory on stones, metals, and minerals, their genesis, and their composition. The second book focused mainly on the extraction process, especially the patio process, including the use and proprieties of mercury. In the third, Barba described his method, called “heating pans.” The fourth book discussed smelting of metals, and the fifth, metal assaying. Barba was a man immersed in the first stage of the Scientific Revolution. In the same year that the Arte de los metales was published (1640), Evangelista Torricelli published his De motum gravium (On the Movement of Weights). Some 30 yr earlier, Kepler published Astronomia Nova (New Astronomy), and 40 yr prior to that, William Gilbert had published his De magnete (On the Magnetism). Agricola, Ercker, and Biringuccio were already consecrated as the masters of European mining and metallurgy. The subject of study of Barba’s book, silver mining and metallurgy in the viceroyalty of Peru, remained at its peak of production for 70 yr, after the reforms of viceroy Pedro de Toledo in the 1580s. The Cerro Rico mine of Potosí supplied no less than 90% of all the Peruvian silver between 1580

and 1640 (Garner, 2007), around one-half of the world’s silver production at the time of maximum production (1585–1605) (Amaré et al., 1997, p. 8). Barba himself was so conscious of the distribution of these mines that he owned at least three mines in three different places of the viceroyalty. Barba was the last practitioner of the alchemical tradition that persisted in Spanish America into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and whose notions of mineralogy, petrology, and prospecting were founded on four main sources. The first was dogmatic knowledge of classical sources (from the Bible to medieval scholars, including Greek and Roman writers such as Pliny, who were much beloved and often quoted by the first investigators of Spanish American mines and metallurgy) (Moreno, 1986, p. 11– 22). The second included the works of Agricola and Biringuccio, which were influential after the second half of the sixteenth century. European and American technical knowledge had developed from these works. Third, the information furnished by the mining and metallurgical experiences in America influenced Barba’s alchemical ideas (Orche and Puche, 1999, p. 2–3). Fourth and last, the basis of this alchemical knowledge was the Aristotelian concept of metallogenesis, according to which, metals that can be melted were produced by wet exhalations, and metals that cannot be melted were produced by dry exhalations. The Aristotelian theory derived from a system that divides matter into a combination of the four basic properties (wet-dry and hot-cold) represented by the four elements (water, earth, fire, and air). However, Barba’s ideas conformed too to a parallel theory, which included combinations of sulfur and mercury (principles of the solid and earthy, fluid and metallic, respectively) and metal formation.20 These relationships follow a more medieval tradition with Arab roots and are best exemplified by the writings of Ibn Sina (Spanish Avicenna) and Al-Geber. Nevertheless, Barba also quoted Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius (The Star’s Herald), published only 30 yr prior, as an authority to justify discarding the belief that there could be only seven metals, each one generated as a result of the influence of a star. His rationale was either, with the new stars discovered by the Italian, it must be assumed that additional metals could be generated, or, on the other hand, that the stars did not influence metal formation at all.21 This example shows the difference between theory and experimentation in Barba’s work. He liberally quotes from Genesis to Paracelsus, to Ibn Sina, Geber, Llull, and Vilanova to test the theory of which he is inheritor, but when he 20 Sulfur and mercury meant, in the alchemical tradition, much more than a chemical compound and a fluid metallic element. They were the sublimation— as ideas—of several properties: sulfur as epitome of solid, earthy, and dry, and mercury as paradigm of fluid, metallic, and wet. 21 There were, of course, many more than seven stars in the Renaissance sky, but the planets—from the Greek for “wandering stars”—had been since antiquity a very special class of stars, the movements of which could be easily noted and predicted. When Galileo aimed his telescope at the sky, the number of stars multiplied. In fact, it was Galileo who first determined that the planets were not “light spots” but real spheres. It took several years before it was understood that because these spheres did not produce their own light, they were not stars. However, at first, all the objects in the sky were treated as stars (cf. Asimov, 1986, p. 37–39).

From alchemy to science was able to refer to the results of recent beginnings of experimentation and empirical observations in handbooks, he rejected the theory without hesitation: But neither this subordination [of metals from planets] … is true, nor the metals are not more than seven; it can be presumed that there are more differences between them deep down the Earth than we know at the surface. A few years ago the so-called bismuth was discovered in the Sudeten mountains of Bohemia, a metal between tin and lead but nothing similar to them, and known by only a few; and it is possible that there could be so many more. And it is not true actually that the planets were seven … because with the sight instruments … one can observe others. See Galileo Galilei’s Treatise on the satellites of Jupiter, where can be found the number and movements of those new planets complete with other curious things. (Barba, 1640, p. 41–42)22

The theoretical background of Barba is complex. On one hand, there is the paradigm of the European corpus of the prior century: Llull, Vilanova, Jean de Roquetaillade (Johannes de Rupescissa), and Albertus Magnus, Dioscorides (in the translation of Pietro Andrea Mattioli), and Bartholomeus Anglicus (in a Spanish translation) (Anglicus, 1994). He did prefer Aristotle, Ibn Sina, and Al-Geber (Bracesco, 1548), the well-known tradition of the theory of four elements and two components, compared to Basilius Valentinus (Currus Triumphalis Antimonii) and Paracelsus (Barba, 1640, p. 21), whom he accused of being alchemists; he considered himself, in fact, not an alchemist but a scientist. He quotes Agricola, at least in the field the German knew best, for methods of exploiting veins (Barba, 1640, p. 43). Nevertheless, Barba was not a great theoretician, but an expert miner. Although his knowledge about mineralogy arose from traditional, alchemical sources, the quotations he cited from Galileo and Agricola show the hybrid character of his work. FRANCISCO XAVIER DE GAMBOA: MINING IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT The dynastical change in Spain barely touched the Spanish American system. Established in 1714, the new Secretary of Navy and Indies overcame the Council of Indies but maintained its role as supreme court and chiefdom of all matters concerning the American territories. The bureaucratic system started to recruit from among its own people rather than from among Spanish lawyers and noblemen, setting up a kind of career of American clerk that offered traditional servants of the Crown fewer opportunities than before. However, the Crown retained the main lines 22 “Pero ni esta subordinación [de los metales a los planetas]… es cierta ni tampoco lo es que los metales sean más que siete. Antes se puede presumir probablemente que haya en lo interior de la tierra más diferencias de ellos que las que de ordinario conocemos. Pocos años ha que en los montes Sudnos de Bohemia se halló el que llamaban bismuto, metal que es como medio entre el estaño y el plomo sin ser ninguno de los dos ni conocido sino de muy pocos, como podrá ser haya otros muchos. Ni ser solamente siete los planetas… es cosa cierta hoy, pues con los instrumentos visorios… se observan otros más. Véase el tratado de Galileo Galilei, De los satélites de Júpiter, y se hallará el número y movimientos de aquellos planetas nuevos, advertidos con observaciones muy curiosas.”

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of the imperial system: the fleets, crossing the Atlantic twice a year, linked with the market system (ferias), arriving at the new (1717) base of Cadiz; the vice kingdoms, expanded to three (with the addition in 1739, of Nueva Granada, now Colombia). The traditional bullion politics continued to drain raw materials from America and tried to supply it with all kinds of goods. The main problem was the new Caribbean settlements of several European nations (Great Britain, France, Netherlands, but Denmark too). They were dangerously close to the weakly defended coasts of Florida, Honduras, and the isthmus of Panama, where the main fleet market of the empire was located. In addition, the Portuguese push from Brazil to Paraguay and northern Argentina threatened the rich county of Alto Peru with its silver mines of Potosi, Cerro de Pasco, and Oruro. These were not only a military but a commercial problem: the Spanish American market, closed (by decree), nevertheless began to be supplied by these new but daring and powerful merchants. After several naval and land skirmishes and a little war—the War of Jenkins’ Ear, 1739–1748—where the vice kingdom of Mexico proved its value as supplier of manpower and money, Mexico became the most distinguished of all the Spanish American realms, and with the new alliances between France and Spain—the Family Agreements of 1733 and 1743 against Great Britain—Spain hoped a renaissance of the Indies would be led by the growing silver production (Céspedes del Castillo, 1992, p. 113–118). Authors living in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who wrote on Spanish American mining and metallurgy focused almost exclusively on the practical aspects. Frequently, the writers were clerks or professionals who were very conscious of the role of mining as the main support of the Empire, and their objective was to better understand methods of mining and metallurgy. They are well known and include Luis Berrio de Montalvo23 in Mexico and Juan del Corro24 in Peru (Rodríguez-Sala, 2000, p. 631–659). Apparently, there was a failed attempt to introduce the new Newcomen engine25 into New Spain early in the eighteenth century to drain mines. However, the engines never left England (Sempat Assadourian, 2001, p. 387). Until 1761, there were no published volumes on mining, metallurgy, or the art des mines worth mentioning. The few known authors of the time basically wrote on the methods of improving silver refining by adding or modifying ingredients. There were exceptions such as Hernando Becerra’s Tratado de la cualidad manifiesta y virtud del azogue (Treaty on the Evident Quality and Virtue of Quicksilver, 1649) which devoted a chapter to the generation of metals according to the very theory of astral influence that Barba rejected; or the manuscript of friar 23 Judge (Alcalde de Corte) of Mexico City in the first half of the seventeenth century. He wrote a report on the new Benefit of Silver in 1643. 24 Master of quicksilver (azoguero) in Potosí who published in 1676 a short treaty on a new system to obtain silver, with no success. 25 The Newcomen engine was a steam engine fitted to drain mines. This engine was very successful in English copper mining, and it was exported—and illegally copied—to several countries, among them Spain, Belgium, and France (Derry and Williams, 1980, p. 459–463).

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Miguel de Monsalve’s, according to which God created gold by heating and mercury by freezing sulfur. Also, there is the work of Captain Juan Ramos de Valdárrago, which, although entitled De la generación de los metales y sus compuestos (On the Generation of Metals and Its Compounds) is nothing but a tract on refining (Sánchez Gómez, 1997b, p. 229). If Barba was the last alchemist, gathering theoretical medieval sources and the first reactions to the new knowledge proposed during the Scientific Revolution, Francisco Xavier de Gamboa (1717–1794) took the first definitive step to the Enlightenment in Spanish American mining. He was born in Guadalajara, then a province of Nueva Galicia (New Spain), in 1717. He was orphaned as a child, and a judge of the Court of Guadalajara paid for his education and degree in law and philosophy at the University of Mexico. He became a successful lawyer by chance, when the senior fellow in the lawyers’ office in which he was assistant died. He was known for his fierce appetite for any kind of knowledge, including mathematics, mining, land surveying, etc., and he was not limited to the classical subjects, as was so typical of scholars of his time. He became the most highly regarded lawyer in New Spain, finishing his career as judge, first, and last, regent, of the Courts of Barcelona (Spain), Mexico, and Santo Domingo, gaining a level of political power as president of the Audiencia (the upper Court of Justice of the vice kingdom) that was nearly comparable to that held by the viceroys (Trabulse, 1990, p. 156–159). In 1761, Gamboa published his Comentarios a las ordenanzas de minas (Commentaries on the Mining Ordinances; Gamboa, 1761; Fig. 2), a huge work in which he sought to cover, from the legal point of view, all matters relevant to silver in New Spain, from mining to refining and assaying. Gamboa was the foremost legal expert and one of the best mining and metallurgy specialists in New Spain. His work was not naive: he wrote to support the claims of the powerful Consulate of Mexico in the face of reforms that the Bourbon court had tried to develop in Mexico in particular and in all the American realms in general. With the pretext of writing commentaries on the mining laws, he analyzed in detail the general legal, financial, and technical framework of Mexican mining, and he was the first to do so (Albi, 2007, p. 1–2). Gamboa’s erudition was as impressive as his ability to master all the fields on which he wrote. He is presumed to have possessed one of the best American libraries, well provided with both classical treaties and the latest European novelties. However, like Barba’s work, Gamboa’s mining analysis is also a hybrid. As an expert lawyer, he absolutely mastered the legal corpus of the Spanish ancien regime inherited from the Hapsburg monarchy, defending the royal right to possess the entire subsoil and all the riches it contained. As economic analyzer, it cannot be forgotten that Gamboa was both judge and party; his family maintained a position in the Biscayan party of the consulate, the powerful association of overseas merchants who legally monopolized communications and trade with Spain and, not so legally, with the rest of the continent and the world, but with whom Gamboa nevertheless established himself as an adviser. Without an awareness of

such considerations, neither the extent of his commentary on the creation of a mining investment bank (banco de avío) nor the detail of his discussion on the advantages of formation of mining companies could be understood, because both were subjects of primary interest for the consulate. He was commissioned to go to Madrid by the consulate to negotiate the establishment of these companies in 1755 (Trabulse, 1990, p. 131–133). The consulate was one of the most conservative institutions in Mexico and one of the most relevant examples of administration inherited from the sixteenth century. Gamboa fully mastered the imperial Spanish legal resources when in Madrid, putting them at the service of the Mexican traders who were facing up to the reforms that lately had happened at a great scale.26 However, in its technical discussions Gamboa’s book inadvertently leaves questions, more so indeed because he was not a mining owner as other writers, like Barba, were. In 1783, Joaquín Velázquez de León and Juan Lucas de Lassaga wrote an account on mining that became famous, and, subsequently, they wrote the draft for the new Ordenanzas de la Minería de la Nueva España (Ordinances of Mining of New Spain), which remained the sole legal text on mining until the second half of the nineteenth century. However, this achievement caught no one unaware because both writers were also skilled miners (González, 1996, p. 53–57). The manuscript was deposited in the vice regal archives, but it was widely known from copies. What Gamboa knew about mining was what he had learned on his own or what others had told him, but he strived to acquire a deep knowledge about the entire practice of mining and metallurgical works. He probably did not find it difficult to learn about mines because he had a large number of contacts who could provide him access to any mining district he wanted to visit. Gamboa reveals too the excellence of his library and his own erudition about the colonial mining system. In contrast to Barba, who had been supported mainly by the Spanish tradition as we saw previously, Gamboa revealed himself as a man of his time, consulting the best bibliography on mining and metallurgy he could obtain: De la fonte des mines (On Foundry on Mines), the French translation (Paris, 1750–1753) of Christoph Schlütter’s Gründlicher Unterricht von Hütte-Werken (Course of Subterranean Works, Braunschweig, 1738), one of the better German mining treaties; or the abbé Nollet’s Leçons de physique experimentale (Lessons of Experimental Physics, 1759–1765), the most influential book on physics and chemistry by the most famous French science writer; and indeed, the old Veritable 26 Gamboa, as former student in the Jesuit Saint Gregory College in Mexico, was fiercely opposed to the expulsion of the Jesuits from all the realms of the Spanish Crown, which happened in 1767. The consequent struggle that took place between the Court’s Regent, Gamboa, and the King’s special commissioner, José de Galvez, concluded when Gamboa was promoted to oidor (judge) at the Royal Court of Barcelona, in Spain, a simple but effective “kick upstairs” designed to neutralize one of the most powerful opponents to the new Bourbon reforms. Later, in 1781, the same two opponents fought about the economic reforms that Galvez, actually Minister of Indies, wanted to institute—finally, Galvez did it—in the American realms of the Crown. The struggle finished, once again, with the appointment of Gamboa as Regent of the Court of Santo Domingo (Trabulse, 1990, p. 158–159). As we will see, the Jesuit influence was very deep in Gamboa’s mind and knowledge.

From alchemy to science

Figure 2. Title page from Francisco Xavier de Gamboa’s Commentaries on Mining Ordinances (1761).

declaration faite au roy et a nos seigneurs de son Conseil, des riches, and Inestimables thresors, nouvellement decouverts dans le royaume de France (True Declaration to the King and Our Lords of His Council on the Richness and Valuable Treasures Newly Discovered in the Kingdom of France, 1632) by Mme. de Beausoleil (Martine de Bertereau), a classical report of the state of French mining, made by the wife of the General Inspector of French Mines. His career as former pupil of the Jesuits and his contacts in Madrid proved helpful when father Christian Rieger, professor at the Imperial College of Madrid and the Theressianum of Wien, cosmographer of the Council of Indies and well known as mathematician and military engineer (Olivares Poza, 1993, p. 68; Saiz Rodríguez, 2005, p. 17), prepared for him a résumé of several works in German, almost impossible to find and read for a Spanish erudite: Ausführliche Berginformation bey dem Berg- und Schmeltzwesen (Detailed Report on Mines, Mining, and Smelting Works) by Abraham von Schönberg (Leipzig, 1693), a classical work of this General Inspector of Mines of

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Saxony; the Geometria Subterranea (Subterranean Geometry) by Nicolaus Voigtel (Eissleben, 1714), the best handbook in mining geometry; Gründlicher und deutlicher Begriff von dem ganzen Berg-Bau-Schmelz-Wesen und Marckscheiden (Complete and Precise Idea of the Whole Mining, Smelting, and Landmarking) by Johann Gottfreid Jugel (Berlin, 1744); Anleitung zur Markscheidekunst (Instructions for Landmarking) by Friedrich Wilhelm von Oppel (Dresden, 1749), one of the co-founders of the celebrated Freiberg Academy of Mines, the European reference center for studies on mining and metallurgy; Traité de physique, d’histoire naturelle, de minéralogie et de métallurgie (Treaty on Physics, Natural History, Mineralogy, and Metallurgy) by Johann Gottlieb Lehman, a great German mineralogist, one of the discoverers of chromium (French translation of Barón d’Hollbach, Paris, 1759); or the Institvtiones geometriæ svbterraneæ (Institutions on Subterranean Geometry) the first scientific treatise on subterranean geometry by Johann Friedrich Weidler, professor of Mathematics at the University of Wittenberg (Wittenberg, 1751[1726]) (Gamboa, 1980, p. 247), all of which were very recently printed oeuvres at the time. Gamboa did not ignore Spanish chroniclers or technical writers. He quoted De Re Metallica (On Metals) by Bernardo Pérez de Vargas (Madrid, 1569), Father Acosta, Luís Berrio de Montalvo, the Tratado de ensayadores (Treaty of Assaying) by Juan Fernández del Castillo (Madrid, 1623), and Miguel de Rojas’ Jardín de ensayadores (Garden of Assayers, end of seventeenth century). He was informed too of the new innovations in metallurgy contained in Lorenzo Felipe de la Torre Barrio y Lima’s Arte ó cartilla del nuevo beneficio de la plata en todo genero de metales (Art of the New Profit of Silver in all Genre of Metals, Lima, 1738), in which the new colpa (ferrous sulfate) system was detailed.27 In addition, he used Arte ó Nuevo Modo de beneficiar los metales de oro y plata (Art or New Method to Work Gold and Silver Metals) by Juan Ordóñez Montalvo (México, 1758). Mathematics and subterranean geometry were taken from three authors: Tomás Vicente Tosca (Compendio matemático [Mathematical Compendium], Madrid, 1727); father José Zaragoza, S.I., professor of the Imperial College of Madrid and author of several treaties on applied mathematics, the best known being the Esphera en común, celeste y terráquea (Common Spheres, Celestial and Terrestrial, Madrid, 1675); Gamboa also used his Geometría especulativa y práctica (Practical and Speculative Geometry, Valencia, 1671) (Capel, 1980, p. 5–15) and his manuscript notes about Mexican mercury lodes (Trabulse, 1990, p. 152); and especially Joseph Sáez de Escobar. As far as is known, the works of Sáez de Escobar remain unprinted today, although there are some works about Sáez as a surveyor (Nickel, 1998, 2000). Sáez de Escobar’s manuscripts include numerous complete, excerpted, and abridged copies of his Geometría Práctica y Mecánica, dividida en tres tratados (Three Treaties of Mechanical and Practical Geometry) (Trabulse, 1990, 27 The system was not so new: it only added colpa, a natural mix of ferrous sulfate and oxide, instead of copper sulfate (cf. Humboldt, 1991, p. 378).

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p. 150), but it was never printed. Gamboa writes that he deeply regrets “that treaties had never been printed, and they could be very useful to Judges, Lawyers, Surveyors, Proprietors of Haciendas and Mines” (Gamboa, 1980, p. 229). The 27 pages of the appendix to chapter twelve in Gamboa’s volume are an excerpt of Sáez de Escobar’s treatise on surveying of lands and mines, in an effort to fill this need, and it includes not only gravures but the complete trigonometric tables, although not currently used by the miners at that time for they preferred practical surveying to applied mathematics. Gamboa was fully aware of the general ignorance about modern mining methods in Mexico. Like Humboldt 40 yr later, he especially regretted the lack of experts in subterranean surveying for the correct management of both mines and estates—a legal matter that he regarded as highly important and to which he devoted chapters 9–13 in his book. His sources were mainly contemporaries. He quoted Agricola several times (about mining claims, mining surveying, veins, proprietor’s rights, mining law, interior works, and design of pits and galleries), and he also quoted Pliny in passing, but he wrote no theoretical discussions on the nature of metals, classification of stones, or their proprieties, etc. He composed a handbook on Mexican silver mining and production the sole subject of which was silver: its mines, rights, and ways to produce the metal. The work is devoid of speculation. He devoted two paragraphs to the qualities of metals with an ironical reference to the deceitful Seneca and his theories about loss and gain of humors in metals. Barba is referred to twice, although well praised, in the foreword and as a part of a general quotation by an authority (Gamboa, 1980, p. 394). No classical sources on lapidaries or on the theories of the nature of metals are quoted. His work is an illustrative handbook in the broadest sense of the term, encompassing both silver mining and metallurgy and describing a system that was, despite its apparent primitivism, the condensation of two centuries of experience, superbly adapted to labor conditions. It was the most complete handbook on mining in Spanish colonial times, if not the most widespread. That distinction belonged to Barba’s treatise, but Gamboa’s book included furthermore legal, economic, and technical sections, a little glossary of mining terms, the first systematic attempt to compile a Spanish American mining dictionary, following the first manuscripted essay of Sáez de Escobar. Gamboa’s oeuvre marks the beginning of a period of deep reflection on legal procedures and taxation of silver mining and metallurgy that was to be continued by others (Joaquín Velázquez de León, Juan Lucas de Lassaga, José de Gálvez, Fausto de Elhuyar, Andrés del Río, Frederick Sonneschmidt) in order to optimize an integral system of silver production that reached a historic peak early in the nineteenth century. CONCLUSIONS Despite Barba’s interpretation of the generation of metals with a classical and alchemical perspective, his Art of Metals remained the manual par excellence on silver metallurgy in Spanish America. Nevertheless, he made the most successful attempt

to explain the nature of refining silver ores in terms of experimental practices, as a man of his times immersed in the general trend of the Scientific Revolution, quoting indeed not only the classical authorities but also new ones such as Galileo in order to support his own statements. The distance from Gamboa’s Commentaries must be measured not only in terms of time—more than 150 yr— but within the evolution of the scientific thought. Gamboa’s work aspired to cover all the technical and legal sides of the silver business with no references to matters other than these. Technically, it advocates for a renewal of surveying methods—better, to apply any method, to develop new managerial systems, to improve the drainage of mines, and to give a brief but comprehensive compendium of the state of the art. The evolution from Barba to Gamboa is the evolution from the first stages of the modern scientific thought, initially close to medieval and burdened with alchemical thought, to one of the most elaborate productions of the Enlightenment in which the legal background, analytic method, and comprehensive study provide all the support needed, far from the classical—Greek, Roman, Arab, Spanish—authorities and closer to the new ones—German, French, and northern at last. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work was developed with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education (project HUM2007-63273/ HIST) and the Regional Government of Castilla-León (project VA043A07). REFERENCES CITED Acosta, J. de, 1954 [1591], Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, in Mateos, F., ed., Obras del P. José de Acosta: Madrid, Atlas, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 633 p. Agricola, G., 1972 [1556], De Re Metallica libri XIII (Andreu, C., trad., Paredes, J.C., ed.): Madrid, Unión Explosivos Río Tinto, 601 p. Albi, C., 2007, Derecho Indiano v. Bourbon Reforms: Francisco Xavier Gamboa’s Defence of the Laws of the Indies in Eighteenth-Century New Spain [paper presented at the workshop Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830]: Cambridge, Trinity College, University of Cambridge (12–14 December), 22 p. Alfonso X, 1980 [ca. 1253], Lapidario (2nd ed.) (Mariño, M.B., ed.): Madrid, Castalia, 271 p. Amaré, M.P., Orche, E., and Puche, O., 1997, Minería y metalurgia de la plata y el azogue: Un puente entre España y América [paper presented at the V Reunión de la Asociación Iberoamericana de Enseñanza Superior de la Minería, Catamarca (Argentina), 7–9 October 1997; unpublished], 27 p. Anglicus, B., 1994 [1494] [ca. 1230], Liber de propietatibus rerum (Galiano Toledo, M.J., and Galiano Serra, M.J., transcr., De Burgos, fr. V., trans.): Madrid, Micronet [CD-ROM]. Asimov, I., 1986 [1975], Historia del telescopio: Madrid, Alianza (Eyes of the Universe: A History of Telescope: Boston, Houghton Mifflin), 314 p. Baquedano, E., 2005, El oro azteca y sus conexiones con el poder, la fertilidad agrícola, la guerra y la muerte: Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl, v. 36, p. 359–381. Barba, Á.A., 1640, Arte de los metales, en los que se enseña el verdadero beneficio de los de oro y plata: Madrid, Imprenta del Reino, 228 p. Bargalló, M., 1955, Minería y metalurgia en la América española durante la época colonial: México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 442 p. Becerra, H., 1649, Tratado de la qualidad manifiesta y virtud del azogue, llamado comúnmente el mercurio, y por otro nombre el argentum vivum: México, Juan Ruiz, 244 p.

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Nickel, H., 2000, Joseph Sáez de Escobar y su tratado sobre geometría práctica y mecánica: Historia y Grafía, v. 15, p. 241–267. Nollet, J.A., 1759–1765, Leçons de Physique Expérimentale (6 vol.): Paris, Guerin Frères, 3035 p. Olivares Poza, A., 1993, Libros de Arte y Ciencia Militar en la Universidad Complutense: Militaria: Revista de Cultura Militar, v. 5, p. 67–83. Oppel, F.W. v, 1749, Anleitung zur Markscheidekunst: Dresden, Walther, 484 p. Orche, E., and Puche, O., 1999, Fuentes documentales sobre la génesis y prospección de yacimientos minerales en la América colonial (1500– 1650), in Actas de la IV Sesión Científica de la Sociedad Española de Defensa del Patrimonio Geológico y Minero (2 vol.): Córdoba (Spain), SEDPGYM, 548 p. Ordóñez Montalvo, J.J., 1758, Arte ó nuevo modo de beneficiar, los metales de oro y plata: Mexico City, Bibliotheca Mexicana, 64 p. Rodríguez Carracido, J., 1892, Los metalúrgicos españoles en América: Madrid, Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 40 p. Rodríguez-Sala, M.L., 2000, Tres constructores de obras científico-técnicas de minería y metalurgia en la Nueva España del siglo XVII: Luís Berrio de Montalvo, Jerónimo de Becerra y Juan del Corro: Anuario de Estudios Americanos, v. 57, no. 2, p. 631–659. Saiz Rodríguez, P., 2005, El Peluquero de la Reina: Madrid, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Working Papers on Economic History, 2005/1), 51 p. Sánchez Gómez, J., 1989, De minería, metalurgia y comercio de metales (2 vol.): Salamanca, Universidad de Salamanca, 789 p. Sánchez Gómez, J., 1997a, Minería y metalurgia en la Edad Moderna: Madrid, Akal, 76 p. Sánchez Gómez, J., 1997b, La técnica en la producción de metales amonedables en España y en América, 1500–1650, in Sánchez Gómez, J., Mira DelliZotti, G., and Dobado, R., eds., La savia del imperio. Tres estudios de economía colonial: Salamanca, Universidad de Salamanca, p. 19–265. Sánchez Gómez, J., and Pérez Melero, J., 2002, El nervio principal para la conservación de estos reinos. La minería a través de los cronistas indianos, in Barrio, Á.E., ed., Antropología en Castilla y León e Iberoamérica: Salamanca, Universidad de Salamanca, p. 181–193. Schlütter, Ch.A., 1738, Grundlicher Unterricht von Hutte-Werken…: Braunschweig, Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer, 612 p. Schlütter, Ch.A., 1750–1753, De la fonte des mines (Hellot, M., trans.) (2 vol.): Paris: Veuve Pissot, 1087 p. Schönberg, A. v, 1693, Ausführliche Berg-Information, Zur dienlichen Nachricht vor Alle, Die Bey dem Berg-und Schmeltzwesen zu schaffen…: Leipzig, David Fleischer, 134 p. Schulten, A., 1971, Tartessos: Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 294 p. Sempat Assadourian, C., 2001, La bomba de fuego de Newcomen y otros artificios de desagüe: Un intento de transferencia de tecnología inglesa a la minería novohispana, 1726–1731: Historia Mexicana, v. 50, no. 3, p. 385–437. Sonneschmidt, F., 1825, Tratado de la amalgamación en Nueva España: París, David, 160 p. Torre Barrio y Lima, F. de la, 1738, Arte ó cartilla del nuevo beneficio de la plata en todo genero de metales fríos y calientes: Lima, Antonio Joseph Gutiérrez de Zevallos, 42 p. Tosca, T.V., 1727, Compendio matemático (9 vol.): Madrid, Imprenta de Antonio Marín, 4296 p. Trabulse, E., 1990, La minería mexicana en la Ilustración: La obra de Francisco Xavier de Gamboa, in Pérez, J.F., and Tascón, I.G., eds., Ciencia, Técnica y Estado en la España ilustrada: Zaragoza, Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y las Técnicas, p. 131–160. Voigtel, N., 1714, Vermehrte Geometria subterranea: Eissleben, Rudel, 228 p. Weidler, J.F., 1751, Institvtiones Geometriae Subterranae: Wittenberg, G.H. Schwartz, 88 p. Xerez, F. de, 1891 [1534], Verdadera relación de la conquista del Perú: Madrid, Juan Cayetano García, 174 p. Zaragoza, J., 1671, Geometría especulativa y práctica: Valencia, Gerónimo de Villagrassa, 176 p. Zaragoza, J., 1675, Esphera en común, celeste y terráquea: Madrid, Juan Martín del Barrio, 256 p. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Signs and symbols in Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus William C. Parcell† Department of Geology, Wichita State University, 1845 Fairmount Avenue, P.O. Box 27, Wichita, Kansas 67260, USA

ABSTRACT Symbolism, allegory, and metaphor pervade Athanasius Kircher’s (1602–1680) Mundus Subterraneus (The Subterranean World). Elements from the communicative theory of semiotics are useful for exploring Mundus Subterraneus and for illuminating the modern reactions to his works. Kircher used Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophies as a bridge between medieval thought systems and the growing empirical movement of the Scientific Revolution. In Kircher’s studies, no event was taken in isolation, and his examination of Earth rested with Plato’s philosophy that the world was created by God as a manifestation of his own perfection. From a modern semiotic viewpoint, Kircher used indexical and iconic signs to combine rational and empirical techniques that sustained his holistic view of the cosmos. In the modern ideal formulation of scientific observation and inquiry, indexical signs are acceptable authoritative causal links between observation and interpretation. For Kircher, both indexical and iconic signs were legitimate articles to collect and employ because they were all manifestations of the Divine Mind. Iconic signs could be religious images or conceptual ideas that Kircher projects onto the workings of Earth. Keywords: history of geology, Baroque science, Athanasius Kircher, semiotics, Hermeticism. Indeed there is nothing, actually produced by nature…that will not be seen by our imagination as similar to something of human concern. —From Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1665) “THE PRESENT IS NOT THE KEY TO THE HISTORICAL PAST”

examinations of Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). Kircher, a politically influential German Jesuit, occultist, and polymath (Fig. 1) working at the cusp of the Enlightenment, has been consistently identified as a curious footnote to the conventional portrayal of the linear advancement of the earth sciences (Gould, 2004). This established account posits that through the Scientific Revolution, science gradually removed religious obstructions and revolted against the dominance of Aristotelian doctrine (Reilly, 1974). In turn, science moved toward a realization of the immensity of time and the inner workings of our planet. Certainly, some of Kircher’s methods may seem foreign

While James Hutton’s (1726–1797) axiom that “understanding present forces is the key to interpreting Earth’s past” is a basis of modern geologic studies, no inclination can be more misleading to historical analysis than our temptation to project modern sensibilities onto older methods and practices of geoscience (Gould 2004). A case in point is the few geologic †

E-mail: [email protected].

Parcell, W.C., 2009, Signs and symbols in Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 63–74, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(04). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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Parcell himself into the crater of Mount Vesuvius for closer observation immediately before its eruption in 1638 (Fig. 2). This paper examines the cultural influences on Kircher and his use of symbolism in Mundus Subterraneus to communicate his ideas and observations about Earth. Modern explanative theories such as semiotics, the study of signs and their meaning, suggest that an understanding of cultural environment, historical context, and external influences is essential to begin to extract original meaning from an historical text or analysis. This paper will demonstrate that elements from semiotics are quite useful to interpret Kircher’s discussions of Earth. We begin with a discussion of the historical context and philosophical influences on Kircher and continue with application of semiotics to Mundus Subterraneus (1664, 1665). ATHANASIUS KIRCHER AND MUNDUS SUBTERRANEUS: TWO ANOMALOUS ENTITIES

Figure 1. Portrait of Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) by Cornelius Bloemart (1603–1680) from the 1664 edition of Mundus Subterraneus.

to modern readers, and some of his conclusions are flatly incorrect. However, conventional accounts of the progression of earth science rarely take into account contributions of men such as Kircher. Beyond his inclusion in historical surveys of the earth sciences, there have only been a few investigations of Kircher’s geological work (see Baldwin, 1993; Leinkauf, 1993; Nummedal, 2001; Waddell, 2006) and even fewer from a geologist’s perspective (see Gould, 2004). Kircher’s investigations of Earth in his immense two-volume tome, Mundus Subterraneus (1664–1665) are replete with an astounding and strange variety of subjects, including astrology, volcanoes, alchemy, mining, dragons, weather, eclipses, fossils, and gravity (Godwin, 1978). Peculiar to the ears and eyes of modern practitioners of geology, Kircher often calls upon religious and Hermetic philosophies in his interpretations of the subterranean world. Yet, he also presents experimental observations throughout his treatise, and, like Pliny before him, he saw the need to lower

Athanasius Kircher’s life spanned most of the seventeenth century, and, as such, his career bridged a changing society. Early in his career, the polymath’s tendencies toward generalization and integrated studies were accepted, even praised, in the learned community (Findlen, 2004). Kircher was a respected, if controversial, contemporary of Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, all of which maintained an interest in Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and alchemy. Scientific research during Kircher’s early career still incorporated mystical thought and philosophy. As Godwin (1978, p. 5) states, the purpose of examinations of the universe at that time “was nothing less than to penetrate the workings of the Divine Mind.” However, by the latter half of the 1600s, Kircher’s intellectual authority began to decline as his academic peers turned toward specialization as the preferred path to knowledge (Findlen, 2004). This period also saw the shift from religious-based interpretations to observational and empirical interpretations. While philosophical divisions appeared between objective examinations of the physical world and subjective interpretations of mind and thought, Kircher maintained his holistic worldview of an integrated physical and spiritual universe. Throughout his discussions of Earth, Kircher uses sign, symbol, analogy, allegory, and even dream-states as mechanisms for conveying his interpretations of the world. These permitted him to maintain the philosophical association between the physical and spiritual world. The Mundus Subterraneus (Fig. 3) was arguably the most popular of Kircher’s works in his day. By the time of its printing in 1664 and 1665, Kircher had become famous among learned men across Europe and even the New World. With a career that would eventually include over 40 books under his name, by the time of Mundus, Kircher was a publishing machine, and his influence reached both the common man and the growing academic community. References to his works are found in the writings and correspondence by many of the great contemporary scientists, including Martin Lister (1639–1712), Robert Moray (1608?–1673), Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), John

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Figure 2. Engraving of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1638. From Mundus Subterraneus (2nd edition, 1678).

Locke (1632–1704), Henry Oldenburg (1618–1677), Nicolas Steno (1638–1686), Christian Huygens (1629–1695), Gottfried Leibnitz (1646–1716), Robert Boyle (1627–1691), and René Descartes (1596–1650). As with Kircher, the Mundus Subterraneus has been a problematic work for historians to fit into the traditional description of the evolution of the earth sciences. Godwin (1978) describes the work as “a textbook in general science…[which] does not broach new frontiers of knowledge but proffers its information in a readable and lavishly illustrated form, free from mathematical and philosophical complexities.” (Godwin, 1978, p. 84). Oldroyd (1996) considered the work to be a reflection of “what the seventeenth-century man in the street may have thought of the Earth’s interior.” According to Oldroyd, it “gave expression to the beliefs of his day, and in his illustrations he reveals what many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers thought was going on in the Earth’s interior.” (Oldroyd, 1996, p. 36). However, most of Mundus Subterraneus has never been translated into English (Fig. 4) from its original Latin (1665, 1678) editions or Dutch (1682) versions. The majority of analyses of the work from an English perspective have therefore focused on the “lavish” illustrations and have not tackled the accompanying 800+ pages of text. The text and accompanying images are

actually extremely complex in their philosophical, experimental, and theological treatment of Earth. The Mundus Subterraneus represents a philosophical bridge between medieval thought systems and the growing empirical movement, which we today, in retrospect, regard as the Scientific Revolution. Kircher used a sophisticated combination of theological and empirical techniques that sustained his holistic view of Earth. It is interesting and significant to note that Kircher’s works related to Earth proved controversial to his contemporaries on both sides of the growing theological-secular divide. Of all his published works, the only volume disapproved of by Jesuit censors on philosophical grounds was the precursor to Mundus and his first geological manuscript, Iter Exstaticum II (1657) (Fig. 5). Some of his other works did face Jesuit scrutiny, but it was focused on the quality and style in Ars magna sciendi (1631) and factual inaccuracies in Iter Hetruscum (1661) (Siebert, 2004). The Iter Exstaticum II was itself an expansion of an earlier work, Itinerarium exstaticum (1655), which discussed the cosmology of the universe above Earth and presented the discussion in a fictional dream-state, possibly as a means to get past Jesuit censors (Rowland, 2004). The subsequent Iter Exstaticum II added discussion of the structure and workings of Earth. These additions proved problematic for one particular Jesuit censor, who argued

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Figure 3. The frontispiece of Mundus Subterraneous (2nd edition, 1678) illustrates the influences of Hermetic and Roman Catholic principles on Earth. At the top of the image, God’s hand sustains Earth through the influence of the Trinity (the winged sphere penetrated by the serpent). The serpent holds a banner with the quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid that reads, “The Spirit supports from within infused through its every member, Mind sets mass in motion and mingles itself with the mighty body.” Earth hangs between the opposing Hermetic principles of the Sun and Moon (see text for explanation). Earth is also surrounded by the twelve winds (an allusion to the influence of the twelve signs of the Zodiac). At the base of the illustration, two figures represent man’s attempts to measure and understand the terrestrial world (on the left) and heavens (on the right).

that Kircher was boastful and disobedient, incorrectly explaining the motion of the seas and using various philosophical arguments that contradicted Aristotle’s authoritative view of the natural world (Siebert, 2004). Kircher opposed the teaching of Holy Writ in the book of Ecclesiastes by denying that springs and rivers originate in the sea. Instead, Kircher asserts that springs and rivers are produced only by the condensation of air into vapor.

Figure 4. Title page from the partial English translation (“The Vulcanos…,” 1669) of portions of Mundus Subterraneus. This English text only includes parts of Kircher’s work dealing with volcanoes. The title page also refers to the recent fire of London of 1666 and was probably a means to draw interest to the work.

Kircher’s secular contemporaries also took issue with Mundus. For example, Steno did not agree with Kircher’s position that mountain chains can be categorized based on geographic orientation. While Kircher distinguishes a series of east to west chains crossed by a very high north to south belt, Steno recognized three types of mountains based on mechanical processes (Adams, 1938). HERMETIC INFLUENCES ON KIRCHER’S “GEOCOSM” Of the many influences on Kircher, two are of particular significance to his geologic analyses: Roman Catholicism and Hermeticism. While it is assumed that the modern reader understands the essentials of Catholic doctrine, the same cannot be assumed of Hermeticism, and so it should be described in brief.

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Corpus Hermeticum is a set of 16 books set up as dialogues between Hermes and a series of personages. A related Hermetic work, The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, is a short tract that includes the well-known dictum “As above, so below.” This statement of correspondence became the mantra for a holistic philosophy that could be, at least in part, accommodated within a Christian worldview. The so-called Tablet became a foundation of medieval and Renaissance alchemy. Commentaries and/or translations were published by, among others, Roger Bacon, Michael Maier, Albertus Magnus, and Isaac Newton. Ficino and the other Renaissance scholars who studied the Hermetic texts accepted the ancient historical provenance claimed within the Hermetica. Encouraged by Church authorities, these scholars believed that Hermetic philosophy was an ancient forerunner, possibly Egyptian in origin, and prophetic of Christianity. The influence of these works should not be underestimated (Yates, 1966). Copernicus, when introducing the heliocentric hypothesis, quotes the words of Hermes Trismegistus from the Asclepius when he states:

Figure 5. Title page from Iter Extaticum II (1657), a work that proved problematic to Jesuit censors on the basis that Kircher’s interpretation of Earth contradicted Aristotle’s authoritative view of the natural world. This work became the prelude for Mundus Subterraneus.

Historical surveys of the earth sciences have often mentioned the influence of Neoplatonism and alchemy in Kircher’s geological and paleontological work, but references to Hermetic philosophy are usually made only to degrade, demean, or dismiss a particular conclusion or method. These are unfortunate and unconstructive assertions. By employing Hermeticism, Kircher attempted to understand Earth using “naturalistic” explanations while maintaining a holistic religious system of correspondences. A powerful philosophical force in the Renaissance, Hermeticism and its related philosophies of alchemy and Neoplatonism, have today become a symbol of medieval and superstitious practices. Hermeticism is a set of philosophical and religious beliefs based upon writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a fusion of the classical Greek god Hermes and the ancient Egyptian god Thoth. While elements of Hermetic doctrine were known in the Middle Ages through the work entitled Asclepius, Hermeticism was broadly reintroduced to the West in 1460 CE, when a monk named Leonardo di Pistoia brought the Corpus Hermeticum to Pistoia, Italy. Subsequently translated by Marsilio Ficino, the

For, the sun is not inappropriately called by some people the lantern of the universe, its mind by others, and its ruler by still others. [Hermes] the Thrice Greatest labels it a visible god, and Sophocles’ Electra, the all-seeing. Thus indeed, as though seated on a royal throne, the sun governs the family of planets revolving around it. Moreover, the earth is not deprived of the moon’s attendance. On the contrary, as Aristotle says in a work on animal, the moon has the closest kinship with the earth. Meanwhile the earth has intercourse with the sun, and is impregnated for its yearly parturition. —From Copernicus (1543, Chapter 10)

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), in defense of his ideas of the movement of Earth, adapted the view discussed in the Corpus Hermeticum that Earth is not immobile because it is alive (Yates, 1966): Hermes: After all, what is the energy of life? Is it not movement? What, then in the cosmos is unmoving? Nothing, my son. Tat: Does the earth seem to you unmoving, father? Hermes: No, my son. It is the only thing full of movement, and at the same time stationary. Would it not be absurd for the nourisher of all things, the producer of and begetter of all, to be motionless? It is impossible for one who brings forth to do so without movement. It is most absurd to ask whether the fourth element earth is idle, for an unmoving body signifies nothing but idleness. Then know, my son, that without exception everything in the cosmos this is, is moving, whether decreasing or increasing, and that which moves is alive. —Translation from Salaman et al. (2000, p. 63)

Even James Hutton, in the last part of the eighteenth century, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the circulation of blood in the microcosm, reflecting the persistent Hermetic principle that man, the microcosm, reproduces in miniature, or is directly influenced by, events of the macrocosm (Eisely, 1960). However, by the early seventeenth century, Hermeticism had begun to lose its widespread appeal. Subsequent analysis of

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Hermetic texts claimed that the extant Hermetic writings were not the work of an ancient Egyptian priest but were in fact dated to the early Christian era (Quispel, 2000). After this reevaluation, the Corpus Hermeticum began to fall out of favor. Kircher, working in the waning years of the Hermetic revival, borrowed ideas from alchemic and Neoplatonic philosophies when emphasizing his holistic approach. In Kircher’s studies, no event is taken in isolation. Behind Kircher’s examination of Earth rests Plato’s philosophy that the universe or great world order was fashioned by God the creator as a manifestation and illustration of his own perfection: “and so he formed it as a single visible living thing which was to include all related creatures … by turning it he shaped it into a sphere …, giving it the most perfect form of all” (from Plato’s Timaeus in Roob, 2006, p. 35). In sacred geometry, the sphere is the ultimate expression of unity, completeness, and integrity. In the sphere, there is no reference point given greater or lesser importance, and all points on the surface are equally accessible and regarded by the center from which all originate. From the second chapter of Mundus, Leinkauf (1993) recognized that in order to maintain the Church’s doctrine of the geocentric position of Earth and the finiteness of the universe, Kircher cleverly describes the subterranean world as an analog for the greater universe itself, where God is the nondimensional center (or punctum) of the cosmic reality, and Earth represents the absolute perfect and finite geometric structure (the sphere). By manipulating the ambiguity of the word mundus, Kircher could refer to either Earth as an isolated planetary body, or the whole cosmos (Rowland, 2004). Kircher also uses the terms “geocosm” and “geocosmos” in this bimodal fashion. In studies of alchemic practices of the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, Baldwin (1993) acknowledged the influence of alchemy on Kircher’s interpretation of Earth. She states that Kircher maintained that the geocosm was the prototype for alchemical processes and that careful observation of geological events could teach alchemists the perfection of their art. From a geologic perspective, it can also be argued that throughout the Mundus, Kircher used descriptions of alchemic laboratories and processes (which he actively practiced) as analogs for an interpretation of Earth. In this way, his techniques can be seen as a precursor to the use of modern analogs for interpretation of ancient earth processes. Instead of “the present is the key to Earth’s past,” Kircher’s interpretive maxim could be, “the modern laboratory is the key to Earth’s past.” The various alchemic techniques of heating, evaporating, calcining, coagulating, hardening, and fixating could be used as conceptual models for understanding the formation of Earth. He had ascended Vesuvius in 1638 and had himself lowered inside its crater. Escaping the wrath of Vesuvius, a few days later he witnessed the volcanic eruption from fifty miles away. His observations were interpreted within his circle of influence. He likened the volcano’s heat to that of the alchemist’s furnace, its smoke to that of his alchemical concoctions, and its stench to the sulfur and bitumen fumes, which he inhaled in his laboratory (Baldwin, 1993).

Kircher’s comparison of the workings of Earth to an alchemic project largely focuses on the opposing principles of fire and water. Astrologically, the Sun and the Moon represent these elements and signify two opposing principles. The Sun represents fire, sophic sulfur, God, the King, Spirit, and ultimately the One Mind of the universe. The Moon represents water, sophic salt, the Queen, the Holy Ghost, Soul, and ultimately the One Thing of the universe. It is indeed interesting to note that the Sun and Moon are the only two heavenly bodies described in detail other than Earth in Mundus Subterraneous. In fact, individual chapters are devoted to these objects. At the microcosmic scale, the alchemic principles of fire and water were used as a philosophical foundation for understanding eruptions of volcanoes. From observations along the Apennine Peninsula, Kircher notes that the oceans tend to recede and then rise in relation to ensuing volcanic eruptions. He draws an association between the two events and explains their correspondence through the important Hermetic principle of maintaining equilibrium between fire (volcanoes) and water (the ocean). Kircher describes the oceans filling in subterranean voids left behind by escaping fires that feed volcanoes and, hence, extinguishing the eruptions. Equilibrium of fire and water is also used at a macrocosmic scale. Through the conjunction of these two primordial elements, Earth becomes the perfect spherical eunuch (Fig. 6). Citing elements from alchemy, sacred geometry, and Catholic theology, Kircher’s spherical geocosm is described in terms of a living castrated being. As a spherical eunuch, Earth becomes a metaphor for perfect neutrality and the neutral stage in all reality for mankind to exist (Leinkauf, 1993). SIGNS IN MUNDUS SUBTERRANEUS Semiotics is the study of signs and how meaning arises by the heuristic process of perceiving and conceiving objects. This explanative theory is useful for exploring Kircher’s interpretations and is also useful for illuminating the modern reactions to his works. We can approach Mundus with semiotics by examining how Kircher recognized and interpreted various natural signs. In the most elementary terms, signs can be defined as something present that represents something absent (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1993). In semiotics, a sign is a set of characteristics that represents an object to somebody in some capacity. Characteristics of an object govern what sign or signs are recognized. In turn, a sign creates in the mind of a person an equivalent or more developed sign or idea, the interpretant (Chandler, 2007). Two conceptual models dominate the modern study of semiotics. Figure 7A illustrates the Saussurean dyadic sign model, termed “signification.” The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) organized the formulation of meaning as a relationship between a “signifier” and a “signified concept.” The “signifier” is commonly interpreted as the physical form of a sign, that is, something which can be perceived by our senses. The “signified” is the mental conception of the meaning of the sign.

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Figure 6. Kircher’s interpretation of the interweaving of fire and water in the subterranean world. This was a reflection of his Hermetic worldview, which stated that through the conjunction of fire and water (the two primordial elements), Earth becomes the perfect spherical eunuch.

Figure 7. The two principal sign system models found in modern semiotics. The upper diagram (A) illustrates the Saussurean dyadic sign model, termed “signification.” Here, the sign system is a formulation of meaning as a relationship between a “signifier” and a “signified concept.” The “signifier” is the form that the sign takes and is something perceived by our senses. The “signified” is the mental conception of the meaning of the sign. The lower diagram (B) demonstrates the Peircean triadic sign system model. This model posits three elements: an object, a representamen, and an interpretant. An object is an item identified by an understood common, shared characterization or classification. The representamen is a characteristic that signifies something in a particular capacity. The interpretant is the conception or implication of the sign.

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Figure 7B demonstrates the Peircean triadic sign system model. The American philosopher Charles Peirce (1839–1914) distinguished three elements within his derivation of a sign model: an object, an representamen, and an interpretant. The “object” is what a sign stands for (or represents). The sign itself (or “representamen”) is what is perceived by our senses. The “interpretant” is the mental conception of the sign. The interpretant then becomes itself a sign in the mind of the interpreter. A sign system may be perceived and conceived in three aspects: (1) symbolically, (2) indexically, or (3) iconically. A symbolic sign is one that does not bear a resemblance to its object and therefore its relationship must be learnt. Examples of symbolic signs include languages, letters, numbers, and map symbols. Conversely, an indexical sign is physically or causally connected to the object. Examples of indexical signs include medical symptoms, natural events, measuring instruments, and video or audio recordings. An indexical association can be observed or inferred. An iconic sign is perceived as resembling or imitating the object being similar in possessing some of its qualities. Iconic signs include portraits, scale-models, metaphors, and imitative gestures (Chandler, 2007). As discussed already, Kircher’s method of understanding Earth was founded on upholding a coherent, logical system while sustaining the Hermetic macrocosm-microcosm tradition, which maintains Christian theology and the philosophy that supported it. These two principles profoundly influenced Kircher’s perception of signs and the meaning attributed to them. In the earth sciences, Kircher is remembered in a large part for misidentifying fossils and their origins (Fig. 8). Kircher’s examination of figured stones were formed through sign recognition (textures, familiar images, etc.) that was influenced by the Christian and Hermetic traditions. In some cases, Kircher recognized the figures as actual remains of organisms. In other cases, the images were perceived to simply “look” like organisms. (Gould [2004] suggested that these probably were, in fact, molds of fossils.) Some of the stone figures were even identified as representing religious images. What is important to note is that in each of these cases, Kircher’s interpretations of stones were directly related to whether he perceived their characteristics as indexical or iconic of the object. Kircher’s recognition of religious imagery and figured stones “resembling” fossils are classic example of iconic signs. The stones resemble religious figures or possess some of the qualities of petrified organisms but are not the actual object of reference. Since Kircher saw the sign itself as simply imitating the object and not the object itself, he showed little concern for how these signs actually appear on stones. For him, the ultimate purpose of understanding the natural world was to understand the Divine Mind. This disregard for causality has led modern scientific historians to question his methods. Most modern practitioners of geology are, however, familiar with Kircher’s acknowledgment that some stone images result from the preservation of previously living organisms. Kircher states, “I will not speak here of the innumerable oysters, clams, snails, fungi, algae and other denizens of the sea that have been converted to stone, because

Figure 8. Examples of Kircher’s use of iconic and indexical signs as illustrated in Mundus Subterraneus. (A–D) Examples of use of indexical signs. (A) Toad within a stone that corresponds to the ancient thought that just as stones grow in Earth’s “body,” stones may grow in animals’ bodies, such as toads. (B) A cemented collection of shells that represents Kircher’s position that “innumerable oysters, clams, snails, fungi, algae and other denizens of the sea that have been converted to stone.” (C–D) Engravings of objects that Kircher recognized as petrified remains of fish. (E–H) Images that Kircher interpreted as iconic signs, including animals (an owl in E and a fish in H), astronomical objects (the Moon and fixed stars in F), and religious/mythologic objects (the Virgin and Child with dragon in G).

Signs and symbols in Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus these are obviously found everywhere in such a state, and hardly merit any mention” (translation by Gould, 2004). Such interpretations are indexical signs, where the sign is not arbitrary but directly connected in some way (physically or causally) to the object. A causal link is made between the sign and object. It is in the use of these indexical signs that Kircher’s interpretations parallel modern scientific thought and are therefore considered a credible part of the evolution of science. However, Kircher’s indexical signs do not imply a “modern” method of determining causality. In fact, many of Kircher’s methods were not based on direct observations, but were instead secondhand accounts that he often accepted and elaborated upon. His use of others’ testimony to support his holistic worldview can be seen in his descriptions of the sources of major rivers of the world. In Book 2, a synthesis of Kircher’s understanding of the physical planet, he first describes the “Mountains of the Moon” (Montes Lunae) in central Africa as the source for the Nile (Fig. 9). His description is derived from ancient Greek accounts. Kircher cites directly from the journal of Pedro Páez, a contemporary Jesuit, who had visited Ethiopia in the early 1600s: On the 21st of April, in the year 1618, being here, together with the king and his army, I ascended the place, and observed every thing with great attention. I discovered first two round fountains, each about four

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palms in diameter…The two openings of these fountains have no issue in the plain on the top of the mountain, but flow from the root of it. The second fountain lies about a stone-cast west from the first: the inhabitants say that this whole mountain is full of water, and add, that the whole plain about the fountain is floating and unsteady, a certain mark that there is water concealed under it; for which reason, the water does not overflow at the fountain, but forces itself with great violence out at the foot of the mountain. (Bruce, 1813, p. 445)

From such descriptions, Kircher envisaged that the Montes Lunae contained large subterranean lakes that fed the Nile River. Kircher then proceeded to project this idea onto other major rivers of the world. The Andes as source for the Amazon (Fig. 10A), the Rhaetian Alps as source for the Padus (Fig. 10B), and the Himalayas as source for the Ganges (Fig. 10C). Each river is described as being sourced from lakes beneath the mountains. From a semiotic viewpoint, the extension of this conceptual model in effect changes the sign system. The initial relationship between the Nile and the Montes Lunae is one of causality, and the mountains are therefore indexical signs. However, when Kircher projects this concept into unobserved regions of the world, the mountains and rivers become an iconic sign. For these other river systems, an associated mountain chain is perceived as resembling or imitating the relationship between Montes Lunae and the Nile River (the icon).

Figure 9. Kircher’s illustration of large subterranean lakes beneath Montes Lunae as the source for the Nile and other African rivers. Kircher’s ideas are based on ancient Greek accounts and the seventeenth-century journal of Pedro Páez, S.J.

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Figure 10. Maps from Book 2 of Mundus Subterraneus (1664) illustrating the extension of Kircher’s subterranean lake concept to the Amazon River in South America (A), the Padus River in Europe (B), and the Ganges River in Asia (C).

Signs and symbols in Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus CONCLUSION Instead of being dismissed as an anomaly in the linear upward evolution of the earth sciences, Kircher should be viewed as a transitional figure between medieval thought systems and the growing empirical movement of the Scientific Revolution. His examination of Earth is based on Plato’s philosophy that the world was created by God as a manifestation of his own perfection. Kircher uses symbolism, allegory, and metaphor in Mundus Subterraneus from both an indexical and iconic perspective. From a semiotic viewpoint, Kircher used indexical and iconic signs to combine rational and empirical techniques that sustained his holistic view of the cosmos. In the modern ideal formulation of scientific observation and inquiry, indexical signs are acceptable authoritative causal links between observation and interpretation, but for Kircher, iconic signs were also legitimate articles to collect and employ because they were signs of God’s work. Iconic signs could be religious images or conceptual ideas that Kircher projected onto the workings of Earth. Kircher’s primary concern was to analyze data within the framework of his holistic worldview. Kircher’s methods can also be viewed as a precursor to the Huttonian “Principle of Uniformity” and the use of analogy to understand the workings of Earth. It has been noted by others that the medical background of James Hutton encouraged him to realize notable insights into the workings of Earth by treating it as a living organism and emphasizing its dynamic qualities and processes (Eiseley, 1960, p. 24). Hutton states, The earth like the body of an animal, is wasted at the same time that it is repaired. It has a state of growth and augmentation; it has another state, which is that of diminution and decay. This world is thus destroyed in one part, but it is renewed in another.

As introduced here, Kircher preceded Hutton in the use of biological and alchemic analogies toward the discussion of active earth processes. Kircher, however, expanded upon this analogy within a holistic Hermetic and religious framework. REFERENCES CITED Adams, F.D., 1938, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences: Baltimore, Maryland, Williams & Wilkins Company, 506 p. Baldwin, M., 1993, Alchemy and the society of Jesus in the seventeenth century: Strange bedfellows: Ambix, v. 40, pt. 2, p. 41–64. Bruce, J., 1813, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773: Edinburgh, George Ramsay and Company, 512 p. Chandler, D., 2007, Semiotic: The Basics: New York, Routledge Press, 307 p. Copernicus, N., 1543, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres: Nuremburg, J. Petreium, 6 books. Eiseley, L., 1960, The Firmament of Time: Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 183 p. Findlen, P., 2004, The last man who knew everything… or did he?, in Findlen, P., ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything: New York, Routledge, p. 1–48. Godwin, J., 1978, Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge: London, UK, Thames and Hudson Ltd., 96 p.

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Gould, S.J., 2004, Father Athanasius on the isthmus of a middle state: Understanding Kircher’s paleontology, in Findlen, P., ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything: New York, Routledge, p. 207–237. Kircher, A., 1631, Ars magnesia: hoc est disqvisitio bipartita-emperica seu experimentalis, physico-mathematica. De natura, viribus, et prodigiosis effectibus magnetis, quam cùm theorematicè, túm problematicè propositam, nouâque methodo ac apodicticâ seu demonstratiuâ traditam, variisque usibus ac diuturnâ experientiâ comporbatam, fauente Deo. tuebitur. Praenobilis & Eruditus D. Joannes Jacobus Svveigkhardus à Freihausen, juris & mathematicae studiosus. Herbipoli: Rome, Italy, Typis Eliae Michaelis Zinck, 63 p. Kircher, A., 1655, Oedipus aegyptiacus, hoc est universalis hierolglyphicae veterum doctrinae temporum iniuria abolitae instavratio, opus ex omni orientalium doctrina & sapientia conditum, nec non viginti diuersarium linguarum authoritate stabilitum. Rome: Rome, Italy, Ex Typographia V. Mascardi, 3 v. Kircher, A., 1657, Iter extaticum II: qui & mundi subterranei prodomus dicitur. Quo geocosmi opificum sive terrestris globi structura, unà cum abditis in ea constitutis arcanioris naturae reconditorijs, per ficti raptus integumentum exponitur ad veritatem. In III. dialogos distinctum: Rome, Typis Mascardi, 237 p. Kircher, A., 1661, Diatribe de prodigiosis crucibus: Quae tam supra vestes hominum, quam res alias, non pridem post ultimum incendium Vesuuij montis Neapoli Comparuerunt: Rome, Sumptibus Blasij Deuersin, 103 p. Kircher, A., 1664–1665, Mundus subterraneus in xii libros digestus: Quo divinum subterrestris mundi opificium, mira ergasteriorum naturæ in eo distributio, verbo Protei regnum, vniversæ denique naturæ majestas & divitiæ summa rerum varietate exponuntur: Abditorum effectuum causæ acri indagine inquisitæ demonstrantur: Cognitæ per artis & naturæ conjugium ad humanæ vitæ necessarium usum vario experimentorum apparatu, necnon novo modo, & ratione applicantur: Amsterdam, Apud Joannem Janssonium & Elizeum Weyerstraten, Volume 1 (chapters 1–7), 346 p., Volume 2 (chapters 8–12), 487 p. Kircher, A., 1669, The vulcano’s, or, Burning and fire-vomiting mountains, famous in the world, with their remarkables collected for the most part out of Kircher’s Subterraneous world, and exposed to more general view in English: Upon the relation of the late wonderful and prodigious eruptions of Aetna, thereby to occasion greater admirations of the wonders of nature (and of the God of nature) in the mighty element of fire: London, printed by J. Darby for John Allen, 68 p. Kircher, A., 1678, Mundus subterraneus in xii libros digestus: Quo divinum subterrestris mundi opificium, mira ergasteriorum naturæ in eo distributio, verbo Protei regnum, vniversæ denique naturæ majestas & divitiæ summa rerum varietate exponuntur: Abditorum effectuum causæ acri indagine inquisitæ demonstrantur: Cognitæ per artis & naturæ conjugium ad humanæ vitæ necessarium usum vario experimentorum apparatu, necnon novo modo, & ratione applicantur: Amsterdam, Joannem Janssonium & Elizeum Weyerstraten, Volume 1 (chapters 1–7), 366 p., Volume 2 (chapters 8–12), 507 p. Kircher, A., 1682, D’onder-aardse weereld in haar goddelijk maaksel en wonderbare uitwerkselen aller dingen: Amsterdam, d’Erfgenamen van wylen Joannes Janssonius van Waasberge, Volume 1 (chapters 1–7), 425 p., Volume 2 (chapters 8–12), 415 p. Leeds-Hurwitz, W., 1993, Semiotics and Communication: Signs, Codes, Cultures: Hillsdale, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 222 p. Leinkauf, T., 1993, Mundus combinatus: Studien zur Struktur der barocken Universalwissenschaft am Beispiel Athanasius Kirchers SJ (1602–1680): Berlin, Akademie Verlag GmbH, 434 p. Nummedal, T.E., 2001, Kircher’s Subterranean world and the dignity of the geocosm, in Stolzenberg, D., ed., The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher: Stanford, California, Stanford University Libraries, p. 37–47. Oldroyd, D.R., 1996, Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology: Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 410 p. Quispel, G., 2000, Preface to the Corpus Hermeticum, in Salaman, C., Van Oyen, D., Wharton, W.D., and Mahe, J.-P., eds., The Way of Hermes: New Translations of The Corpus Hermeticum and The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius: Rochester, Vermont, Inner Traditions International, p. 9–11. Reilly, P.C., 1974, Athanasius Kircher S.J.: Master of a Hundred Arts 1602– 1680: Weisbaden, Edizioni Del Mondo, 207 p.

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Roob, A., 2006, Alchemy & Mysticism (25th Anniversary Edition): Los Angeles, Taschen, 576 p. Rowland, I.D., 2004, Athanasius Kircher, Giordano Bruno, and the panspermia of the infinite universe, in Findlen, P., ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything: New York, Routledge, p. 191–205. Salaman, C., Van Oyen, D., Wharton, W.D., and Mahé, J-P., 2000, The Way of Hermes: New Translations of The Corpus Hermeticum and The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius: Rochester, Vermont, Inner Traditions International, 124 p.

Siebert, H., 2004, Kircher and his critics: Censorial practice and pragmatic disregard in the Society of Jesus, in Findlen, P., ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything: New York, Routledge, p. 79–104. Waddell, M.A., 2006, The world, as it might be: Iconography and probabilism in the Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius Kircher: Centaurus, Blackwell Publishing, Munksgaard, v. 48, p. 3–22. Yates, F., 1966, The Art of Memory: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 464 p. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Niels Stensen—Steno, in the world of collections and museums Elsebeth Thomsen† Department of Natural Sciences, Tromsø University Museum, NO 9037 Tromsø, Norway

ABSTRACT In 2006, we celebrated the 350th anniversary of the beginning of an extraordinary career. On 27 November 1656, Niels Stensen, also known as Steno, commenced his studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. All through his scientific life, Steno was fortunate to be able to name many famous scholars amongst his acquaintances, including experts in, for example, chemistry, mathematics, pharmacy, medicine, and biology. He was also supported financially by patrons with a keen interest in natural history. Many of these people were also associated with collections or museums of reputation. Some had inherited collections or museums, e.g., Jan Swammerdam and Manfredo Settala, and others had established these themselves, e.g., Athanasius Kircher. Steno eventually became a collector and curator for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. This work is documented in a catalogue, Indice di Cose Naturali, listing amongst other naturalia samples of minerals and fossils in the Grand Duke’s collection, some collected by Steno himself. Examples are hematite crystals from Elba, collected before De Solido reveals the principles of “Steno’s law” in 1669, and fossil fish from the copper shale in Eisleben, collected later. The importance of the Indice (the Index) is that the samples listed were partly collected by Steno as documentation for his own research and inspection of economically important geological localities. In posterity, the late Dr. Gustav Scherz was able to reconstruct Steno’s travels using the information of these samples. There is only scattered information on Steno’s interest and experience with collections or museums in his publications and letters. The aim of this paper is to throw light upon this relatively unknown part of his life from the very beginning of his career. This study demonstrates that Steno encountered many of the most important collections and museums in Europe during the period of his life, which was dedicated to science. Steno was a marvelous analytical observer with a unique scientific approach. It therefore seems obvious that this encyclopedic multitude of impressions and information from the caretakers and other sources must have been of significance, not only for his own museological work, but also for his outstanding ability to contribute to new discoveries in anatomy as well as in geology. Keywords: Niels Stensen, Steno, collections, museums, Indice.

†

E-mail: [email protected].

Thomsen, E., 2009, Niels Stensen—Steno, in the world of collections and museums, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 75–91, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(05). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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INTRODUCTION An extraordinary career began when Niels Stensen, also known as Nicolaus Stenonis or Steno, was admitted in 1656 to the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He became a famous scientist, not only because of his many important discoveries in anatomy, but also because of his achievements in geology, in particular, in paleontology, stratigraphy, and crystallography (cf. Steno [1969] in Scherz, ed., 1969b). With the death of Steno in 1686, his achievements fell into oblivion for a long period. He became forgotten outside Italy until 1823, when the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), followed in 1832 by the French geologist JeanBaptiste Élie de Beaumont (1798–1874), were the first to make Steno known again as the founder of geology (Garboe, 1948). Considering Steno’s important contributions to geology as a science, this seems justified (Garboe, 1958; Hansen, 2000). It took until 2004 for him to be commemorated at the 32nd International Geology Congress in Florence for his discoveries in stratigraphy and crystallography (Vai, 2004; Nielsen, et al., 2004; Thomsen, 2005b). Most recently, Steno was the focus of many oral presentations (e.g., Thomsen Hanken, 2006) at the History of Geology Division session organized by Dr. Gary Rosenberg at the 2006 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Philadelphia, United States. All through his scientific life, Steno was fortunate to count many famous scholars amongst his acquaintances. Many of these people were also associated with collections or museums of reputation. Steno eventually became a collector and curator for the Grand Dukes of Tuscany, and his work is documented in a catalogue Indice di Cose Naturali (Index of Natural Objects) (Scherz, 1956; Scherz, ed., 1958). Otherwise, there is only scattered information in Steno’s publications (Stenonis, 1910) and letters (Stenonis, 1952; Hansen, ed., 1987) about his interest in collections or museums. The aim of this paper is to throw light upon this relatively unknown side of his activities. For more information on the life of Steno, the following biographies are recommended: Jørgensen (1884, 1958), Plenkers (1884), Plovgaard (1953), Garboe (1959), Bjarnhof (1972), Scherz (1988), Bierbaum and Faller (1979), Mortensen (1993), Kardel (1994a), Kermit (1998, 2003), Cutler (2003), and Sobiech (2004). A complete bibliography of works up to and including 1986 has been published by Jensen (1986), and a poster in honor of Steno, which shows the life of Steno in pictures from his days as a student until his beatification in 1988, was published by the author in 2006. THE FIRST COLLECTION Steno was born on 1 January 1638 in Klareboderne in Copenhagen (Stenonis, 1952, p. 800; E 419 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 688), and he became a pupil in Vor Frue Skole (School of Our Lady) in 1648 (Scherz, 1988). One of his teachers was

Ole Borch, who later became professor in philology, poetry, chemistry, and medicine at the university. Borch (1626–1690) had studied medicine and was very interested in chemistry, in particular, metallurgy and mining because of the importance of precious metals and minerals in the “modern” medicine of his time. For the same reason, he was also a competent botanist, who, according to a diary of one of his students, Holger Jakobsen (latinized Jacobaeus) (1650–1701), took his students “herbatim,” i.e., on botanical excursions (Jacobaeus, 1672). Thus, in the context of the present study, we first meet Steno on a botanical excursion with other pupils in a bog outside Copenhagen (Fig. 1).1 Then, as now, one of the most important parts of a botanical excursion would be the collection of plants for the creation of an herbarium. In his early notes from 1659, known as the Chaos manuscript, Steno writes (col. 135 in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 326): So that you can impress upon your memory the simple medicaments and their properties, you should obtain a specimen of each one and arrange them in certain classes, so that purgatives are placed on their own, etc. A herbarium should be made in which the sheets can be taken out and put in at will.

Thus, the first collection of Steno was probably an herbarium. A COLLECTION OF BOOKS On 27 November 1656, Steno was admitted to the University of Copenhagen as a student of medicine (Scherz, 1956, 1988). He chose the famous anatomist and professor of medicine Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680) as preceptor.2 Bartholin had his own small collection, a “Naturalienkabinet,” in a room in Domus Anatomica above the lecture hall Theatrum Anatomicum in Copenhagen (Bartholin, 1622; Scherz, 1956; Snorrason, 1966). During his studies, Steno also had access to private libraries belonging to, e.g., professor Simon Paulli (1603–1680) and Ole Borch, as well as to the first university library. This opened in 1657 in a bright room above the student’s church, Trinitatis Kirke, which was consecrated in 1656. This library had a collection of ~10,000 books (Nielsen, 1987). In 1659, Steno was enlisted with the other students to defend Copenhagen during a period of war with Sweden (Rørdam, 1855) (Fig. 2), but he also found time to read and excerpt several important scientific books, e.g., the second edition from 1643 of Athanasius Kircher’s work on magnetism, Magnes sive de Arte Magnetica (Magnet or the Magnetic Art) (cf. Ziggelaar, 1997; Yamada, 2006). We know the books Steno worked with because we have his notes, the so-called Chaos manuscript, which was published in extenso by Dr. Ziggelaar in 1997 (see also Schepelern, 1986; Rosenberg, 2006a; Yamada, 2006; Ziggelaar, this volume). 1 For more information on Steno depicted in objects of art, see Metzler (1911); Thomasen (1975, 1979); Thomsen (2005a, 2006). 2 For information on Thomas Bartholin, see Garboe (1949–1950).

Niels Stensen—Steno, in the world of collections and museums THE ROYAL DANISH KUNSTKAMMER The Chaos manuscript reveals little about Steno’s life, but we learn that he visited the royal collection of art and naturalia, named Kongens Kunstkammer (the Royal Danish Kunstkammer), at the castle of Copenhagen. Founded by King Frederik III (1609–1670) ca. 1650 in a single room called Himmeriget (the Paradise), and moved in 1653, the collection in 1659 filled eight rooms (Gemacher), one of which was devoted to naturalia (Dam-Mikkelsen, 1980; Gundestrup, 1985; a list of objects in an inventory from 1674 is kept by the Danish National Archives, Copenhagen). Steno wrote (col. 64 in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 179): At the castle I saw the famous room which is decorated with manifold conches and the shells of various animals. There were four doors with these emblematic pictures: Death, Doomsday, Heaven and Hell. There were various beautiful sights, etc.

Amongst the “beautiful sights” were cups (Fig. 3) made from shells of the cephalopod Natilus pompilius, often engraved with pious sentences. MUSEUM WORMIANUM Included in the Royal Danish Kunstkammer from 1655 was the famous collection of Ole Worm, known as Museum Wormianum (see, e.g., Schepelern, 1971; Mordhorst, 2002). Ole Worm (1588–1654) was a professor in Latin, Greek, physics, and medicine who had studied in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. He had visited several of the most important collections and museums in Europe, places of future visits by Steno. Worm’s museum was internationally famous and included naturalia, ethnographica, antiquities, and art (catalogues 1642, 1653, and 1655). Naturalia, i.e., minerals, fossils, plants, and animals, dominated (Schepelern, 1971; Rosenberg, 2006b) (Fig. 4). The Kunstkammer consisted of many objects that Steno would later see again in other places, e.g., glossopetrae (tonguestones) from Malta, corals, teeth of mammoths, stuffed sharks, and the “nose” of a sawfish. The Danish Lutheran minister and historian of Danish geology Axel Garboe (1886–1970) assumed that Steno knew the catalogue for Museum Wormianum, which was published by the son of Ole Worm, Villum Worm, in 1655 (Garboe, 1958). Steno probably returned to the Kunstkammer later in his life when he visited Copenhagen, since he had promised to give a description of the Kunstkammer to Cardinal Leopoldo in 1672 (E 87 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 204). Steno’s intention was to communicate what he judged to be of importance for a new museum in Florence. THE SWAMMERDAM COLLECTION In 1660, Steno went to Holland in order to continue his studies in medicine at the University of Leiden, the most important university of the period 1660–1670 (Helk, 1991). In Amsterdam, he met a Dutch fellow student, Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680).

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His father, Jan Jakobzoon Swammerdam (1606–1678), was a pharmacist in Amsterdam who had a collection of naturalia (a “Naturalienkabinet”). His son spent much time with this collection (Scherz, 1952), and we may safely assume that he brought his new friend Steno to see it (cf. Scherz, 1956). According to a description by an English visitor, doctor in medicine Edward Browne (1644–1708), who saw the collection in 1668, it was “a very fair Collection of Insects brought from several Countries; a Stagg-fly of very great bigness; an Indian Scolopendria, or Forty-foot; a fly called Ephemeron, and many other Curiosities” (Browne, 1677, p. 1–38). Jan Swammerdam was a skilful anatomist and zoologist, and he became a well-known entomologist (Cobb, 2000, 2002). He shared an interest in silk-worms with the doctor and scientist Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) in Bologna (although they never communicated directly according to Cobb, 2002). In 1675, Steno served as a link between the two, bringing some unpublished hand-colored illustrations by Swammerdam to Florence and sending them on to Malpighi (E 106 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 230–231). These illustrations are now preserved at the University Library of Bologna with the following label by Malpighi: “Drawings of Bombyx done by Mister Swammerdam, which he gave to me because he was abandoning his studies of anatomy, and which were transmitted by Mister Stenon 18. July 1675” (Cobb, 2002, figure 4, text translated from Latin; NB Cobb has a translation error, it is Mister [Dominus], not Master). Swammerdam had decided to quit his research for religious reasons (E 99 in Hansen, ed., 1987, note 11, p. 224; Cobb, 2000). The year before, Steno had tried to persuade Swammerdam to carry on as a scientist and to rescue his collection with the aid of the Grand Duke Cosimo III (E 99 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 223–224). The duke offered to buy the collection, provided Swammerdam would move to Tuscany and accept a position as curator (Findlen, 1996). Swammerdam declined and later had to sell the collection at a lower price (Findlen, 1996). He died from malaria in 1680. THE MONTMOR COLLECTION Jan Swammerdam and Steno studied at the University of Leiden, and Steno later got his doctoral degree in medicine in absentia when staying in Paris in 1664–1665 as a guest at the house of Melchisedec Thévenot. Thévenot (1620–1692) was an important patron for many scientists (Scherz, 1952; Brown, 1967). He introduced the two and Ole Borch to the scientific community in Paris. Many lectures, demonstrations, dissections, chemical experiments, etc., including Steno’s famous lecture about the brain (Stenon, 1669; Steno, 1965; Stensen, 1997), took place in his home as a continuation of the informal meetings of the “Montmor Academy,” which took place in the home of HenriLouis Habert de Montmor. De Montmor (1603–1679) had been a member of Académie Francaise since 1634, and several meetings of this academy also took place in his home, where he had a large collection of books, paintings, and curiosities, including

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Figure 1. Painting from 1918 by Valdemar Neiiendam showing Ole Borch with his students on a botanical excursion. The person that is looking into a book is Steno. Picture is reproduced with the permission of Haderslev Museum, Denmark.

Figure 2. Detail of a painting from 1918 by Valdemar Neiiendam showing Steno with other students on the mound during the siege of Copenhagen in 1659. Picture is reproduced with the permission of Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen (photo by E. Thomsen).

Figure 3. Cup made from a shell of the cephalopod Nautilus pompilius. Picture is reproduced with the permission of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen (photo by E. Thomsen).

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Figure 4. Museum Wormianum, 1654. Frontispiece from 1655 (photo by E. Thomsen).

astronomical instruments (Brown, 1967). Steno must have seen this collection, according to Scherz (1969a). During the summer of 1665, Steno traveled to Montpellier in southern France. Montpellier had an old university (founded in 1289) with a faculty of medicine, a botanical garden, and a good library. Here, he stayed during the winter, making acquaintances with the Englishmen John Ray (1627–1705), a naturalist, philosopher, and theologian, and Martin Lister (1638–1712), a physician and malacologist, and other important persons who would later be of significance for his scientific career and international fame (Scherz, 1956, 1969a). GALLERIA DE SEMPLICI Steno departed from his friends early in 1666 and went on to Tuscany in northern Italy in September. With very good recommendations from Thévenot (E 21 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 100),

he was well received in Pisa by the Grand Duke Ferdinando II (1610–1670), his brother Cardinal Leopoldo (1617–1675), and the son of Ferdinando, later to become Grand Duke Cosimo III (1642–1723). Pisa had a university, a botanical garden, and a small natural history museum, Galleria de Semplici, next to the garden (Findlen, 1996; Fig. 5). Here, Steno would spend some time in 1668 and 1671–1672 organizing and curating the collection of minerals, etc., so that it could be coordinated with the collection of minerals and fossils in Palazzo Pitti in Florence (Scherz, 1956, 1958a). His work would later be documented in Indice di Cose Naturali (Index of Natural Objects), which is an incomplete catalogue of the ducal natural history collection (Scherz, 1956, 1958b). The Index also includes samples collected and curated by Steno himself (Scherz, 1956, 1958b). The most important value of the Index is that it gives us a glimpse of the travel route Steno used and what he saw and collected for documentation and/or research in periods of his life of which we know very little

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Thomsen Street Entrance (Via S. Maria)

16 Bookshelves

Windows

23 Cabinets and 18 Small Chests

Table Bench

“Room of Paintings” Doorway Lined with 12 Portraits of Famous Naturalists Entrance to the Botanical Gardens Figure 5. Galleria de Semplici. Plan of the Pisa museum from P. Findlen (1996) based on a source from 1626.

or nothing. This was first documented by Dr. Gustav Scherz in his dissertation on the Index from 1956 and will be demonstrated by examples in the following when possible. MUSAEUM KIRCHERIANUM From Pisa, Steno traveled to Florence and, after a short stay, went on to Rome. Here, he met the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), whose work on magnetism he had read and excerpted as a student (Ziggelaar, 1997). Kircher was professor at the University of Würzburg from 1628 to 1631 where he taught mathematics, philosophy, Hebrew, and Syrian. Later, in 1638–1646, he taught mathematics at Collegio Romano (the Roman College), the Jesuit college in Rome, which was founded in 1551. Kircher had a wide field of interests, studying old languages, archaeology, astronomy, magnetism, Chinese and Egyptian culture, etc. (Findlen, 1996, 2004a; Findlen, ed., 2004b). His interpretations and hypotheses were published, but Kircher also tried to demonstrate them in a museum situated in Collegio Romano. Musaeum Kircherianum had many rare items, including ethnographica, machines, manuscripts, coins, and fossils, etc. (Cutler, 2003; Lo Sardo, 2004). An engraving by Georgius de Sepibus from 1678 (Fig. 6) gives an idealized view of the museum, with Kircher himself handing out something to a guest, perhaps a letter of recommendation such as Steno asked for in 1669 (E 40 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 135). The personal relationship between Steno and Kircher was amiable (cf., e.g., E 102 and 107 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 226–227 and p. 231–232). Steno, however, criticized and rejected Kircher’s

ideas about Earth, in particular, Kircher’s theory on the organic production of mountains, about which Steno commented in De Solido, “Mountains do not grow in the way plants do” (Stenonis, 1669; Scherz, ed., 1969b, p. 168–169). Yamada (2006) suggested that Steno seems to have been influenced by Kircher’s idea on magnetism and certainly adopted his idea with regard to the formation of crystals. PALAZZO PITTI Back in Florence, Steno devoted most of his time to anatomical studies. He also attended the meetings of Accademia del Cimento (1657–1667), which took place in Palazzo Pitti (Anonymous, 2001–2002). Here, he saw a collection that included minerals, fossils (e.g., glossopetrae from Malta, which he had seen in Copenhagen in his preceptor’s [Thomas Bartholin] collection and in the Kunstkammer), objects of art, (e.g., cups of cephalopod shells), coins, weapons, and instruments (Scherz, 1969a, 1988; Turner, 1985). He had just finished his treatise on the muscles Elementorum Myologiae Specimen (A Specimen of the Elements of Myology) (see Kardel, 1994b) when he received the head of a giant shark that had been caught offshore Livorno. Based on his study of the head, he wrote the paper Canis Charcharia Dissectum Caput (The Dissection of the Head of a Carcharias-Shark), which was published in 1667 (Stenonis, 1667b; Steno, 1933), together with the paper on muscles and a minor paper on the dissection of a dogfish. Steno compared the teeth of the shark with glossopetrae and recognized the origin of these as shark teeth. Thus, he reached his conclusion by applying the later well-known scientific principle “the present is the key to the past.” Recently, Dr. Jens Morten Hansen (2000, and this volume) has credited Steno for introducing “the recognition criterion” as one of three cognition criteria. The organic origin of fossils, however, had been recognized by others before Steno, for example, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and the naturalist Fabio Colonna (1567– 1640) in 1616 in his work De glossopetris Dissertatio (Dissertation on glossopetrae) (Morello, 1981, 2003, 2006; Cutler, 2003). As the decayed state of the head was too poor to be used for an illustration, Steno borrowed two plates from Carlo Roberto Dati (1619–1676), who owned the unpublished thesis by the physician and superintendent for the botanical garden in the Vatican, Michaelis Mercati (1541–1593), on the natural history collection, Metallotheca Vaticana, in the Vatican (published by Lancisi in 1717). One of the plates (Fig. 7A) demonstrates the close similarity between Mercati’s dried specimen and an old museum specimen today (Fig. 7B). Ironically Mercati thought that fossils, including glossopetrae, had nothing to do with once-living organisms (Steno, 1933; Krogh, 1933). Steno added a note in proof as a result of a visit by the Canon Manfredo Settala (1600–1680) from Milan. Settala was widely known for his museum (cf. Findlen, 1996). He told Steno that “there were many things amongst the rarer pieces of his collection which quite clearly supported my (Steno’s) con-

Niels Stensen—Steno, in the world of collections and museums

Figure 6. Musaeum Kircherianum (G. de Sepibus, 1678).

jectures,” and Steno thought this was “gratifying to my ears, in as much as I am aware of how much weight they gain from this man’s assent” (Stenonis, 1667b; Steno, 1969, p. 114–115; Scherz, ed., 1969b).3 “GEOLOGIAE PARENS” Steno then left Florence to take a closer look at the geology of the area, at first restricted to the nearest surroundings (Fig. 8). Steno’s fieldwork would be essential for his later fame and reputation as “Geologiae Parens” (“the father of geology”; e.g., Vai, 2004). By his conclusions, based upon his observations of the strata and their fossil contents, he founded the science of stra3 Settala and his museum will be dealt with in the following in connection with Steno’s fieldwork in 1671.

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tigraphy. We know that Steno collected many fossils, especially bivalves and gastropods, from the Tertiary-Quaternary sediments in Tuscany. He included them in the collection in Palazzo Pitti, but they were not recorded in the Index by Dr. Tozzetti (Scherz, 1956, 1969a), probably because there were too many. Steno’s pursuit in science was shortly interrupted by his decision on 2 November 1667 to become a Catholic. He resumed his fieldwork, i.e., sampling shells, the day after his confirmation on 8 December 1667 (E 28 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 111). He first went to Pisa collecting along the road, and proceeded to Volterra, which is known for its many fossils, remarking that “shellfish (shells) of every kind are found” (Stenonis, 1669; Steno, 1969, p. 199), and solfatara (places where sulfurous gas is emitted from vents)4 (E 35a in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 122). From there, he went to the Island of Elba, which belonged to Tuscany (Scherz, 1956, 1969a). Steno’s knowledge of the economically important mineral resources of this island is documented in the Chaos manuscript (col. 109 in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 273–274), and his visit to the island is documented in a 1668 letter from the secretary of Accademia del Cimento, Lorenzo Magalotti, to the secretary of the Royal Society in London, Henry Oldenburg (E 35b note in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 122), and in the Index, e.g., “No. 70–76. Sette pezzi di Miniera di Ferro dell ‘Elba de quali un piccolo ha un bellissimo Colere turchino nella sua superficie” (“Seven pieces of iron ore from Elba, a small one among them has a very beautiful blue color on its surface”; Scherz, 1956, p. 162; Scherz, ed., 1958, p. 223). Figure 9 shows a sample of hematite from Elba from the collections of Tromsø University Museum. Beautiful crystals of many different minerals occur on Elba (Scherz, 1969a; Steno, 1969). Thus, it is not strange that Steno chose rock crystals (Fig. 10) and hematite crystals in an illustration (“diagram”) of his crystallographic work in De Solido, revealing “Steno’s law” about the constancy of interfacial angles in the figure text (Stenonis, 1669; Steno, 1969). De Solido Intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento Dissertationis Prodromus (Introduction to a Dissertation on Solids Naturally Contained within Solids) was a preliminary work written in haste during two months and published in 1669 (second edition in 1679; Fig. 11). According to Steno (Stenonis, 1669; Steno, 1902), it contained the chief items of what he had completed (Scherz, ed., 1969b, p. 138–139). Steno had planned a major geological treatise but was unable to complete it because he did not have enough time. Steno, however, felt an obligation to communicate the most important of his results in a preliminary work to his patron the Grand Duke and therefore wrote “The Prodromus,” i.e., De Solido. MUSEO IMPERATO In November 1668, Steno traveled from Florence to Rome and met Athanasius Kircher, who offered him letters of recommendation (E 40 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 135). 4

The name is derived from the Solfatara crater, north of Naples.

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A

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B

Figure 7. (A) Figure of a dried head of a shark from Stenonis (1667), borrowed by Steno from Mercati’s unpublished paper (photo by E. Thomsen). (B) An old dried museum specimen of a shark (photo by E. Thomsen).

Figure 8. Detail of a fresco from 1939 by Oscar Matthiesen, showing Steno doing fieldwork in the nearest surroundings of Florence (Matthiesen, 1940). Picture is reproduced with the permission of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, Geological Museum, University of Copenhagen (photo by E. Thomsen).

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Figure 9. A sample of hematite from Elba, Tromsø University Museum (TMU), Norway (photo by J. Rødli and M. Karlstad, copyright TMU). With permission by TMU.

Figure 10. Small sculpture in plaster from 1915 by Laurits Jensen showing Steno as geologist demonstrating rock crystals. Picture is reproduced with the permission of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, Geological Museum, University of Copenhagen (photo by E. Thomsen).

Figure 11. Frontispiece of De Solido, 2nd edition from 1679 (photo by E. Thomsen).

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Figure 12. Museo Imperato from Imperato (1599) and a “nose” of a sawfish from Tromsø University Museum (photo by E. Thomsen).

Next, he proceeded to Naples (E 37 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 133). Ole Worm had visited a famous collection, the Museo Imperato in Naples in 1609 (Schepelern, 1971). This museum was created by the Neapolitan pharmacist Ferrante Imperato (1550–1625), and it possessed many geological (especially fossils) and zoological items (cf. Findlen, 1996; Vai and Cavazza, 2006), including objects Steno would have seen in the Royal Danish Kunstkammer, e.g., the “nose” of a sawfish (Fig. 12). It is not known whether the museum in Naples still existed in Steno’s time, but corals in the Imperato collection (cf. Imperato, 1599) are mentioned in a correspondence between the Sicilian botanist Paolo Boccone (1633–1704) and Steno, who had seen similar corals in the museum in Pisa and catalogued them as belonging to the species Coralloides biecheianti (E 57, 64, 89 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 160–163, 177–178, 207–208). Early in 1669, Steno left Florence for another long journey partly to do fieldwork, and partly to carry out inspections of economically important geological locations. His route has been accounted for by Scherz (1956, 1958a, 1969a, 1988). Steno began in northern Italy, proceeded to Austria-Hungary with a trip to Nürnberg (Nuremberg) in Germany, and then he returned to Florence in the end of 1669 via Prague, Germany, and Holland, where he visited Jan Swammerdam. Steno arrived in Florence in 1670, probably with many samples or promises of samples, like the promise he got from the Archduchess Anna de’Medici in 1672 (E 79 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 193) that she would find a curiosity for the natural history collection of the duke (Cosimo III). In Dresden, Steno was promised rocks and minerals for the same collection by the Regent Johann Georg II (1613–1680) (E 79 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 193).

MUSEO COSPIANO In northern Italy, Steno visited Marcello Malpighi in Bologna, the hometown of the naturalist Ulysse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), professor de fossilibus plantis et animalibus at the University of Bologna, and his comprehensive library and natural history museum, Studio Aldrovandi, which was founded in 1547. The museum has been described by Olmi (1985), Findlen (1996), Vai (2003), Vai and Cavazza (eds., 2003), and Vai and Cavazza (2006). Following the death of Aldrovandi, his collection and library were moved to Palazzo Pubblico in 1617, merged in 1657 with a private museum created by the Marchese Ferdinado Cospi (1606–1686), and donated to the town in 1667 under the name Museo Cospiano (Legati, 1677; Olmi, 1985; Laurencich-Minelli, 1985; Findlen, 1996). Steno most likely visited this very famous museum (Fig. 13) as he spent some time in Bologna. His next stop was Venice with a visit to the glass works of Murano. In Venice, he met an artist, probably from Ravenna (Thomasen, 1975, 1979), which resulted in a terracotta relief of “Nicolaus Stenonis anatomicus geologicusque maximus” (Fig. 14). No doubt Steno had become famous! Going north, Steno traveled through Verona, which we know housed another famous museum, the private Musaeum Francisci Calceolari, named after its pharmacist founder, Francisco Calceolari (ca. 1521–ca. 1606) and inherited by his nephew Francesco, who extended the collection (Olmi, 1985). The last catalogue by Benedicto Ceruti and Andrea Chirocco is dated 1622. This museum consisted of minerals, animals, and

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Figure 13. Museo Cospiani from Legati (1677). Note the little man with the pointer in the exquisite museum.

plants, and it existed at Steno’s time. It was just as well-known as the museums of Aldrovandi, Mercati, and Imperato (Borel, 1649; Torrens, 1985). SCHLOSS AMBRAS WUNDERKAMMER In the middle of May 1669, Steno arrived at the court of the Grand Duke’s sister, Archduchess Anna de’Medici (1616–1676). During summertime, her court would move to the Schloss Ambras, south of Innsbruck. This castle housed one of the most important collections in Europe, principally a collection of weapons, arms, and art in a Kunstkammer, but also a Wunderkammer full of minerals and fossils (Scheicher, 1985). The collection was founded by the Archduke Ferdinand II (1529–1595). It was evacuated to Vienna in the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna still has some objects, for example, a fossil fish, Anaethalion knorri (Fig. 15), from the famous Jurassic deposits at Solnhofen in Germany collected in 1543 and “described” as a victim of the Deluge by the determinator/curator using a poem by Virgil in the engraved text. Another Ambras item is an Ophit, a Jurassic ammonite, Coroniceras rotiforme, with a carved head from Württemberg in Germany collected in 1564 (Fig. 16). The Index gives several references (Scherz, 1956, p. 174; Scherz, ed., 1958, p. 235) to ammonites, e.g., “No. 152. Pietra bianca lattata in forma di Riempimento di una Conca di Cornu Ammonis” (“Milky white stone in the shape of the filling of a conch of Ammon’s horn”), “No. 153. Un Cornu Ammonis tutto Marcasita” (“Cornu Ammonis all marcasite”), and some collected by Steno himself (cf. Scherz, 1969a), e.g., “No. 263....

No 141: Certi Ciottolini cavati vicino a Nolliberga, ne quali sono Nicchi detti comunemente Corni di Amone” (“Certain little stones quarried near Nuremberg in which there are shells, vulgarly called Ammon’s horns”) (Scherz, 1956, p. 204; Scherz, ed., 1958, p. 265; Nolliberga = Nuremberg). Steno dissected, lectured, and inspected salinas (places where salt crystals are produced by evaporation of highly saline water), silver, lead, and tin mines near Innsbruck, and an emerald locality in Habachthal near Salzburg (Scherz, 1955). This historically well-known locality (Grundmann, 2007) is situated ~2000 m above sea level and was not easily accessible in Steno’s time, but thanks to the Index, we know he had been there and collected samples, for instance, “No. 30. Smeraldo in Colonna a sei facette come il Cristallo con pozetti di Cristallo” (“Emerald in the form of a column with six facets like a crystal with small pieces of crystal”) (Scherz, 1956, p. 152; Scherz, ed., 1958, p. 213). Steno must have collected his samples in the naturally fallen material. By late June 1669, Steno was in Vienna. We do not know the sites he visited, although Scherz (1969a) suggested the old hospital, its church, and the Jesuit college. Vienna, however, also housed the Habsburg Kunstkammer collection and its many spectacular objects of art made of gold, silver, rock crystals, corals, etc. (Distelberger, 1985). This collection would have been of interest to Steno, and it may have been necessary for Steno to obtain a letter of recommendation, just as he had from Kircher. The Index also reveals that Steno inspected gold and silver mines in Schemnitz and Kremnitz in Hungary, and he collected samples listed in the Index, e.g., “No. 268. Miniere d’Argento con oro dell’Ungheria...” (“Ore of silver with gold from Hungary...”) (Scherz, 1956, p. 206; Scherz, ed., 1958, p. 267).

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Figure 14. Detail of a terracotta relief, made by an unknown artist, showing Steno in 1669. Picture is reproduced with the permission of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, Geological Museum (photo by E. Thomsen). The relief is now housed at the Museum of National History at Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark.

Figure 15. A victim of the Deluge. Picture is reproduced with the permission of the Natural History Museum Vienna (copyright NHM Vienna, Austria).

Niels Stensen—Steno, in the world of collections and museums

Figure 16. An Ophit. Picture is reproduced with the permission of the Natural History Museum Vienna (copyright NHM Vienna, Austria).

Steno returned to Vienna in October 1669 and gave a short report in a letter to Marcello Malpighi (Stenonis, 1952, p. 212) in which he said that his journey to see the mines in Hungary gave him great satisfaction “not so much because of new observations which were very few in number, but rather because I saw with my own eyes things that are very difficult to understand in the writings of writers on metal. However, I also saw something which confirmed my views on the changes in the earth...” (Scherz, 1969a, p. 32). From Vienna, Steno traveled home via Bohemia, Germany, and Holland, where he visited his old friend Jan Swammerdam. Three samples in the Index, “No. 163L-M. Due Pietre Islebiana bianche, una piccola, et una grande con il loro Pesce” (“Two white Eisleben-stones, one small, one large, with their fish”) and “No. 163N. Una Pietra Islebiana nera col suo Pesce di Colere di Miniera di Rame” (“One black Eisleben-stone with its fish of a color like a copper ore”) (Scherz, 1956, p. 178; Scherz, ed., 1958, p. 239; Islebiana = Eisleben) of fossil fish from the Permian copper shale of Eisleben reveal that he passed through the Mansfeld area in Germany on his way to Holland. Copper and silver had been derived from this shale since 1199, and during the late sixteenth century, this area was one of three major copper- and silver-producing areas of Europe. Fossil fish occurring in shale and concretions were common in the collections and museums in Europe, e.g., in Museum Kircherianum (cf. Scherz, 1956; Gould, 2004, his Figure 9.2) and in the Royal Danish Kunstkammer

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Figure 17. Painting from 1943 by Valdemar Neiiendam showing Steno in the field in Italy (private collection) (photo and copyright The Royal Library, Copenhagen).

in Copenhagen.5 In 1672, when Steno was in Copenhagen, the son of Ole Worm, Villum Worm (1633–1704), inspector at the Kunstkammer from 1673, showed him “a rock from Norway with a fish that looks like those from Eisleben” (E 87 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 205). FIELDWORK AND SETTALA 1671 Steno always tried to personally visit locations in order to gather specimens for documentation and research (Fig. 17). Although he was frail, he undertook physically strenuous journeys in alpine terrain (as that to Habachthal in 1669) and in 1671 to the ice caves in northern Italy (Scherz, 1950; Garboe, 1951; Steno 1969; Scherz, ed., 1969b; E 62–63 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 164–170). Manfredo Settala helped him, at least on one occasion. Settala had inherited his father’s famous museum, the Musaeum Settala, which had many curiosities, including minerals, fossils, stuffed animals, plants, ethnographica, etc. (Aimi et al., 1985; Findlen, 1996). Settala had increased the collection greatly; he was particularly well known for his self-made optical and mechanical instruments, e.g., concave mirrors, confirmed in Index “No. 299” where Steno uses the description “Effetti del Fuoco nell’Etna, nella Solfaterra da una Saietta, da uno Specchio Setala” when describing an effect 5 The inventory from 1674 lists “Mandtsfeldiske Kobbershiffer, huor paa staar en figur av fisk og holder sølff” (“Copper shale from Mansfeld on which there is a figure of a fish holding silver”).

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of lighting that looked as a Settala mirror (Scherz, 1952, 1956, p. 213–214). A visit by Steno to Settala in the summer 1671 was recorded by doctor of medicine Paolo Maria Terzago (?–1695), who described how Steno performed an elegant dissection in the house of Settala (Stenonis, 1952). “A DEADLY BORING OCCUPATION” (IN 1672!) As mentioned earlier, Steno curated and catalogued the collections in Pisa and Florence in 1668 and 1671–1672, but he also included his own material in the Grand Duke’s collection. In 1763, the Florentinian naturalist, doctor of medicine, and professor of botany, Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti (1712–1783), recovered a brief catalogue that he thought might have been dictated or written by Steno (Scherz, 1956; Scherz, ed., 1958). The surviving Index was published by Dr. Gustav Scherz in 1956 and in 1958. Later, Dr. Stefano de Rosa published a catalogue by Steno on the Pisa collection in 1671–1672 (de Rosa, 1985; de Rosa and Mazeetti, 1986). The Index lists 304 numbers. Each number may record several specimens, so the total amount of listed specimens is much larger. The entire collection must have been still larger. Primarily, the samples listed in the Index from Steno’s long journey provided information on localities. Today, it is not possible to distinguish any samples collected by Steno from other preserved samples in Florence of the contemporaneous collection, simply because the labels have not survived. However, they still existed in the eighteenth century in the Reale Gabinetto di Storia Naturale and were described in Vita del Letteratissimo Mons. Niccolò Stenone di Danimarca by the Florentinian librarian Domenico Maria Manni (1690–1788) as “written by hand by our scientist with such precision and elegance that they are clearly the fruit of his genius” (Manni, 1775 in Scherz, 1956, p. 129). The catalogue was not completed before Steno left Florence in 1672 for a position as royal anatomist in Copenhagen. He had been summoned by King Christian V (1646–1699) (E 74 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 188–189). Steno’s position as superintendent (head curator) was given to the former secretary of the Accademia del Cimento, Lorenzo Magalotti (1637–1712), who described it as “una fastidiossima occupazione” (“a deadly boring occupation”) (Scherz, 1952, p. 23). COPENHAGEN REVISITED Steno arrived in Copenhagen on 3 July 1672 and received a salary for teaching anatomy, but without a title as professor, because professors at the university had to be of Lutheran belief. Only once during the next two years was he allowed to perform a proper public dissection (Fig. 18), but the lecture he presented on that occasion would become famous because of the preserved introduction Prooemium demonstrationum Anatomicarum in Theatro Hafniensi Anni 1673 (Preface to Anatomical demonstration in the Copenhagen Theater Year 1673), and the description by Holger Jacobaeus of Steno’s dissection of a female cadaver. Both

have been published in English by the Danish doctor of medicine Troels Kardel (1994a). Best known is Steno’s maxim: Pulchra sunt qvae videntur, pulchriora qvae sciuntur, longe pulcherrima qvae ignorantur. Beautiful is what we see, more beautiful is what we know, most beautiful is what we do not know.

During his stay in Copenhagen, Steno used most of his time for dissection of different animals in private homes. He had, as previously mentioned, promised Cardinal Leopoldo that he would visit the Kunstkammer and describe it to him. However, Steno admits after some time in a letter to the cardinal that he had not yet done it, and that it might take a while before he could do it, because of the sudden public (anatomical) demonstration he was asked to perform (E 87 in Hansen, ed., 1987, p. 204). Steno, as always, wanted to do his best, which in this case meant to present a proper description of the Kunstkammer, as the description might be of use for the construction of the new museum in Florence. We can only guess whether he did fulfill his task, but it would have been very unlike him not to have done so. Leaving Copenhagen in 1674, Steno returned to Florence via Holland. At home in Florence, he became a priest in 1675 and, in 1677 in Rome, was also ordained as titular Bishop of Titiopolis (Fig. 19). The previous collector of geological samples had become a collector of souls. Steno was responsible for the conversion of more than 45 persons to Catholicism. As bishop, Steno was Vicar Apostolic to northern Germany, Denmark, and Norway from 1678 to 1679 in Hannover. In 1680, he moved to Münster as Bishop Auxilliary, and, in 1683, he moved to Hamburg as Vicar Apostolic. In 1685, he paid a short visit to Copenhagen and died on 25 November 1686 on his way back to Florence after a one-year stay in Schwerin in northern Germany. Bishop Niels of Titiopolis was beatified by Pope John Paul II in Rome on 23 October 1988. CONCLUDING REMARKS With the perspectives of this paper in mind, I should like to conclude by quoting the following lines from Steno’s Prooemium (Stenonis, 1675 in Kardel, 1994a, p. 112–115): The visitor of a museum who wants to see there the curiosities hung and set about everywhere, indicated by the pointer or the rod of the custodian, does not feel offended if perhaps the pointer is rudely fashioned whereas an elaborately fashioned pointer will draw the attention of the spectators to itself. The anatomist is a pointer or a rod in the hand of God, pointing out curiosities of the body like the guide of an exquisite museum. (Translation from Kardel, 1994a)

Besides Steno’s important message, “the anatomist is a pointer or a rod in the hand of God,” this quotation also clearly reflects his long relations with many of the most famous collections

Niels Stensen—Steno, in the world of collections and museums

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Figure 19. Bishop Niels of Titiopolis. Painting from 1938 by Vilhelm Wils. Reproduced with permission by the Steno Diabetes Center, Copenhagen (photo by E. Thomsen).

and museums in Europe, as have been demonstrated in the present study. Steno was a marvelous analytical observer with a unique scientific approach for his time. It therefore seems obvious that the fact that he saw so many and so different objects in these encyclopedic institutions and obtained information from their caretakers and other sources must have been of significance, not only for his museological work, but also for his outstanding ability to contribute new discoveries in anatomy and geology.

private means, enabled me to participate in the 2006 GSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, USA, and present the talk upon which this paper is based. Dr. August Ziggelaar is thanked for his many helpful comments on early drafts of the manuscript, for the talk and for providing important literature, and Dr. Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen is thanked for help with difficult references, spelling corrections, and comments. Professors Valdemar Poulsen and Jens Morten Hansen are thanked for their helpful reviews of this paper. Anne Gundersen (TMU) is thanked for technical assistance with the figures. Jorunn Rødli and Mari Karlstad (TMU) are thanked for photographs of the mineral sample. A number of persons, collections, museums, libraries, and other institutions have kindly given their permission in connection with the illustrations in this paper. They are gratefully acknowledged in the figure captions.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

REFERENCES CITED

Dr. Gary Rosenberg is thanked for his enthusiastic support and assistance. The History of Geology Division of the Geological Society of America (GSA) and the International Division of GSA are thanked for travel grants. These grants, together with financial support from Tromsø University Museum (TMU) and

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Figure 18. Detail of a fresco from 1905 by Emmanuel Vigeland showing Steno as anatomist and geologist. Picture is reproduced with the permission of the Copenhagen City Hall (photo by E. Thomsen).

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Stenonis, N., 1667a, Elementorum Myologiae Specimen, Seu Musculi Descriptio Geometrica Cui Accedunt Canis Carchariæ Dissectum Caput, Et Dissectus Piscis Ex Canum Genere: Florentiae, Stellae, 123 p. Stenonis, N., 1667b, Canis Carchariae Dissectum Caput, in Stenonis 1667a: Florentiae, Stellae, p. 69–110. Stenonis, N., 1669, De Solido Intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento Dissertationis Prodromus: Florentiae, Stellae, 78 p. Stenonis, N., 1675, Prooemium demonstrationum Anatomicarum in Theatro Hafniensi Anni 1673: Acta Medica and Philosophica Hafniensia 1673, v. II, p. 359–366. Stenonis, N., 1910, Opera Philosophica (Maar, V., ed.): Copenhagen, Vilhelm Tryde, v. 1, 264 p.; v. 2, 367 p. Stenonis, N., 1952, Epistolae et epistolae ad eum datae (Scherz, G., ed.): Hafniae, Nyt Nordisk Forlag, and Friburgi, Herder, v. 1–2, 1027 p. Stensen, N., 1997, Foredrag om Hjernens Anatomi. Holdt i Paris i 1665 og trykt samme sted i 1669 (Kardel, T., ed.): København, Nytt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, 71 p. Thomasen, A.-L., 1975, Nicolaus Stenonius anatomicus geologicusque maximus: Dansk geologisk Forening, Årskrift for 1974, p. 1–4. Thomasen, A.-L., 1979, Der Wandel des Stensenbildes, in Bierbaum, M., and Faller, A., eds., Niels Stensen, Anatom, Geologe und Bischof (1638– 1686): Münster, Aschendorff Verlag, p. 152–166. Thomsen, E., 2005a, En Steno-epoke i dansk kunst - og ukendte værker med geologen Steno som motiv: GeologiskNytt, v. 2, p. 16–20. Thomsen, E., 2005b, Alverdens geologer mindes Steno: GeologiskNyt, v. 2, p. 20. Thomsen, E., 2006, Steno - i samlingers og museers verden: GeologiskNyt, v. 2, p. 16–24 and poster on cover page. Thomsen Hanken, E., 2006, Steno, the founder of geology, in the world of collections and museums [abs.], in From the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment: Emergence of Modern Geology and Evolutionary Thought from the 16th to 18th Century II: Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, abstract 35-5, v. 38, no. 7, p. 99. Torrens, H., 1985, Early Collecting in the Field of Geology, in Impey, O., and MacGregor, A., eds., The Origin of Museums: Oxford, Clarendon Press, p. 204–213. Turner, G. l’E., 1985, The Cabinet of Experimental Philosophy, in Impey, O., and MacGregor, A., eds., The Origin of Museums: Oxford, Clarendon Press, p. 214–222. Vai, G.B., 2003, Aldrovandi’s will: Introducing the term “geology” in 1603, in Vai, G.B., and Cavazza, W., eds., Four Centuries of the Word Geology: Ulisse Aldrovandi 1603 in Bologna: Bologna, Minerva Edizioni, 327 p. Vai, G.B., 2004, Unveiling Steno’s Inscription: Informations 32: Firenze, International Geological Congress, 2 p. Vai, G.B., and Cavazza, W., 2006, Ulisse Aldrovandi and the origin of geology and science, in Vai, G.B., and Caldwell, W.G.E., eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 43–63, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(04). von Humboldt, A., 1823, Essai géognostique sur le gisement des roches dans les deux hémisphères: C and Kosmos, v. II, p. 38 (also Kosmos 1847, p. 388). Worm, O., 1655, Museum Wormianum seu historia rerum rariorum, tam naturalium, quam artificialium, tam domesticarum, quam exoticarum, quae Hafniae Danorum in aedibus authoris servantur: Leiden, Elzevier, xii + 389 + 3 p. Yamada, T., 2006, Kircher and Steno on the “geocosm,” with a reassessment of the role of Gassendi’s works, in Vai, G.B., and Caldwell, W.G.E., eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 65–80, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(05). Ziggelaar, A., 1997, Chaos: Niels Stensen’s Chaos Manuscript Copenhagen 1659; Complete Edition with Introduction, Notes and Commentary: Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, Volume 44: Copenhagen, Munksgaard, 520 p. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

The Path to Steno’s synthesis on the animal origin of glossopetrae Kuang-Tai Hsu† Center for General Education/Institute of History, National Tsing Hua University, 101 Kuang-Fu Rd. sec. 2, Hsinchu, 30013, Taiwan

ABSTRACT As a medical student, Steno (1638–1686) entirely belonged to the seventeenthcentury cultural context in which the problem of glossopetrae, or fossilized sharks’ teeth, was given special attention by a number of scholars. In his Canis (1667), Steno entered the realm of geological studies and advanced, on the basis of his medical knowledge and chemical expertise, a hypothesis concerning the animal origin of glossopetrae. Here, I show that the Canis offers an excellent text in which to understand the changes in geological studies between the Aristotelian and Cartesian frameworks. Thus, based upon the legacy of the medical and chemical traditions, Steno’s synthesis of previous views on the animal origin of glossopetrae with Descartes’ particle theory becomes a very good example for showing the nature of the transition between Renaissance and early modern geology. Keywords: Nicolaus Steno, René Descartes, glossopetrae, history of geology, paleontology, Scientific Revolution. INTRODUCTION

ceived the imprimatur (Scherz, 1969, p. 19–20, 22). In the Canis, Steno digressed with a long argument to prove how glossopetrae could be fossils derived from sharks’ teeth rather than products spontaneously generated in a process intrinsic to Earth. As a number of scholars have noted, in light of the fact that Steno was able to report so insightfully on the problem of glossopetrae, in so short an interval of time, it is hardly plausible that he lacked prior knowledge on the question (Adams, 1938, p. 113ff; Albritton, 1986, ch. 2; Ellenberger, 1988, p. 187–192, 235–237, 241; Morello, 1979, p. 50). The aim of this paper is to examine the historical background regarding the main competing views on glossopetrae origins at the time Steno took up the problem, and to explore the ways Steno both utilized his predecessors’ work and distinguished his own thinking on this issue. It emerges from this inquiry that Steno’s achievement represented a synthesis drawn out of his reading and experience in the fields of medicine, chemistry, and natural philosophy. Both the scientific substance and the rhetorical form of Steno’s presentation of the case for the animal origins of glossopetrae were conditioned

In the Canis carchariae dissectum caput (The Head of a Shark Dissected, hereafter referred to as the Canis; Steno, 1667; Garboe, 1958; Scherz, 1969, p. 65–131), Steno made his first public arguments in favor of the animal origin of glossopetrae.1 The immediate stimulus for his inquiry into the origin of glossopetrae came at the end of October 1666 when some fishermen near Leghorn, Italy, caught an enormous shark. Medici Grand Duke Ferdinand II heard of this great catch and ordered that the shark’s head be cut off and brought to one of his anatomists, Nicolaus Steno, to dissect it. Perhaps by the end of that year Steno completed his report, the Canis. On 3 March 1667, Steno’s report re1 Since there was disagreement about what glossopetrae were in the Renaissance and early modern period, the terms glossopetra or glossopetrae will be used without giving any translation, unless some writers used it in a specific way.

†

E-mail: [email protected].

Kuang-Tai Hsu, 2009, The Path to Steno’s synthesis on the animal origin of glossopetrae, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 93–106, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(06). For permission to copy, contact editing@ geosociety.org. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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by his awareness of existing literature on these fossils’ origins, and his medico-chemical background. Philosophically, Steno’s conception of glossopetrae origins also reflected his affinity with Cartesian particle theory (Fig. 1). TWO COMPETING RENAISSANCE VIEWS ON THE ORIGIN OF GLOSSOPETRAE AND THEIR MEDICINAL USES By the time that Steno tried to clarify the nature of glossopetrae, Renaissance naturalists had already brought some degree of order to this confusing problem. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, a number of different claims had been made about the character and special qualities of “tonguestones.” These fossils were variously taken as resembling the tongues of human beings, snakes, or woodpeckers, although the resemblance to sharks’ teeth did not go unnoticed. There were many virtues or powers ascribed to tonguestones in different times and places, among which were uses in divination and as antidotes for poison. Attribution of magical qualities to glossopetrae did not disappear altogether, even though skeptical-minded physiciannaturalists of the sixteenth century, such as Georgius Agricola (1494–1555) (Bandy and Bandy, 1955) and Guillaume Rondelet (1507–1566) (1554–1555), tried to take a more thoroughly descriptive approach to these fossils. Authors increasingly noted the diversity in character of glossopetrae—in color, magnitude, and figure—and their broad geographical distribution. Two competing interpretations of glossopetrae emerged. According to one theory, glossopetrae result from mineral growth processes beneath Earth’s surface: these fossils were formed inside Earth by its intrinsic generative powers. A prevalent Neoplatonic conviction holding that vital principles animate all of nature found support in evident signs that processes of lapidification and petrification do occur in the mineral kingdom. Advocates of this conception included Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) (1550), Michele Mercati (1541–1593) (1717), Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) (1606), and Anselmus de Boodt (1550–1632) (1609). The second theory, which Steno would come to support, argued for the derivation of fossils like glossopetrae from the organic objects they resemble. It was Steno’s special distinction to present with unprecedented clarity an account of the natural processes by which this could be understood. Long before Steno, however, prominent authors emphasized the similarity between glossopetrae and the teeth of different sorts of shark, including Lamia and Carcharia. These included Rondelet, Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1565) (1564), and Konrad Gesner (1516–1565) (1551–1587; 1565). Throughout the seventeenth century, physician-naturalist authors, e.g., Fabio Colonna (1567–1640) (1616), Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680) (1654–1661; O’Malley, 1961), Mercati, and Johann Daniel Geier (1687), among others, reported on a wide variety of supposed medicinal uses of glossopetrae, even as the fossil’s efficacy in certain applications was questioned. Steno, who had been Bartholin’s student, would have been well aware of the in-

tellectual and practical interest physicians had in glossopetrae, including the question of their origins, when the shark’s head arrived for his examination in 1666. STENO’S SOURCES CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF GLOSSOPETRAE When Steno addressed the problem of the origin of glossopetrae in Canis, he apparently attempted to incorporate as many extant opinions or arguments as possible into his account. This was consistent with the habits of humanistic scholars. As a mem-

Figure 1. The head and teeth of the Lamia. See Steno (1667). Reproduced by kind permission of the History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma.

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ber of the Accademia del Cimento, Steno had access to information from two other members: Francesco Redi (1626–1698) and Carlo Dati (1619–1676). Redi, a famous anatomist, had lent Steno an unpublished manuscript, Scene Toscane (Scenes of Tuscany) written by Antonio Nardi, who was a follower of Galileo. In Scene one, Nardi reflected the popular Renaissance view that stones resembling the parts of living animals were generated and grew inside Earth (Nardi, undated, p. 141–144, esp. on p. 141). Steno probably mentioned Nardi among many well-known men having the same opinion only because Redi had introduced him to Nardi’s Scene Toscane (Scherz, 1969, p. 115). For the same reason, Steno mentioned Mercati, for Dati had offered him Mercati’s manuscript of Metallotheca (which was published posthumously in 1717) (Scherz, 1969, p. 72–73, 114–115), a focused work dealing with minerals and fossils. Mercati enjoyed a privileged status as a naturalist because Pope Pius V had selected him to supervise the first Vatican museum. Due to this appointment, Mercati had charge over a very good collection of minerals and fossils, and, based on study of this fine collection, he produced the Metallotheca. Steno’s long citation and his use of two pictures from Mercati’s Metallotheca suggest that it was a valuable source for Steno concerning the origin of glossopetrae (Scherz, 1969, p. 72–75, 119, 121). The significance of Mercati’s manuscript for Steno lies in the fact that it contained an argument against the animalorigin assumption of glossopetrae, an assumption that he criticized as an error (Mercati, 1717, p. 333–334). Instead, Mercati argued that the “true” view of their origin is that they grew in the place where they were found, for their color is not different from that of the surrounding stones (Mercati, 1717, p. 331). Beyond the information offered by his colleagues in the Accademia del Cimento, Steno may have done some library studies, just as he did in the summer of 1666 when he wrote Elementorum Myologiae Specimen (Steno, 1667).2 He knew there were many famous men holding the view of intrinsic mineral generation of fossils (Scherz, 1969, p. 115). On the other hand, there were some observations relevant to the opposite view. Immediately after the long quotation from Mercati’s text, he wrote,

origin” (Scherz, 1969, p. 95). Who could those “various writers” be, who made “observations relevant to the present study”? Were their works “readily available” to Steno? Who could those authors have been, who offered evidence that the fossils in question were of animal origin? Although Steno did not specify them, this group may have consisted of at least three writers: Rondelet, Falloppio, and Colonna. With his own anatomical observations, Rondelet initiated the opinion of the animal origin of glossopetrae. Steno became aware of Rondelet’s work no later than his reading of Mercati’s manuscript, which contains part of Rondelet’s description of Lamia teeth. Falloppio and Colonna were highly important to Steno, since they made some arguments that could have helped Steno unravel the animal origin of glossopetrae. Falloppio should be counted as one of Steno’s authorities on this topic because Falloppio was the only authority cited by Steno when he wrote Dissertio physica de thermis (1660) (Scherz, 1969, p. 45–63; Hsu, 1993, sec. 3). In the same work, Falloppio also presented his view of the animal origin of glossopetrae. I will analyze this in the next section. Steno may have known something about Colonna’s arguments, first through Bartholin, and then through his own reading of Colonna’s De glossopetris dissertatio. I will discuss his arguments in Fabio Colonna’s defense of the animal origin of glossopetrae. Bartholin was one of the earliest sources for Steno’s study of the origin of glossopetrae. In the Canis, Steno mentioned that Bartholin’s observations on Maltese glossopetrae were made during Bartholin’s journey to Malta (Scherz, 1969, p. 95). Bartholin was interested in glossopetrae for medicinal reasons. In his Medical Travel, glossopetrae were among the things that he suggested future physicians collect for medicinal uses (O’Malley, 1961, p. 72).3 In 1644, he traveled to Malta to study the famous glossopetrae found there. Although he never completed this study, he later published his observations under the title “Glossopetrarum Melitensium usus medicus” (Medical Use of Maltese Glossopetrae) in the Historicarum Anatomicarum (Bartholin 1654–1661, v. 3, p. 193–201), which is listed in the bibliography of Steno’s undergraduate notebook (Schepelern, 1987, p. 111).

And these then are the things Mercati relates about the Lamia. I might have added to these various other observations relevant to the present study, collected from various writers, but since these are readily available to those who own or can visit libraries, I proceed to those observations which I believe are not common knowledge, with particular reference to the skin, the eyes, the brain and the teeth. (Scherz, 1969, p. 75)

XII. De Glossopetris Melitensibus Dissertatio. This dissertation was born to me when formerly I visited the island of Melita, when I collected fossil sharks’ teeth of all shapes and sizes which the inhabitants of that place brought to me, and I myself searched here and there for every sort for the completion of the study. However, distracted by other studies, I was unable to complete what I had begun, but I indicated the substance of this dissertation in the Historiae Anatomicae. (O’Malley, 1961, p. 28)

There were other sources that he used to establish the possibility of the animal origin of glossopetrae. Elsewhere, Steno clearly stated that “I produce, from what has been observed in the past, the proofs of those who reckon those bodies to be of animal 2 “He was also noted as a regular visitor to Roman libraries.... The ensuing stay in Florence must be regarded as only part of a journey. The three months there, July, August and September of 1666, were devoted to language and library studies; and particularly to hard work on this Elementorum Myologiae Specimen, the geometric description of muscles” (Scherz, 1969, p. 19).

With its focus on the medicinal uses of glossopetrae, Bartholin’s study contained information useful to Steno. At the very beginning, he stated that there were four traditions regarding the 3 Some of O’Malley’s translations of the term “glossopetrae” seem questionable, for Bartholin did not claim that glossopetrae were sharks’ teeth. Instead, he held a view close to belief in their growth within the earth (Bartholin, 1654– 1661, v. 3, p. 194–195).

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origin of glossopetrae (Bartholin, 1654–1661, v. 3, p. 194). Beside the possibilities that they were serpents’ tongues changed into hard stone, or darts of thunderbolts, he thought that generative powers inherent in mineral bodies, and derivation from animal origin, merited consideration as truly plausible views about the origin of glossopetrae (Bartholin, 1654–1661, v. 3, p. 194). Bartholin preferred the view that glossopetrae grow inside Earth (Bartholin, 1654–1661, v. 3, p. 194–195),4 but he never provided an argument against the animal origin of glossopetrae. In his introduction to the view asserting the animal origin of glossopetrae, Bartholin mentioned that Andrea Cesalpino, Pierre Potier (1581?–1640?), and Cleandro Arnobio ( fl. 1602) believed that glossopetrae were the remains of marine animals. More importantly, Bartholin especially emphasized that Colonna had declared the animal origin of glossopetrae with various arguments in the Purpura (Bartholin, 1654–1661, v. 3, p. 194). This passage probably caught Steno’s attention. In De metallicis, Cesalpino expressed his belief that glossopetrae were the remains of parts of aquatic animals. He made a distinction between the formation of glossopetrae and that of crystals. He also pointed out the substantive difference between preserved animal parts and their earthy medium. He found that these fossils became less soft (or rotten) than their surrounding material (Cesalpino, 1596, p. 132–133). Even after being burned, these fossils retained the same figure (Cesalpino, 1596, p. 133–134). Potier had been in the medical faculty of Paris before he was expelled in 1609 for using antimony. He subsequently moved to Italy. In 1622, he published a work, Pharmacopoea spagirica nova et inedita, which Bartholin interpreted as maintaining that glossopetrae were the remains of the parts of animals. Arnobio’s work, Il Tesoro delle gioie (The Treasure of Precious Stones), gave special attention to glossopetrae. The title of the 36th chapter—Del dente di Lamia, cioè glossopetrae (The teeth of the Lamia, that is, glossopetrae)—reveals that he believed that glossopetrae were derived from the teeth of Lamia. His treatment amounts mainly to an account of contemporary knowledge of the variety of glossopetrae. He reported that there were six species of glossopetrae and that they differed in color, magnitude, and form (Arnobio, 1602, p. 176). He paid attention to the healing power of glossopetrae. By burning glossopetrae found in different areas, Arnobio concluded that they still had similar (healing) powers or virtues (Arnobio, 1602, p. 176). For example, he claimed that glossopetrae, regardless of their origin, were useful for healing malicious fever (Arnobio, 1602, p. 179). Although Arnobio did not explicitly distinguish glossopetrae from their surrounding material, he knew these were made of different substances. On the one hand, the surrounding soil was consumed in cultivation (Arnobio, 1602, p. 178); on the other hand, glossopetrae became 4 It seems to me that this choice on the part of Bartholin has been overlooked. For example, Alex Pollock says that Bartholin “does not want to say anything final about the glossopetrae” among the four traditions of the origin of glossopetrae. Claude Albritton expressed a similar opinion. “His professor, Bartholin, had visited Malta but could make no final decision as to the origin of these curiosities” (Scherz, 1969, p. 128, no. 72, and p. 222, no. 23; Albritton, 1986, p. 24).

testaceous by combustion. While different kinds of glossopetrae became testaceous by artificial or natural heating, their variable appearance (such as having a fragmentary surface or a bark-like covering) indicated that some glossopetrae would be more effective than others in healing (Arnobio, 1602, p. 179). Bartholin was aware of Arnobio’s distinction among glossopetrae based upon the nature of their calcination (Bartholin, 1654–1661, v. 3, p. 200). Among various arguments made by Colonna to demonstrate the animal origin of glossopetrae, Bartholin mentioned one in which Colonna appealed to chemical considerations to distinguish glossopetrae from their surrounding tufaceous material.5 Here, Colonna identified a method of distinguishing extraneous fossils from intrinsically generated minerals using the agent of heat in transforming materials. So far we have seen that Steno’s concern with the origin of glossopetrae emerged from a vigorous Renaissance interest in this topic that had been spurred by the medicinal uses of glossopetrae. Steno’s contemporaries and immediate predecessors largely held one of two competing views: intrinsic mineral generation and the animal origin of glossopetrae. Judging from textual evidence, Steno may have read some of the sources listed in Table 1. FALLOPPIO’S VIEW ON THE ANIMAL ORIGIN OF GLOSSOPETRAE The historical situation just prior to Falloppio (1564) included the emergence of two views of the origin of glossopetrae, championed by Cardano and Rondelet, respectively. While these two views coexisted with each other with only minor mutual criticism, Falloppio began to solidify the animal-origin view of glossopetrae. He developed his argument within a scholastic framework that began with a review of and commentary on extant views on generation of stones or intrinsic mineral generation. Then, within the same framework, he formulated his own view on the animal origin of glossopetrae. Concerning their origin, he focused on three points: the relation between fossils and their surrounding material, their different origins in substance, and the way by which parts of living things become lapidified. Falloppio believed that fossil teeth that were similar to sharks’ teeth had animal origins. He expressed his view on the animal origin of glossopetrae in a discussion of the generation of figured stones. The distinguishing feature of these stones is their derivation from living things, such as wood, snail-shells, worms, or sharks’ teeth (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 109r). In Falloppio’s view, although there are different kinds of stones formed in various places and in different ways, the cause is the same in every case (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 110r). In the eighth chapter of part two of De medicates aquis, “De efficienti lapidum causa” (“Concerning the efficient cause of stone”), Falloppio 5 “... whence it is certain that glossopetrae are moulded by nature into that form from tufaceous material, and if they are tested by fire, the tufa material changes into ashes; glossopetrae, on the other hand, being bones, change into coal, which Fabio Colonna perceives” (Bartholin, 1654–1661, v. 3, p. 200).

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TABLE 1. SOME OF STENO’S POSSIBLE SOURCES CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF GLOSSOPETRAE Intrinsic mineral generation Animal origin Cardano, De svbtititate (1550) Rondelet, Libri de piscibus marinis (1554–1555) Bartholin, “Glossopetrarum Melitensium usus medicus,” in Falloppio, De medicatis aquis (1564) Historiarum anatomicarum. (Started his study in 1644, published in 1661.) Nardi, Scene Toscane (unpublished manuscript) Cesalpino, De metallicis (1596) Mercati, Metallotheca (manuscript, published in 1717) Arnobio, Il tesoro delle gioie (1602) Colonna, De glossopetris dissertatio (1616) Potier, Pharmacopoea spagirica (1622) Note: This is not an exhaustive table. The dates given are those of the first edition, but we should not assume that Steno read these editions.

searched for the universal efficient cause of generation of stones. Within a scholastic framework, he reviewed previous views on the generation of stones. Falloppio found Aristotle did not systematically treat the place from which stones could be generated, and he thought this followed from Aristotle’s inappropriate handling of fossils as a meteorological subject (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 86v). Agricola’s lapidifying juice was not the efficient cause but rather the material cause of his second kind of stone (figured stones) (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 97r). Falloppio also took issue with the popular Renaissance view of intrinsic mineral generation of stones in order to sustain his belief in the organic origin of figured stones. He criticized several versions of intrinsic mineral generation of stones, including Cardano’s views of a vegetative soul (Falloppio, 1564, fols. 103r–104v) and Albertus Magnus’s view of “mineralizing power” (Wyckoff, 1967, p. 18, 20). In his inquiry into the immediate efficient cause of the generation of stones, and through his review of views posed by chemists, and the case of the generation of precious stones or crystals, Falloppio concluded that there are two causes of generation of stones: heat and cold (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 108v). He was ready to discuss the mode by which a particular kind of “figured stone” is formed. The first is a wet mode. According to this mode, worms, snail-shells, wood, and sharks’ teeth had been once-living things or parts of them, before they were destroyed by the lapidifying juices flowing over them. When the lapidifying juice cooled, they were lapidified (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 109r). However, these stones are also found in some dry places such as mountains and rocks (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 109r). He believed that these particular stones found in mountains were generated there, rather than being made by the sea or the Deluge, because the places were far from the sea (Falloppio, 1564, fols. 109r–v). After rejecting the possibility of a wet or hydrological explanation, Falloppio created a dry mode to explain the formation of these specific stones “at the same time with the [surrounding] petrified stone” in mountains and in rocks far from the sea, rather than account for how these figured stones were moved to the mountains from the sea (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 109v). Based on his belief that those figured stones were once-living before being lapidified in the surrounding material, Falloppio did not explain how the parts of a marine animal were buried

in lapidifying stones. Instead, he simply pointed out that while these figured stones were surrounded by tufas or petrified stones, a chemical operation, fermentation, came into existence. It first generated a kind of vapor and spirit vital to the generation of snail-shells (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 109v).6 Furthermore, he gave an example of the process: “Sometimes I saw certain large water stones had been cut into powder, and on the spot little frogs arose. From where did these come? Certainly from the excited spirit made by fermentation when those water stones were reduced to powder” (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 109v).7 In a similar way, the shells of oysters are generated in mountains (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 110r). If these marine animals were to be supplied with food, they would not be lapidified, even in the rock (Falloppio, 1564, fols. 109v–110r). For example, oysters found in the rocks were not lapidified, for they were near the sea, from which they were nourished (Falloppio, 1564, fol. 109v). Finally, Falloppio mentioned that other things are found in the (figured) stones that are congealed by coldness, such as worms, snail-shells, or other similar things. Perhaps in the mountains, the insufficient food supply causes them to die and become lapidified. As an advocate of the organic origin of stony teeth that resemble sharks’ teeth, Falloppio wrote of burning as a method for determining the characteristics of certain stones. For example, he observed that by combustion tufa becomes powder and crystal is reduced to ash (Falloppio, 1564, fols. 97r, 100r, 108r). However, he did not record efforts to test either glossopetrae or sharks’ teeth by combustion, nor did he systematically test the difference between figured stones and their embedding material. FABIO COLONNA’S DEFENSE OF THE ANIMAL ORIGIN OF GLOSSOPETRAE Colonna came to the study of the origin of glossopetrae in a different historical situation. In Morello’s opinion, “there is no first-hand evidence which might reveal” why he took up this 6 In 1617, John Woodall gave a definition of fermentation as follows: “Fermentation is the exhalation of a massie substance, by the admission of Fermentum, which doth penetrate it wholly (his vertue distributed by a spirit) and inuerteth it into its own nature” (Woodall, 1617, p. 343). 7 This view sounds like a kind of intrinsic mineral generation of living things in the rocks or tufas, although Falloppio used an external cause to explain it.

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problem. She suggests that Colonna’s friendship with Ferrante Imperato and his son Francesco and his frequent visits to the Imperatos’ museum were factors that led him to the study of fossils (Morello, 1981, p. 69). However, since Ferrante Imperato did not seem to have a clear conviction on the origin of glossopetrae, and his son held the view of intrinsic mineral generation,8 these factors seem to be an inadequate explanation. Nevertheless, for whatever reasons, Colonna started to build his arguments for the animal origin of glossopetrae, and he identified the process of combustion as a means to make a clear distinction between the nature of glossopetrae and that of their surrounding material. No later than the middle of the sixteenth century, combustion had been used as a method to differentiate between fossils resembling the parts of living things and their surrounding material. Agricola and Falloppio knew tufas turned to ash by burning (Bandy and Bandy, 1955, p. 12; Falloppio, 1564, fols. 97r, 100r, 108r). Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–1566) found that the internal part of fossils exhibited different characteristics from their surrounding material when burned (Mattioli, 1554, p. 568). In De metallicis (1596), Cesalpino also recognized the difference in substance between glossopetrae and their surrounding material. He mentioned that they had different results upon combustion (Cesalpino, 1596, p. 133–134). In Il treoso delle gioie, Arnobio expressed a similar view (Arnobio, 1602, p. 178). Colonna’s use of combustion as a chemical method to distinguish figured stones (including glossopetrae) from their surrounding material in his 1616 De glossopetris dissertatio was thus the product of a practice over half a century old. However, the question still remains: Why and how did Colonna come to be interested in glossopetrae, and how did he come to know that by combustion one could distinguish the nature of glossopetrae from their surrounding material? Perhaps his use of combustion in his work had something to do with his bad health, as we shall see shortly. Colonna was born in Naples in 1567 and was educated by his father, Gerolamo Colonna. His education covered many areas, such as philosophy, mathematics, painting, music, and Greek. In 1589, he received a degree in civil and canon law from the University of Naples. His weak health, including susceptibility to epilepsy, directed him away from a potential career in law and drove him to investigate pharmacology. With this new orientation, it is natural to suppose that he paid special attention to glossopetra because one of its medicinal functions was to cure epilepsy. Although there is no firsthand evidence to show that Colonna was interested in glossopetrae for this reason, his citation of Rondelet’s introduction to the medicinal uses of the serpent teeth at the end of his dissertation suggests that he was concerned with the medicinal 8 Ferrante Imperato (1599). In the 1695 Latin edition, there is an index with no entry for “glossopetra.” Francesco Imperato stated that many copies with similar forms are produced. “Compared stones with similar form I will reach some names, first, Glossopetra, as tongue stone, which almost maintains white color, and it reproduces many copies, as the sharp points of winged bolts or arrows, the teeth of Lamia, and of bird’s tongues, and of other forms...” (Francesco Imperato, 1610, p. 63).

functions of glossopetrae (De Ferrari, 1982, p. 286; Faraglia, 1885, p. 672–677; Morello, 1981, p. 65). The medicinal uses of glossopetrae were discussed within texts dealing with their origin. Works that exemplify this were written by authors such as Rondelet, Mercati, Aldrovandi, and de Boodt. Given this fact, it was not difficult to know these authors’ views of the origin of glossopetrae through an analysis of their medicinal uses. There are two other significant implications in Rondelet’s work about the animal origin of glossopetrae. First, if glossopetrae came from Lamia teeth through the lapidification of bony material, they were actually products of bones rather than of stones. Second, in order to use glossopetrae as a gargle for cleaning human teeth, one might have to boil them in water and reduce them to powders in the solution. The internal uses of glossopetrae also suggest that glossopetrae had been reduced to powders. Thus, the pharmacists probably carried out the combustion of glossopetrae no later than the middle of the sixteenth century, when glossopetrae were used in medicaments. At least Arnobio did this no later than 1602. By burning them, he was attempting to compare the healing powers of glossopetrae dug up from different regions (Arnobio 1602, p. 178–179). This may explain why and how Colonna came to distinguish between the nature of glossopetrae and that of their surrounding material. If we judge that Colonna was aware of the literature cited here from the mid-sixteenth century onward, the mystery of his interest in glossopetrae vanishes. His ability to master scientific literature was recognized by the members of a famous learned society, the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1603 by Duke Federigo Cesi (1585–1630). Colonna was elected as a fellow member in 1612 on the basis of his reputation as a “naturalist of the first rank” (Drake, 1966, p. 1198; Faraglia, 1885, p. 693; Morello, 1981, p. 65). In the period between the initial publication of Falloppio’s De medicatis aquis in 1564 and the appearance of Colonna’s De glossopetris dissertatio in 1616, although a number of writers managed to accept and to advocate the animal origin of glossopetrae, in 1569, Jan Goropius Becanus (1518–1572) published the Origines Antwerpianae, in which he asserted the spontaneous generation of glossopetrae by categorically denouncing the possibility of their animal origin. In 1606, Aldrovandi reproduced Goropius’ text concerning spontaneous generation of glossopetrae in De reliquis animalibus (Goropius, 1569, p. 233–243; Aldrovandi, 1606, p. 239–243). Since Colonna really wanted to defend the animal origin of glossopetrae in a compelling way, in De glossopetris dissertatio, he targeted Goropius’ view (Ellenberger, 1988, p. 188–189), namely that glossopetrae were spontaneously born by the formative power of nature in the places where they were found (Colonna, 1616, p. 31). Colonna challenged three elements of Goropius’ view. One was concerned with the nature of glossopetrae. According to Goropius, they were generated inside Earth by the formative force of nature, “just as other infinite sorts of stones, having nothing to do with living things” (Goropius, 1569, p. 240). The second stated that this formative force was limited by

The Path to Steno’s synthesis on the animal origin of glossopetrae the matter in its place (Goropius, 1569, p. 242). In addition to these two points, Colonna opposed another of Goropius’ ideas: that bones passed into stones through the nature of juices (Goropius, 1569, p. 242). In order to refute Goropius’ view, Colonna concentrated on Maltese glossopetrae and built his arguments around three key ideas: the nature of glossopetrae, the relation between glossopetrae and their surrounding material, and the way they are formed in the surrounding material. First, Colonna attempted to clarify his idea of the nature of glossopetrae. He claimed that Maltese glossopetrae can be identified as bones rather than congealed stones according to three of their characteristics: “By the appearance, the effigy, and the whole substance alone, at least, we say that [Maltese glossopetrae] are not congealed stone of this kind” (Colonna, 1616, p. 31). Second, in his comparative examination of the Maltese glossopetrae and their surrounding material, Colonna found that the two substances reacted to combustion in two ways. This constituted a “chemical consideration” in identifying the characteristics of fossils. The figured stones first became charcoal and then, after further burning, were reduced to ash. The surrounding stones changed directly into calxes or ashes without passing through charcoal (Colonna, 1616, p. 31). In other words, fire was a decisive means for distinguishing things of organic nature from inorganic or rocky material. For Colonna, this chemical procedure yielded a sharp differentiation between the nature of Maltese glossopetrae and their surrounding material. The nature of the former was bone; that of the latter was stone. Here, Colonna regarded teeth as having the nature of bone. He most probably had tested sharks’ teeth by burning them and compared them with the results of the combustion of Maltese glossopetrae. Otherwise, he could not declare that fossil teeth “are of the nature of bones, not stones.” That is, he would have no empirical basis for making this declaration. This is also suggested by his comparison of the effigies of Lamia teeth with Maltese glossopetrae. In Colonna’s view, the effigies of Lamia teeth meant their whole shapes, including the internal fibrous and porous structure, external appearance, and the root.9 According to Colonna, a comparison of the effigies of Lamia teeth with Maltese glossopetrae would show that the latter were made of bone (Colonna, 1616, p. 31). In the comparison of the whole shapes of glossopetrae with the shape of sharks’ teeth, one needs to keep in mind the similarities between them in terms of three characteristics: the outer appearance, the internal structure, and the roots. The similarity between the outer appearance of glossopetrae and that of sharks’ teeth is recognized relatively easily. The roots and the internal structure of glossopetrae are more difficult to compare with the corresponding parts of sharks’ teeth because minerals usually adhere to the roots and fill the fibrous and porous internal structure of glossopetrae. However, if glossopetrae are subjected to combustion, then their whole shapes, including their roots and internal 9

According to Morello, “the effigies” of Lamia teeth mean their “fibrous internal structure, the smooth outer covering and the root” (Morello, 1981, p. 68).

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structures, may be recognized without too much trouble. In this process, mineral or earthy material that adheres to glossopetrae will be reduced to ash or powder and separated from the effigies of glossopetrae. Thus, when Colonna compared the bony nature of the effigies of Lamia teeth and Maltese glossopetrae, he must first have subjected them both to combustion. Since he found that both Lamia teeth and Maltese glossopetrae were converted to charcoal and then acquired very similar effigies, Colonna could also conclude that they both have “the nature of bone.” By this means, Colonna stressed that the three characteristics of the effigy of Maltese glossopetrae established their bony nature. Once he made clear that Maltese glossopetrae were composed of bone rather than stony matter, Colonna proceeded to refute another of Goropius’ ideas, namely that bones are born inside Earth. Colonna wanted to show that bones are bones, always derived from living bodies, whether or not they are found in the living state. First, he made a distinction between the formation or growth of glossopetrae and that of congealed stones. Although crystals or gems have smooth surfaces, as do Maltese glossopetrae, they are naturally shaped following the nature of juice (ex nature succi). The way they are generated and grown never produces an angular shape like that of the Maltese glossopetrae. On the other hand, teeth, horns, and claws of living animals grow very slowly by nourishment (ex auctiuo) (Colonna, 1616, p. 32). Even in the subterranean region, living things are dead, and bones found in the stones will not change, though they slowly lose their growing nature. Therefore, bones are bones, and even when they are in dead bodies in the subterranean area, they remain unchanged. In response to Goropius’ opinion that bones pass into stones inside Earth, Colonna asked how bones could be changed into another nature (i.e., stony nature) (Colonna, 1616, p. 34). According to the natural tendency (aptitudo) of the teeth, in the rocks or dry tufas, he recognized a shortage of their nourishment supply, so that they could not have originated there (Colonna, 1616, p. 34).10 But if one still supposes their spontaneous generation, one has to explain either how these teeth had been generated spontaneously as they were found at the beginning, or how their sizes in tufas gradually approached those in living animals (Colonna, 1616, p. 34). Colonna hypothetically enumerated a variety of relational conditions between the fossils’ teeth and their surrounding tufas in order to show that in all of these conditions, the spontaneous generation of teeth in the earth is negated either by experience or by observation. He started by dividing the first part of the question into two conditions: if the teeth had been generated at the beginning in tufas, did this happen before or after tufas were congealed (Colonna, 1616, p. 34)? In what follows, Colonna expressed his shrewd understanding of site or position as a decisive issue in explaining fossil teeth. Instead of answering directly, he asked, 10 Morello thought it is “the aptitudo of the soil.” Since she looked for the type of petrification, in Colonna’s texts she found “the type of petrification depends on the aptitudo of the soil” (Morello, 1981, p. 69).

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“If a tooth was generated in the tufa before it congealed, it is asked: was the position of that tooth in the tufa in the shape and magnitude? Or did a tooth prepare its own position?” (Colonna, 1616, p. 34). Colonna tried to show the impossibility of the suggestion that the tufa had been congealed without there having been a previously existent cavity by emphasizing the physical contact between the tooth and tufa (Colonna, 1616, p. 34–35). If one supposes that a tooth gradually generates spontaneously in rocks, one needs to argue that it grew in a way totally different from our experience, because the rock has not kept the tooth from growing. Thus, one might suppose that the living force had animated the congealed tufa to function as a womb for an embryo, in which case the coagulation of humors formed the effigy of the tooth (Colonna, 1616, p. 35). Colonna doubted that the tooth was really generated in this way. First, he argued that if the animating force worked in the rock, how could it produce incomplete or fragmentary glossopetrae, which we find in rocks? Moreover, a comparison of the bases of glossopetrae with the roots of sharks’ teeth showed that both kinds were irregular and fractured in random fashion. Hence, he believed that a formative nature could not be responsible for the formation of glossopetrae (Colonna, 1616, p. 35). If the formative force failed to produce complete teeth, Colonna thought it hard to believe that the humors could produce the teeth in tufas like the serrated, bright, and growing teeth of Lamia. He also maintained that intrinsic mineral generation is false, because nature does not make anything that lacks a purpose (Colonna, 1616, p. 32). Moreover, there are different kinds of humors, and glossopetrae are various in form, size, quality, and natural tendency. How could they be created without purposes (Colonna, 1616, p. 35)? The teeth must have been generated in an animal’s mouth for intended use, rather than by an intrinsic power within the earth, for no apparent purpose. In contrast to the unconvincing view that the formative force produces glossopetrae inside Earth, Colonna compared the dentition of a shark with glossopetrae removed from tufas. As Morello says, Colonna “noted the analogy between the range of the forms and inclinations of sharks’ teeth (which vary according to the position in the mouth) and the observed variety of glossopetrae” (Colonna, 1616, p. 35–36; Morello, 1981, p. 69). As to the way glossopetrae were formed inside Earth, Colonna had a different interpretation than Falloppio’s. If glossopetrae were the remains of sharks’ teeth and not generated inside Earth, how can they appear in rock, in dry sandy land, or in high mountains? The places glossopetrae were found were not the original places where they had been formed. In his view, they must have been buried accidentally in the sea in the accumulation of deposits from above, in which they did not have any chance to live. There is no doubt that that place was changed, and that many things which were buried can be found under them. Nor in the least could they grow in the accumulation of the deposition from above made in past time. (Colonna, 1616, p. 36–37)

He concluded that they were living things that moved in various places before they “were crushed down by the pressure of winds, buried and wrapped by mud [in the seabed] with other marine things, as well as heaped up by terrestrial things, and finally after the water withdrew, they were changed to a stony nature with the same mud, according to the character of the place, mud, and the type of juice” (Colonna, 1616, p. 37). With this hydrological account, Colonna explained the process through which the parts of living aquatic animals became fossils in the earth, including the formation of glossopetrae. In this discussion, we have evaluated Colonna’s response to Goropius’ arguments against the animal origin of glossopetrae. Colonna presented an alternative explanation of the formation of glossopetrae. He theorized that aquatic animals were first buried in the seabed, and after the water withdrew, the surrounding material of glossopetrae became petrified. STENO’S SYNTHESIS ON THE ANIMAL ORIGIN OF GLOSSOPETRAE IN THE CANIS Half a century after the publication of Colonna’s De glossopetris dissertatio, while writing the Canis, a report on the dissection of a shark’s head, Steno continued the argument for the possibility of the animal origin of glossopetrae, a view criticized by Mercati as an error. In doing so, Steno relied heavily on a number of observations and propositions made by his predecessors. As he said, ... so I produce, from what has been observed in the past, the proofs of those who reckon those bodies to be of animal origin.... But lest the reader be led to expect many new ideas and because of this expectation complain that he has been deceived, I wish to warn him beforehand that some of the propositions have been made already by others; that many are owed to the observation of my teachers; there will be very few to which I have not been an eyewitness. (Scherz, 1969, p. 95)

Thus Steno informed his readers that his work should be located within a tradition with which, to some extent, they might be familiar. This tradition included a host of observations, propositions, and arguments. Although he drew upon this tradition, Steno took a quite different approach from those of his two major predecessors, Falloppio and Colonna. Unlike either Falloppio, who refuted Cardano’s account of the intrinsic mineral generation of glossopetrae, or Colonna, who rejected Goropius’ mineral-generative view of glossopetrae, Steno was very cautious about claiming to be certain in his opinions. He prudently asserted, “while I show that my opinion has the semblance of truth, I do not maintain that holders of contrary views are wrong” (Scherz, 1969, p. 113). Steno’s modest, careful, and prudent way of supporting the animal origin of glossopetrae has been recognized by Scherz and Albritton (Scherz, 1969, p. 28; Albritton, 1986, p. 27–29). From another perspective, one may find Steno’s modesty and prudence associated with legal affairs.

The Path to Steno’s synthesis on the animal origin of glossopetrae Thus just as in legal affairs, one takes the part of the plaintiff and the other submits himself to the decision of the judge, so I produce, from what has been observed in the past, the proofs of those who reckon those bodies to be of animal origin, setting down perhaps at another time the reasons for contrary opinions, and looking always for a true judgement from more learned men. (Scherz, 1969, p. 95)

Rudwick is aware of the judicial style of Steno’s argumentation and attempts to connect it with the method used by Steno,11 but he provides no clear account of why Steno chose the judicial style to proceed in his argument. The judicial style of Steno’s argumentation may partially explain the caution that characterizes his Canis: since Steno played the role of a plaintiff rather than a judge, he needed to construct his arguments carefully to persuade the “judge.” This may also solve a question raised by Albritton, namely, why Steno presented his case for the animal origin of glossopetrae “with less confidence than the logic of his arguments might seem to justify” (Albritton, 1986, p. 28). However, this kind of answer raises more basic questions: Why did Steno choose to limit himself to the role of a plaintiff in attempting to present evidence in his arguments for the animal origin of glossopetrae? Why did he not instead adopt the posture of a judge, as Colonna did in confidently asserting the animal origin of glossopetrae and rejecting Goropius’ view of intrinsic mineral generation? Although there is no direct evidence that reveals why Steno chose a judicial style, the Canis contains a number of suggestive clues. The dissection of the shark’s head was an anatomical “report” commissioned by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II. Steno understood that it should be primarily an anatomical description and an expert’s opinion on this specific topic (Scherz, 1969, p. 69, 73). To this Steno added an unexpected set of arguments on the problem of the origin of glossopetrae. He needed to show how this unexpected part of the report was relevant to the main objective of anatomical study. So, in his description of the dissection of the shark’s head, he left to last the consideration of the shark’s teeth in order to make possible a smooth transition to his arguments about the derivation of glossopetrae. At that point, Steno could have put together his description of the shark’s teeth with a forceful philosophical argument in favor of glossopetrae originating from sharks’ teeth, just as many Renaissance and early modern writers mixed their descriptions of glossopetrae with views on their origin. Instead, he did not go that far; he chose a more cautious way. As he wrote, While I show that my opinion has the semblance of truth, I do not maintain that holders of contrary views are wrong ... it would be imprudent to recognize only one method out of them all as true and condemn all 11 In his view, Steno “reflects an awareness of the problems of method in science, and of the need to conduct scientific discussion within a community committed to rational argument on the basis of empirical observation. Thus, although Steno was probably convinced in his own mind that tongue-stones were the true teeth of fossil sharks, he disowned any claim to certainty in the matter: he said that his essay would merely present the case for their organic origin, which could then be countered, as in a law-suit, by the opposite case for their origin in situ within the rocks” (Rudwick, 1985, p. 52–53).

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the rest as erroneous. Many and great are the men who believe that the said bodies have been produced without the action of animals... These men have their reasons too... (Scherz, 1969, p. 113–115)

Steno had good reasons to be cautious because he knew the proponents of the animal origin of glossopetrae were a minority within the community of European naturalists, which included many famous physician-naturalists and physician-natural philosophers who held the opposing view of intrinsic mineral generation. To express his argument forcefully meant to regard those opposing views as explicitly erroneous beyond any doubt. Steno evidently did not want to do that. On the other hand, he was clearly motivated to present his own view on the animal origin of glossopetrae. So he needed to find a careful manner of expressing his argument. In this respect, medical jurisprudence may have offered Steno the tools he needed to argue his point in a more cautious manner. Medical jurisprudence constituted a branch of medicine that applied medical knowledge to the elucidation of those problems upon which legal authorities needed consultation. Its origin as a modern discipline can be traced back to the early sixteenth century. In 1507, the Bishop of Bamberg drew up a penal code that ordered judges to summon physicians in certain cases of violent death. This code was adopted in 1516 in Bayreuth, Anspach, and Brandenburg. The rest of Germany resisted it until 1532, when Emperor Charles V in the Diet of Ratisbon issued the Constitutio criminalis Carolina, which laid the foundation for recognizing medicine as an indispensable tool for the administration of justice (Smith, 1933, p. 274–278, esp. p. 274–276). With the need for physicians to work in forensic medicine, many practitioners acted as judicial consultants. For example, Ambroise Paré (1510?–1590), a famous surgeon, acted as a medical judicial consultant and left some autopsy records about the practice of legal medicine in the late sixteenth century. Paré limited his role to a very prudent judicial consultant both in the expression of his advice and in his treatment of the advice of others (Paré, 1840– 1841, v. 3, p. 661–666; Hamby, 1960, p. 151–153). With the development of medical jurisprudence in the first half of the seventeenth century, the connection of medical practitioners (physicians, anatomists, surgeons, or apothecaries) with legal affairs may have provided a common background in understanding the role of their advice within legal procedure. They performed the role of medical judicial consultants in offering advice to the judge who made a final ruling on the case. Thus, their views were best couched in the language of conjectures rather than definitive statements. While there is no firsthand evidence showing his reliance on medical jurisprudence,12 there are hints of this connection in his arguments for the animal origin of glossopetrae. Steno knew that the readers of the Canis included anatomists, physician-naturalists, and physician-natural philosophers. Among them, many famous and great men held opposing views on the origin of glossopetrae. In this situation, the style of 12 Steno seemed to have read some of Paré’s works, but he did not specify this in his Chaos manuscript (Schepelern, 1987, p. 26).

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argumentation of medical judicial consultation would have been useful. It made his arguments for the animal origin of glossopetrae look like “conjectures,” which are inferences from incomplete evidence, rather than definitive statements. At the same time, he could refrain from explicitly asserting that the advocates of intrinsic mineral generation were in error. This posture would be more acceptable to those readers who advocated the views of intrinsic mineral generation. Nevertheless, Steno was also strongly motivated to express the “true” view of the origin of glossopetrae. He needed to take a stronger but still prudent position to do that. The role of a “plaintiff” appropriately corresponded to his wish not to alienate his opponents and yet to show his “true” view. In addition, it retained the advantage he had already derived from adopting the style of medical judicial consultation. Thus, just as a plaintiff (or a prosecutor) would put together pieces of evidence in conformity with certain assumptions about the cause of a wound or murder, Steno (in the Canis) put together evidence from anatomy, chemistry, and geological observations in accordance with the assumption of the animal origin of glossopetra. The “judge” in Steno’s case would have been his “learned” readership.13 Beginning with his assumption of the animal origin of glossopetrae, Steno listed eleven observations that he thought were reliable and supportive of his assumption. As he stated, “many [observations] are owed to the observation of my teachers; there will be very few to which I have not been an eyewitness” (Scherz, 1969, p. 95). The eleven observations may be briefly summarized as follows (Scherz, 1969, p. 94–97; Garboe, 1958, p. 9–11): 1. Some parts of the earth, from which the fossils resembling parts of aquatic animals are dug out, are hard, like tufas and other kinds of stone, while others are soft, like sand and clay. 2. This earth, regardless of degree of hardness, is compacted and resistant to moderate pressure. 3. These earths are seen in various places, composed of superimposed layers, at an angle to the horizon. 4. In claylike earth, layers are seen differing in color, with more or less perpendicular fissures filled with material of one color. 5. In these earths, whether hard or soft, different kinds of bodies are hidden. 6. In clay, a large number of bodies are seen on the surface of the earth, only a few within the earth. 7. The deeper one finds the bodies, the more fragile they are. Even at the surface, they can be pulverized easily. 8. These bodies are more abundant in rock with the same consistency throughout and are attached to the embedding rock. 9. The aquatic bodies, dug out from both hard or soft earth, resemble not only each other, but also corresponding parts of aquatic animals in form and texture. 13 At that time, the readership of Steno’s Canis would include those “learned” people who were interested in anatomical knowledge of sharks’ teeth and their origin (Scherz, 1969, p. 73, 95).

10. These aquatic bodies may be hard, like stones, or less hard, so that they are reduced to powder easily. 11. Sometimes, many glossopetrae, which are not complete nor of the same size, are embedded in the same matrix in which broken, deformed, and hardened scallops, mussels, and oyster shells are found. Based upon these observations about fossils resembling parts of aquatic animals and about their surrounding material, in order to “offer some glimpse of the truth” about the origin of glossopetrae (Scherz, 1969, p. 97), Steno proposed the six conjectures listed next as key connected steps in understanding the process through which the parts of aquatic animals, such as sharks’ teeth, became fossilized bodies, such as glossopetrae (Scherz, 1969, p. 97, 99, 101, 105, 109). “Conjecture 1. Soil from which bodies resembling parts of animals are dug does not seem to produce these bodies today.” “Conjecture 2. The said soil does not seem to have been firm when the bodies referred to were produced in it.” “Conjecture 3. Nor can there be strong opposition to the belief that the said soil was once covered with water.” “Conjecture 4. There seems also to be no objection to the belief that the said soil was at some time in the past mixed with water.” “Conjecture 5. I cannot see anything to prevent us from regarding the said soil as a sediment gradually accumulated from water.” “Conjecture 6. There seems to be no objection to the opinion that bodies dug from the ground which resemble parts of animals should be considered to have been parts of animals.” The most notable general characteristic of these six conjectures lies in their tentative phraseology such as “... does not seem to ...,” “Nor can there be strong opposition to the belief that ...,” “There seems also to be no objection to the belief that ...,” “I cannot see anything to prevent us from ...,” and “There seems to be no objection to the opinion that...” As in a legal case, the plaintiff wished to strengthen his own position tactfully while weakening the plausibility of the opposing interpretations. The first two conjectures were rebuttals of the assumption of intrinsic mineral generation of glossopetrae. The remaining four conjectures were aimed at supporting the animal origin assumption. All six conjectures were designed to achieve the goal of persuading the “judge” to determine the animal origin of glossopetrae as the most acceptable position. Since Steno adopted the strategy of playing the role of a plaintiff, in order to win the case, he needed to organize his evidence to form a consistent argument presented in front of the “judge.” Steno’s long argument generally assumes the structure of Colonna’s work on glossopetrae. In addition, Steno developed his arguments for the animal origin of glossopetrae by focusing mainly on the relation between glossopetrae and their surrounding material. In doing so, Steno may have found that his predecessors provided no detailed account of some problems such as sedimentation, stratification, and the lapidifying process in which parts of

The Path to Steno’s synthesis on the animal origin of glossopetrae animals changed into figured stones. In this respect, he was in a position to draw significantly from his predecessors’ ideas and observations regarding the formal and substantive relationship between glossopetrae and Lamia teeth, the affinities and distinctions between glossopetrae and their rock matrices, and the process of lapidification. Steno’s intellectual resources included knowledge provided by chemical art and Cartesian natural philosophy, which offered ways of accounting for the petrification of hard organic parts embedded in their strata. What Steno needed was to add his own account of these subjects. Before we turn to his assumption of the role of a plaintiff, we need briefly to introduce previous uses of the term sedimentum and stratification synthesized by Steno. In the middle of the sixteenth century, terms such as sedimentum and hypostasis were employed as medical terms to express the appearance of sediment in urinal analysis. Physicians commonly divided urine into three regions: clouds or bubbles on the top, sublimation in the middle, and sediments or hypostasis at the bottom (Recorde, 1548, fols. 51v–52r). These terms referred to the deposition of sediment or the formation of solids by hydrological processes. Along with Renaissance interest in the chemical analysis of medicinal or thermal waters, in De medicates aquis, Falloppio built his usage of the term sedimentum in a medicochemical context (Falloppio, 1564, fols. 34r–37r). He regarded heat as the cause of solids forming in fluids (Falloppio, 1564, fols. 102vff). In 1644, in the Principia philosophiae, Descartes offered a mechanical philosophy in which everything in this world resulted from the combination or separation of imperceptible particles in motion. As the terrestrial particles joined together, they gradually formed the exterior crust of the earth with the successive shells or rinds. The agitating force of heat could transform the shape of salt particles into a certain acid that could unite with metallic matter and form vitriol (Miller and Miller, 1983, p. 212). This Cartesian idea of “sedimentation” (or the formation of solids) occurred through mechanical means in his explanations of the combination or separation of imperceptible particles. “Stratification” had been regarded as an operation of chemical art and had been used in metallurgy since the medieval period. According to John Woodall (1556?–1643?), the term stratification or stratum super stratum was applied to a chemical operation in which two medicines were laid one on another (Woodall, 1617, p. 327, 348). In the fourth part of the Principia philosophiae, Descartes connected sedimentation and stratification in his theory of Earth. Departing from hydrological explanation, he explained the formation of “sediments” and “strata” in the exterior crust of Earth by means of the invisible processes of the separation and combination of particles (Descartes, 1644, part 4). We have seen that Steno’s intellectual resources included knowledge provided by chemical art and Cartesian natural philosophy, which offered ways of accounting for the petrifaction of hard organic parts embedded in their strata. Having arrived with these resources, it made sense strategically for Steno to have organized his arguments mainly around the problems of understanding glossopetrae in relation to the mineral substances in which they were enveloped.

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In the first conjecture, Steno began with a rebuttal of the hypothetical relation between fossil teeth and their surrounding material (as addressed in the views of intrinsic mineral generation) (Scherz, 1969, p. 97).14 From observation and experience, he found that in the unconsolidated material, the surrounding material seemed to destroy these fossils rather than produce them. The ease with which naturalists and pharmacists had reduced these fossils to powders was a proof of their tendency to decay. If these fossils were growing in consolidated material, the surrounding material would have to give way to them rather than wrap around them consistently on all sides. Since these fossils were surrounded consistently on all sides by consolidated material, they could not be growing in this consolidated material in Steno’s lifetime. Hence, Steno concluded that the surrounding material did not produce these fossils during his lifetime. An extrapolation from this conjecture to previous times seems to be implied here; that is, these fossils were not even produced by their surrounding material before Steno’s time. In the second conjecture, Steno continued to rebut the hypothetical relation between these fossils and their surrounding material (as addressed in the views of intrinsic mineral generation). According to that view, some fossils were generated in the rock. But according to Steno, if living things grew slowly in the rock, they would create some gaps in the rocks that contain them, and they would also be deformed by the resistance of those same surrounding rocks. By analogy, the roots of trees were found to be much more twisted and compressed in hard ground than in unconsolidated material. Thus, if these fossils had originally grown in consolidated material, they should be deformed in different ways. Nevertheless, these fossils were always found to assume the same shape, and therefore, they could not have been produced in hard, compact, or firm soil (Scherz, 1969, p. 97).15 In the first two conjectures, Steno elaborated on Colonna’s rebuttal of the plausibility of fossils growing in their surrounding material by using a legal format. If fossils resembling parts of aquatic animals had been growing in unconsolidated materials, how were they originally deposited in this medium? How did these unconsolidated materials become hard before the fossils were removed from them? How could one explain fossils found in layers with almost perpendicular fissures? In order to answer these questions, Steno proposed four more conjectures. In the elaboration of these four conjectures (Scherz, 1969, p. 99ff), Steno articulated the terms of an argument for detrital sedimentation in water, and the gradual enclosure of hard organic parts within the accumulated sediments. In doing so, Steno connected the relationship 14 This hypothetical condition had been discussed and rebutted by Colonna, as seen in the last section. 15 “But the bodies that we are dealing with here are in fact always of the same shape (a), whether they are dug up from softer ground, hewn from rocks, or taken out of animals; it would seem then that since these bodies do not appear to be produced today (b) in the places where they are found, and since things that grow in from soil are found to be strangely deformed, but these are everywhere alike, the soil would not have been firm when the bodies referred to were produced in it” (Scherz, 1969, p. 97).

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between glossopetrae and their surrounding material with some key steps related to the process through which sharks’ teeth are changed into glossopetrae. This idea had already been discussed by Falloppio and Colonna. Falloppio had proposed two modes of explanation for the formation of these fossils in places near and distant from the ocean, respectively. For him, the mode of formation depended on the place where the stones were formed. By contrast, Colonna had advocated a universal hydrological mode to explain how aquatic animals were buried in the seabed and later petrified. Ellenberger recognized that Steno gave a geological meaning to a medico-chemical term: sedimentum, but he offered no detailed explanation for how this step was taken (Ellenberger, 1988, p. 238). Basically, in conformity with his assumption of the organic origin of glossopetrae and related observations (such as figured stones that appeared in strata), Steno adopted Colonna’s hydrological account of deposition, synthesizing it with chemical sedimentation, stratification, and Descartes’ particle theory. On the basis of this hydrological process of the formation of glossopetrae, Steno developed a view of the formation of sediment and stratification that entailed processes invisible to the human eye. The strata explained by this view were thought to contain fossils of aquatic origin (including glossopetrae). Concerning his explanation of the formation of sediments, Steno had adopted an invisible process that entailed the combination and separation of particles (from chemical considerations), as well as Descartes’ particle theory. Steno synthesized previous views on sedimentation with Descartes’ particle theory. Those previous views included: the formation of solids in a hydrological mode, the formation of solids in limpid waters, the cause of the formation of solids in fluids, and Descartes’ idea of sedimentation. Likewise, Steno came to the problem of stratification and its connection with sedimentation. Steno handled the problem of stratification in a way similar to his synthesis of previous views on sedimentation: He drew together diverse elements from three previous views on stratification. By adopting a hydrological explanation of a rudimentary process in which parts of aquatic animals such as sharks’ teeth were buried in deposits laid down on the seabed, he assimilated Descartes’ mechanical account of the formation of “layers” in connection with sedimentation in his version of this process. With Descartes’ particle theory, Steno could see that there was no significant difference between what happens in nature and chemical art. In the bosom of the earth, nature behaved analogously to chemical operations performed in art. If there is stratificatio in chemical art, “natural stratificatio” constitutes its counterpart in the bosom of the earth. Because stratificatio in chemical art results in an ordered relation among color, sediment, and strata, “natural stratificatio” will produce a similar order in the earth. In so doing, Steno appropriated the term stratificatio for geology. In his elaboration of the sixth conjecture, Steno followed Colonna’s hydrological mode to address the earlier stage of the formation of glossopetrae—how once-living animals were buried in sediments. When aquatic animals—whether they were

alive but unable to move, or dead—were at the bottom of a sediment, an additional layer of sediment would place them inside the said soil. For whether a cream-like crust of stone hardens on the surface of the water, sinking to the bottom when it has become heavier, or particles of stones are produced evenly throughout the water, settling out gradually, the sediment grows only at a slow rate, thus, only those things which are already adhering to the bottom, whether they be dead animals, skins of dead creatures, or living animals unsuited for locomotion, will be covered over by new sediment; the rest of the living animals, striving above the said sediment, fill the waters with numerous progeny before a new sediment is laid down there. (Scherz, 1969, p. 111)

Next, he adopted Rondelet’s anatomical report of the dentition of the teeth of Lamia as important evidence in support of this earlier stage of the formation of glossopetrae, since the dentition of glossopetrae in the matrix is similar to that of sharks’ teeth: But if several tongue stones of various size, not all of them complete, are observed sometimes to stick together, as if in the same matrix, the same is noted in the jaw of a living animal where neither are all the teeth of the same size nor are the teeth arranged in the inner rows completely hardened. (Scherz, 1969, p. 111–113)16

Noting that “the similarity of forms seems to suggest a similarity of origin,” he thought this evidence would not be an obstacle to the organic origin of glossopetrae (Scherz, 1969, p. 111–113). In addition to drawing a parallel between the dentition of the teeth of Lamia and glossopetrae, Steno raised two further parallels in order to infer that the substantive differences between glossopetrae and their surrounding material also suggested that they have different origins. In one, he compared the substance of sharks’ teeth with their surrounding material under the action of subtle fluid (or heat). Using combustion analysis, Steno distinguished their substantive difference as Colonna had done. On combustion, sharks’ teeth first passed through a charcoal state, whereas stones or minerals reduced directly to ashes or powder (Scherz, 1969, p. 113; Colonna, 1616, p. 31). However, Steno used Descartes’ idea of subtle matter to explain these phenomena and made another parallel. In the bosom of the earth, glossopetrae (the supposed sharks’ teeth) underwent a natural combustion and reacted in a way similar to the combustion of sharks’ teeth in chemical art (Scherz, 1969, p. 113; Hsu, 1992, ch. 2, sec. 4). Having presented his first two conjectures as two rebuttals suggesting minimal plausibility of intrinsic mineral generation and the remaining four conjectures as propositions supporting the plausibility of the animal origin of glossopetrae, at the end of his elaboration of the sixth conjecture, Steno concluded his argument in the style of a plaintiff as follows: I reckon that I have shown sufficiently clearly that neither in the soil from which bodies resembling parts of animals are dug nor in those bodies themselves is it easy to find anything which is an obstacle to the belief that those same bodies may be regarded as the parts of animals. (Scherz, 1969, p. 113) 16

This had been used by Colonna (Colonna, 1616, p. 35).

The Path to Steno’s synthesis on the animal origin of glossopetrae CONCLUSIONS WITH A NOTE ON HOOKE The principal conclusion of this paper is that Steno drew from the medical and chemical traditions of the time to synthesize the animal origin of glossopetrae in the Canis. This contribution to geology is best appreciated within the context of the broader themes of science and culture that surface in appraisals of the transition from medieval earth studies to early modern geology. Twenty-five years ago, Jacques Roger convincingly argued for a connection between Descartes’ “theory of the earth” and the “Scientific Revolution” (Roger, 1973, p. 23). Gabriel Gohau, furthermore, claimed that the birth of geology can be traced back to the “theory of the earth” genre (Carozzi and Carozzi, 1991, p. 1). Thus, Gohau found an important connection between early modern geology and the Scientific Revolution, a line of development that links the Copernican Revolution, Descartes’ physical cosmology, and eventually Steno’s work. It seems that Gohau thought that geology had its point of origin in the Scientific Revolution.17 If the change in worldview associated with the Scientific Revolution made an essential (revolutionary or global) change in seventeenth-century geology, then it raises a more general problem: What was the nature of the change from medieval geology to seventeenth-century geology? Or, put otherwise, was the change from medieval and early modern geology continuous or discontinuous? In this paper, the author suggests that Steno’s Canis is a very good example of the transition between medieval and early modern geology. While medieval geology was set in the Aristotelian or scholastic framework, seventeenth-century geology acquired a largely Cartesian framework. Nevertheless, medieval and early modern geology shared questions such as the animal origin of some fossils. The Canis thus offers an excellent opportunity to understand the transition from the scholastic to Cartesian frameworks in geological studies, especially given that the problem of glossopetrae was a very concrete case that had a long and sustained tradition within medical-chemical literature. A focus on this problem allows for a very specific case study to shed light on the degree of continuity and discontinuity between medieval and early modern geology. According to Troels Kardel, “[Steno’s] writings represent one of the turning points between the scholastic and the scientific approach to biology and geology” (Kardel, 1994, p. 96). He reflects on Steno’s scientific method in the Canis and finds resemblances between Steno and Popper (Kardel, 1994, p. 73–74). He also stresses that Steno questioned Cartesian authority (Kardel, 1994, p. 92). Yet, this may not be the case of the Canis, for Steno was still a convinced Cartesian in this geological work. We have seen that the historical development of ideas concerning the animal origin of glossopetrae can be regarded as a 17 It is not clear whether or not Gohau adopted this account of the origin of geology from Roger’s article, but Roger’s article is found in Gohau’s bibliography (Gohau, 1987, p. 239).

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consequence of a series of transitions from the medieval view of the origin of fossils (stressing the petrifying power of the place), through the Renaissance rivalry between the views of spontaneous generation and animal origin, to Steno’s view expressed in his Canis. He not only brought chemical considerations into the debate concerning the nature of glossopetrae (by using combustion to identify their nature as being that of bones), but he also appealed to the medico-chemical tradition to formulate some rudimentary concepts of sedimentation and stratification. Descartes relied on chemical considerations in a number of his ideas such as sedimentation, the formation of layers in Earth’s exterior crust, the appearance of fissures and tilted strata, and the production of metals in the bosom of Earth. Steno synthesized previous views on the problem of sedimentation, stratification, and the animal origin of glossopetrae with Descartes’ particle theory. By adopting Descartes’ particle theory, medical contributions and chemical considerations helped Steno transform this problem from the older views of the animal origin of fossils (largely based upon the more outward similarity between fossils and living animals) to a specific identification of the distinct nature of glossopetrae. Before we conclude this paper, we should not neglect the contribution of Robert Hooke (1635–1703), who was also a great pioneer of geology and the organic origin of fossils with resemblances to living animals, in his work beginning in the late 1660s. He thought that fossils were animal remains that had been turned into stones by petrifaction rather than by the inherent “plastic power” in nature. In some historical comparisons with Steno’s Prodromus, published in 1669, it has been said that Hooke developed his view of the organic origin of fossils in England first, even before Steno in Italy (Oldroyd, 1996, p. 60; Carozzi, 1999, p. 87). However, in contrast to Steno’s Canis in 1667, they might have simultaneously considered the organic origin of fossils. To my knowledge, Hooke paid no attention to glossopetrae. Steno appears to have arrived at his conclusions on the animal origin of glossopetrae without knowledge of or reference to Hooke’s views. Their paths to understanding of the animal origins of extraneous fossils were different. As the curator of experiments in the Royal Society of London, Hooke was an avowed Baconian with emphases on observations and inductive method (Oldroyd, 1972; Vickers, 1987, p. 133). Although Steno showed his interest in Bacon’s work and method in his Chaos manuscript in 1659 (Schepelern, 1987, p. 124; Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 465, 475, 483), in Canis, he heavily relied upon his awareness of existing Renaissance literature on fossils’ origins, his medico-chemical background, and his affinity with Cartesian particle theory. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My greatest debt of gratitude is to Kenneth L. Taylor, who gave me much advice. I thank Alan Cutler and Gary Rosenberg for their useful suggestions and comments, Steven J. Livesey for translations and discussions, and Kerry Magruder for resources.

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Hsu, K.-T., 1992, Nicolaus Steno and His Sources: The Legacy of the Medical and Chemical Traditions in His Early Geological Writings [Ph.D. dissertation]: Norman, University of Oklahoma, 274 p. Hsu, K.-T., 1993, Gabriele Falloppio’s De medicatis aquis as a major source of Nicolaus Steno’s early geological writing—Dissertatio physica de thermis: Philosophy and the History of Science, v. 2, no. 2, p. 77–104. Imperato, F., 1599, Dell’Historia Natvrale: Napoli, Constantino Vitale, 791 p. Imperato, F., 1610, De Fossilibvs Opvscvlvm: Neapoli, Typis Io. Dominici Roncalioli, 98 p. Imperato, F., 1695, Historiae naturalis libri XXIIX: Coloniae, Sumptibus Philippi Gothofredi Saurmanni, Bibliopol. Bremensis, 928 p. Kardel, T., 1994, Steno: Life, Science, Philosophy: Copenhagen: Danish National Library of Science and Medicine, 159 p. Mattioli, P.A., 1554, Commentarii, in libros sex Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei, De medica materia. Adiectio quam plurimus plantarum & animlium imaginibus, eodem authore: Venetijs, in Officina Erasmiana, Apud Vincentium Valgrisium, 707 p. Mercati, M., 1717, Metallotheca opus posthumum, auctoritate, & munificentia Clementis Undecimi Pontificis Maximi e tenebrus in lucem eductum; opera autem, & studio Joannis Mariae Lancisii: Romae, Ex officina J.M. Salvioni, 378 p. Miller, V.R., and Miller, R.P., trans., 1983, Principles of Philosophy: Dordrecht, Holland, D. Reidel, 325 p. Morello, N., 1979, La Macchina Della Terra: Teorie Geologiche dal Seicento All’Ottocento: Torino, Loescher, 231 p. Morello, N., 1981, De Glossopetris Dissertatio: The Demonstration by Fabio Colonna of the True Nature of Fossils: Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, v. 31, p. 63–71. Nardi, A., undated, Scene Toscane, in MS Galilei, Volume 130: Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. Oldroyd, D.R., 1972, Robert Hooke’s Methodology as Exemplified in His Discourse of Earthquakes: British Journal for the History of Science, v. 6, p. 109–130. Oldroyd, D.R., 1996, Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology: Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 440 p. O’Malley, C.D., trans., 1961, On the Burning of His Library and on Medical Travel: Lawrence, Kansas, University of Kansas Libraries, 101 p. Paré, A., 1840–1841, Oeuvres Complètes d’Ambroise Paré: Paris, Chez J.-B. Baillière, 2148 p. Potier, P., 1622, Pharmacopoea Spagirica Nova et Inedita: Bonon, Typis Nicolai Tebaldini, 280 p. Recorde, R., 1548, The Urinal of Physick: London, imprinted by K. Wolfe, 72 p. Roger, J., 1973, La théorie de la terre au XVIIe siècle: Revue d’Histoire des Sciences, v. 26, p. 23–48. Rondelet, G., 1554–1555, Libri de piscibus marinis, in quibus verae piscium effigies expressae sunt: Lugduni, Apud Matthiam Bonhomme, 583 p. Rudwick, M.J.S., 1985, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology (second ed.): Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 304 p. Schepelern, H.D., ed., 1987, Niels Stensen. A Danish Student in His ChaosManuscript 1659: Copenhagen, University Library, 131 p. Scherz, G., ed., 1969, Steno: Geological Papers: Odense, Denmark, Odense University Press, 370 p. Smith, S.A., 1933, Medical jurisprudence: Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, v. 10: New York, Macmillan, p. 274–278. Steno, N., 1667, Elementorvm myologiae specimen, sev musculi descriptio geometrica. Cvi accedvnt canis carchariae dissectvm capvt, et dissectvs piscis ex canvm genere: Florentiae, Ex Typographia sub signo Stellae, 123 p. Vickers, B., ed., 1987, English Science, Bacon to Newton: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 256 p. Woodall, J., 1617, The Surgions Mate: London, printed by Edward Griffin for Laurence Lisle, 348 p. Wyckoff, D., trans., 1967, Book of Minerals: Oxford, Clarendon Press, 309 p. Ziggelaar, A., trans., 1997, Chaos: Niels Stensen’s Chaos-Manuscript, Copenhagen, 1659, complete edition: Copenhagen: Danish National Library of Science and Medicine, 504 p. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Hooke–Steno relations reconsidered: Reassessing the roles of Ole Borch and Robert Boyle Toshihiro Yamada† Department of Science Education, Ibaraki University, 2-1-1 Bunkyo, Mito, Ibaraki 310-8512, Japan

ABSTRACT It has been suggested that Robert Hooke had some influence upon Nicholas Steno’s forming geotheory, but decisive evidence has not yet been given. To reconsider the Hooke–Steno relationship, this paper examines Boyle–Steno relations by not only comparing their texts but by assessing a mediating role played by Ole Borch. In investigating the origin of the Stenonian terminology “solids within solids” in his Prodromus (1669), I shall point to two possible sources. One is represented in Steno’s first dissertation De thermis (1660), which was composed under the influence not only of scholastic themes but also of physiological textbooks of the age. The other is Robert Boyle’s texts on petrifaction and mineralogy written in the 1650s and 1660s, which appeared in part in 1661 and 1672, and which were ultimately published in 2000. A similar terminology for the relations of fluid/solid bodies is also observed in Hooke’s first dissertation on capillary action (1661), Attempt for the Explication of the Phaenomena, apparently deduced from the Boylean concept of fluidity and firmness. On the other hand, Steno’s mentor Borch met Boyle in 1663 during his journey through Europe, and it is likely he transmitted Boyle’s idea to Steno, though Steno himself made no reference to Boyle by name. The fact that Boyle’s works were a possible common source for Hookian and Stenonian geoscientific thought leads us to reconsider Boyle’s contribution to the history of early modern geotheory. Keywords: Robert Hooke, Nicholas Steno, Ole Borch, Robert Boyle, origin of fossils, “solids within solids,” theory of Earth (geotheory), seventeenth-century geoscientific thought. INTRODUCTION Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and Nicholas Steno (1638– 1686) both enjoy fame as seventeenth century founders of “geology.” At the same time, differences of opinion have arisen about the priority of their contributions to the history of the discipline. Which of the two most contributed to prove the organic origin of †

E-mail: [email protected].

fossils and the principles for constructing Earth history? Did they discover these concepts independently, influence one another, or even plagiarize one another? Hooke has recently attracted historians because of many research projects around the tercentenary of his death (Inwood, 2002; Bennett et al., 2003; Cooper, 2003; Jardine, 2004; Chapman, 2005; Kent and Chapman, 2005; Cooper and Hunter, 2006; Drake, 2007). Steno in his turn continues to generate interest from various perspectives (Ascani et al., 2002; Cutler, 2003; Kermit, 2003; Yamada, 2003; Sobiech, 2004;

Yamada, T., 2009, Hooke–Steno relations reconsidered: Reassessing the roles of Ole Borch and Robert Boyle, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 107–126, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(07). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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Hansen, 2005; Morello, 2006b; Kardel, 2008). Thus, it is sufficiently valuable to reconsider the relationship now. The secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg (ca. 1619–1677), introduced Steno’s newly published book Elementorum myologiae specimen (Specimen of the Elements of Myology), which contained Canis Carchariae dissectum caput (Shark’s Head Dissected, hereafter Canis) (Steno, 1667), in the Philosophical Transactions, no. 32, 10 February 1667/1668. Although the article lacks his signature, we can easily identify Oldenburg as its author from a note in the English translation of Steno’s Prodromus (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 3). In the anatomical

treatise on the shark’s head, Steno implied that “glossopetrae” (i.e., tongue stones) were fossils of sharks’ teeth (Steno, 1667; cf. Morello, 2003, p. 136–148) (Fig. 1), but Oldenburg carefully added in his note: this subject Mr. Hook hath also discoursed of at large in several of his publick lectures, founded by Sir John Cutler; which lectures he read about two years since in Gresham College,…where he hath not only shewn the origin of these Glossopetrae, but of all other curiously figur’d stones and minerals; together with that of mountains, lakes, islands, etc… (Oldenburg, 1668, p. 628)

For his part, Hooke deciphered the organic origin of fossils as early as 1663 and published the idea in his Micrographia (Hooke, 1665, p. 105–112), where he described fossil wood and later provided impressive illustrations of fossils, including tongue stones (Waller, 1705, inserted between p. 284 and 285) (Fig. 2). Hooke’s priority over Steno in this respect is evident. Historians of geoscience have suggested the possible transmission of the idea on fossil origin from Hooke to Steno (Drake and Komar, 1981; Oldroyd, 1989, p. 217; Drake, 1996,

Figure 1. Mercati’s then-unpublished illustration of shark’s head and “glossopetra” (Steno, 1667). Steno’s friend Carlo Dati (1619–1675) provided the engraving in his possession. Michele Mercati (1514–1593) pointed to the similarity between shark’s teeth and tongue stones but did not identify the latter’s organic origin (Steno, 1667, p. 70–71, 109).

Figure 2. Hooke’s illustration of fossils including “glossopetra” (Waller, 1705).

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Figure 4. Portrait of Robert Boyle (Birch, 1772), courtesy of Mr. Kiyozo Akahira.

Figure 3. Portrait of Ole Borch (C.P. Rothe, Brave danske Mænd og Kvinders berømmelige Liv og eftermæle, 1753, courtesy of the National Library of Norway, Oslo).

p. 112–120). There is, however, no decisive evidence indicating communication between the two. Later, Hooke accused Oldenburg of having reported his study to Steno (cf. Hall, 2002, chapter 9). However, according to Victor Eyles, who has examined the contents of Steno’s text and Hooke’s changing attitude toward Oldenburg, Steno’s contribution was made independently in spite of Hooke’s claim (Eyles, 1958; cf. Chapman, 2005, p. 149). To clarify the relations between Hooke and Steno, I introduce here two figures whose roles in the history of geoscience have largely been overlooked: Ole Borch (1626–1690) and Robert Boyle (1627–1691). The Danish iatrochemical scholar Borch

(Fig. 3) was a mentor of Steno’s in Copenhagen. When he traveled through Europe, he accompanied Steno in the Netherlands, and then went alone over to England where he visited English natural philosophers including Boyle. Borch again met Steno in Paris on his return to the continent in 1664. This chronology suggests that Borch could have learned of Boyle’s ideas and communicated them to Steno before the latter met English naturalists such as Martin Lister, John Ray, and William Croone in Montpellier in 1665 (Scherz, 1969, p. 17). Of course, Steno had already revealed his interest in meteorological and terrestrial phenomena in his Chaos manuscript, which was compiled in 1659 when he was a student in Copenhagen (Ziggelaar, 1997). Consequently, it is possible that he developed his concept of “solids within solids” independently. However, we can also suppose that Boyle (Fig. 4) and Hooke shared ideas on the nature of fossil objects, since the former employed the latter as an assistant in experiments using air pumps. Another possibility then emerges: stimulation from England motivated Steno to study Earth theory before he arrived in Italy, where he would accept Italian intellectual tradition (cf. Vai, 2009). Boyle’s works, including surviving manuscripts such as Origine of Minerals, recently

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published in the new edition of his Works, afford an opportunity to examine the possible exchanges of ideas, which may shed light upon the complex relationship between Hooke and Steno. In the present paper, I shall first take up two essays of Boyle published in 1661 and 1672, especially the Physiological Essays of 1661, which could be a source of Steno’s terminology. Second, analyzing Steno’s early works, I shall investigate another possible source stemming from physiological textbooks and the role of Borch. Third, I shall examine Boyle’s manuscripts about petrifaction and mineralogy. Fourth, Hooke’s Attempt of 1661 on capillary action will be examined in relation to his theory of Earth. Last, I shall discuss the relations of Hooke and Steno and compare their geotheories afresh. PROBLEMS OF FLUIDITY AND FIRMNESS IN BOYLE’S ESSAYS In the preface to the English translation of Steno’s Prodromus in 1671, Oldenburg, “the Interpreter,” claimed that Boyle had previously treated the same subject as Steno’s. He wrote: …as the Excellent Robert Boyle hath of late Years, with great Acuteness as well as unwearied Industry, led us on a great way in the knowledge of another of the great Masses, the Air; though the same also hath not been unmindful of considering this very subject, here treated of; for as much as He, before he would see or hear any thing of this Prodromus, did upon occasion candidly declare to the Author of this Version,… (Oldenburg, 1671, p. A2v–A3r)

Here, Oldenburg clearly asserts the priority of Boyle as in the case of Hooke about Steno’s work on the shark’s head (1667). He continues by introducing the contents of Boyle’s forthcoming essay about gems: First, That he doth, upon several inducements suppose, the generality of Transparent Gems or Precious Stones to have been once Liquid substances, and many of them, whilst they were either fluid, or at least soft, to have been imbued with Mineral Tinctures, that con-coagulated with them; whence he conceiveth, that divers of the real qualities and virtues of Gems… (Oldenburg, 1671, p. A3r)

The publication of this essay in 1672 was obviously prompted by the appearance of Steno’s Prodromus of 1669 (cf. Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 7, p. xi). Boyle acknowledged Steno’s contribution in his essay. Also in its 1673 edition, he apparently praised the Dane’s work since he even included the English translation of the latter’s Prodromus in his publication (cf. Scherz, 1969, p. 271, 299). At the same time, however, Boyle argued that his essay on gems was just a part of his larger work on the origin of minerals. Actually, since the 1650s, he had been interested in specimens of the mineral kingdom and written about them as well as chemical experiments. Already in 1661, a portion of his manuscripts was published under the title “History of Fluidity and Firmness” as the fifth part of his treatise entitled Certain Physiological Essays. Although the modern translator of Steno’s Prodromus

has referred to Boyle’s works (Winter, 1916, p. 241–242, 243, 249), historians have often overlooked their relations. Certain Physiological Essays, published in London, became popular among the European scholars thanks to the Oldenburg network and its Latin editions published in 1665 and 1667 (Boyle, 1667a, 1667b) (Fig. 5). A famous case was Spinoza’s reference to excerpts from its fourth part “A Physico-Mechanical Essay…touching the differing Parts and Redintegration of SaltPetre.” Indeed, Oldenburg translated Boyle’s manuscript into Latin and sent it to Spinoza, who then replied to him, raising a dispute against Boyle between April 1662 and August 1663 (Hall and Hall, 1965, v. 1, p. 448–473; Hall and Hall, 1966, v. 2, p. 37–43, 86–104). Steno in his turn met Spinoza around 1662 (Scherz, 1958, p. 18; Totaro, 2002). It is most likely that Steno had access to Boyle’s text, and it is even possible that he discussed the subject with Spinoza. Thus, we cannot go further without examining Boyle’s important “physiological” essay, which has been overlooked in the history of geoscience. This is, in fact, a compilation of scientific studies of the young Boyle. It holds some clues to the sources that influenced him and how he used them to create his own theory. In its second section, “Of Firmnesse” (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 150–203; Birch, 1772, v. 1, p. 401–442), Boyle referred to Descartes’s Principia (1644), part 2, sections 54–63. He criticized the French philosopher’s speculation on solidity and fluidity, because it gave no “proof from Experiments or Observations” (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 151). After some discussions about the relations of fluid/solid bodies, he stated: If two bodies be once at rest against one another, it seems consonant to the Catholick Laws of Nature, that they should continue in that state of rest, till some force capable to over-power their resistance puts them out of it. (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 152)

This statement deals with atomistic conception of inertia but at the same time it reminds us of one of Steno’s propositions in his Prodromus. According to Oldenburg’s translation, the Dane said: If a Solid Body be everywhere encompass’d by another Solid Body, that of the two was first hardned, which in the mutual contact doth express on its superfice the proprieties of the superfice of the other. (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 22)

The relationship of two bodies implied a way of forming a body within another body by molding the inner material. Boyle expressed the phenomena specifically in the case of alabaster: “… to exchange its Fluidity for Firmness, so that if it were before cast into a mould, it will perfectly retain the figure of the internal surface thereof” (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 175). Moreover, in his example of marcasite, we can recognize his complete understanding on this topic:

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p. 26), is already included in this quotation, and that marcasite is one of the important examples of “solids within solids.” Of course, Steno’s expression was simpler and more sophisticated in a geometrical manner. In addition, we take notice that two contiguous bodies for Boyle embraced not only solid bodies but also fluid ones. Considering the speculation of “geostatique” based on Torricellian experiments by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) presented in his treatise on the equibrium of liquor and the pressure of the mass of the air (cf. Brunschvicg and Boutroux, 1923), it was not unnatural for Boyle to argue about atmospheric pressure in this setting. For instance, he pointed to the phenomenon that happened between “contiguous surfaces of the two flat glasses” and said the “contiguous Bodies will be hinder’d by the weight or pressure of the lateral Air” (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 157). He also referred to “the Pressure of the Ambient water” (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 162). Hooke shared similar awareness on this issue, as we shall see later (cf. Frank, 1980, chapter 5). Next, Boyle explained the formation of fossils by introducing some petrifying agency. He first referred to an example seen at the streams of southern France in the Life of Peiresc, written by Gassendi. This biography of 1641 discussed a lot of interesting geoscientific phenomena, one of which was that “little balls or lumps turned into perfect pebble stones” (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 195; Gassendi, 1657, v. 2, p. 48). Boyle suggested that “such coagulations must be effected by a substantial form or a petrifying Liquor” (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 195). For him, this kind of liquor had a faculty to turn even animal bodies into stony ones “by introducing a new texture into their parts” (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 198). Thus, we can interpret fish-like figured stones as remains of a real fish. Boyle depicted this as follows:

Figure 5. Latin edition of Certain Physiological Essays (Boyle, 1667a). (N.r.1.7.1 Pisa, University Library, on the concession of the Ministry for Properties and Cultural Activity.)

…that part of the stone wherein the Marchasite stuck, and by comparing them together discern’d that as much of the stone as was contiguous to the Marchasite had a kind of rust about it, and fitted the Marchasite so close, as if either the Marchasite had been formerly liquid, and had afterwards been as it were moulded in that Receptacle, or the stone had been formerly of some soft or fluid matter, which did exactly accommodate it self to the shape of the other Body; or else, as if both the matter of the stone and that of the Marchasite had been at once fluid Bodies, but had each of them preserv’d its own surface distinct till one of them (probably the Marchasite) first growing hard, the other, as being yet of a more yielding consistence, accommodated it self to the harder’s figure. (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 197)

For one who is familiar with Steno’s Prodromus, it is clear that the third proposition, “if a Body be produced according to the Laws of Nature, it is produced out of a Fluid” (Oldenburg, 1671,

…internal Surfaces was most lively engraven the Figure of a small Fish, with all the Finns, Scales, etc. which was affirmed to have been enclosed in the Body of that stone, and to have been accidentally discover’d, when the stone chancing to receive a rude knock upon its edge, split asunder. (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 196)

Suggesting the organic origin of fossils, Boyle examined a controversial notion of petrifying agent, i.e., plastic power. His attitude toward the explanation here remains ambiguous. With various phrases, for instance, plastic principle, Gorgonic spirit, formative power, or diverse seminal principles, Boyle apparently adopted an idea for indurations or hardening of bodies in curious shapes (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 192–193). As seen in the reference published in the Philosophical Transactions, his ideas seemed to owe much to Helmontian texts, as well as to the writings of Anselme Boèce de Boodt (1550–1632) and Gassendi (Hirai, 2003), but as for the plant-like growth of minerals, his negative attitude was clear enough, because of his corpuscular philosophy:

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But not here to debate that famous Controversie, whether stones may be said to grow and to be nourish’d, in the strict sense of those Expressions, I think it not difficult to shew that such parcels of matter are now to be met with in the form of stones as did not before appear under that form, but whilst it was divided into minute parts either was it self some fluid Body or other, or at least did as a material part concur to the constituting of one that was so… (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 2, p. 196)

His opinion was to be shared with Hooke, already then Boyle’s assistant, and with Steno, too. Thus, we recognize that the framework for the debate on fossils and their petrifactions was reestablished by Boyle at the beginning of the 1660s. His texts provided the sources of the debate by gathering materials from contemporary authors like Descartes, Gassendi, and Van Helmont, from his own experiences in the laboratory, as well as from his association with many contemporaries. Boyle’s interest in geoscientific subjects was evident in his papers published in the Philosophical Transactions. In 1665, he argued “Of a place in England, where, without petrifying Water, Wood is turned into Stone” (Boyle, 1665), and, “If I had opportunity to Re-print the History of Fluidity and Firmness, I could adde divers things about Stones” (Boyle, 1665, p. 101). Moreover, he took the initiative with a proposal of “General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey” (Boyle, 1666c), in which he included four headings: Heavens, Air, Water, and Earth. Earth is divided into Earth itself and its “Inhabitants (Natives and Strangers),” “External Productions” (plants and animals), and “Internal Productions” (minerals, including beds of stone, clays, earths, coals, salt-springs, alum, vitriol, sulfur, metals, etc.). Under the guidance of Baconian philosophy, Boyle asserted that a questionnaire should be delivered that would enable composing “a good Natural History,” upon which “a Solid and Useful Philosophy” should be established (Boyle, 1666c, p. 189; cf. Hunter, 2007). It is noteworthy that Boyle paid significant attention to the interaction between the subterranean sphere and the atmosphere. He was conscious of the changes of air when subterranean steams ascended into the atmosphere (Boyle, 1666b), or even when earthquakes happened (Boyle, 1666a). BEHIND STENO’S CHAOS: THE ROLE OF OLE BORCH As I have shown in the case of Gassendi and Kircher (Yamada, 2006), Nicholas Steno’s notebook entitled Chaos, compiled in 1659, contained abundant information on the geoscientific thought of the late seventeenth century (Ziggelaar, 1997). It is not an exaggeration to say that the notebook itself may be compared to a “Wunderkammer” or “room of wonder” (Rosenberg, 2006). In fact, many terrestrial and meteorological subjects are present in its contents, even though Steno compiled it before he was acquainted with Boyle’s texts. For example, in March 1659, Steno excerpted related topics from Pierre Borel’s (ca. 1620–1689) Historiarum et observationum medicophysicarum centuriae (Collections of Medicophysical Histories and Observations), published in 1656 (Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 26–76).

Although his interest emerged from the perspective of a medical student, and although a Paracelsian influence was evident in the original text, we can easily find many geoscientific themes: earthquakes, lightning, magnetic rocks, petrified shells, toothshaped stones (lapides dentiformes), generation of minerals, meteors, central heat, and so forth. Discussions with his mentor, Ole Borch, were reflected in it. Borch, undoubtedly one of Steno’s most important teachers, apparently commented on the weight change of matter as discussed in Borel’s text. According to Ziggelaar, Borch suggested to Steno a similar statement of Ole Worm’s (1588–1654) on the increase of weight in calcinations and told his opinion about the salt ingredient in the ice of seawater (Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 106). Clearly, under the guidance of the kind teacher, Steno developed his intellectual interests in various fields. Ole Borch (Olaus Borrichius) was born in a small town of the western part of the Jutland peninsula in 1629 (Partington, 1962, p. 160–162; Rattansi, 1970; Schepelern, 1979; Schepelern, 1983, p. vii–xliii; Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 466–469, 484–485; Shackelford, 2004, p. 344–349). After his graduation at the University of Copenhagen, he became a teacher at Our Lady’s School of the City in 1650, where Steno met him as a student. He was also a tutor for sons of the nobleman Joachim Gersdorf (1611–1661), who was interested in metallurgy and whose rich library and chemistry laboratory were made available for his studies. Experiences in the plague of 1654 and the Swedish siege of 1659 stimulated his interest in practical medicine and military technology. Appointed as a professor in philology, poetry, chemistry, and botany at the University of Copenhagen, Borch started his long 1660–1666 journeys through European cities, some of which were the same destinations as Steno would later go to: Amsterdam, Leiden, Paris, Montpellier, Florence, and Rome. In Rome, he met the famous Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602– 1680) and the Swedish convert Queen Christina (1626–1689). He even made an excursion to Naples to see Mount Vesuvius. Later, back in Copenhagen, Borch became Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Principal of the University. He died of complications from lithotomy in 1690. In sympathy with the chemical philosophy, Borch (1668) published De ortu et progressu chemiae dissertatio (Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of Chemistry), which became “the standard history of the science in the century” (Debus, 1962, p. 2) and a “fundamental source for chemical historians” (Debus, 1985, p. 3), together with his Hermetis, Aegyptiorum, et chemicorum sapientia ab Hermanni Conringii animadversionibus vindicata per Olaum Borrichium (Hermetic, Egyptian, and Chemical Knowledges Animadverted by Hermann Conring Vindicated through Ole Borch), published in 1674. While he dismissed characters, words, seals, and images as cures for some diseases because of their lack of substance, Borch nevertheless accepted some occult qualities of chemicals and more generally the usefulness of chemical knowledge in medicine and surgery (Thorndike, 1958, v. 7, p. 318–320; Thorndike, 1958, v. 8, p. 365). He was stimulated by the work of the Jutlander Paracelsian Petrus

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Severinus (1540/2–1602), such as Idea medicinae. In spite of the fact that he differed in many regards from Paracelsians, Borch defended them when Hermann Conring (1606–1681), professor at Helmstedt, criticized their three principles (salt, sulfur, and mercury) as useless or false and scorned Severinus (Shackelford, 2004, p. 346–349). His extensive knowledge of classics and his experimentation with metals enabled Borch to publish his volume on mining entitled Docimastica metallica of 1677, which, he said, was to be used “to examine all seams of metal everywhere, in cliffs, sands, waters and clays, and how to evaluate properly their quality” (Schepelern, 1983, p. xix–xx). In addition to the work of Borch, we can find, in Steno’s student years, reports on “the wonders of the mineral kingdom” in the Danish academic journal Acta Hafniensia: “pregnant stones, gems within gems” and an aphrodisian agate considered by C.J. Welsch (Velschius), belemnite and fossil amber by J.S. Elsholtz (1623–1688), and so on (Thorndike, 1958, v. 8, p. 247). Moreover, another mentor of Steno, Erasmus Bartholin (1625–1698), a famous Cartesian mathematician, published treatises on Cartesian physics, shapes of bodies like snow, and experiments on Icelandic spar (Hall, 1970). Such information suggests the nature of the intellectual milieu around young Steno: a Paracelsian alchemical world on the one side and Cartesian mathematical world on the other. STENO’S FIRST DISSERTATION ON HOT SPRINGS Let us turn to another early work of Steno, De thermis (On Hot Springs), published in Amsterdam (Steno, 1660; Scherz, 1960; Scherz, 1969, p. 14–15, 49–63; Vugs, 1970) (Fig. 6). This short treatise was rediscovered by Steno scholar Gustav Scherz at the Loganian Library, which was founded by James Logan (1674–1751), and which is now in the holdings of the Library Company of Philadelphia (Scherz, 1960; Webb, 1999). It is a summary of disputation on a scholastic theme given by a teacher when Steno was a student at the Athenaeum in Amsterdam and is dated 22 July 1660. We find a similar case at Hamburg, where the Niedersachsen-born geographer Bernhard Varenius (1622–1650) gave a physical disputation on Aristotelian definition of motion under the direction of Joachim Jungius (1587–1657) (Varenius, 1642). One might consider this kind of material a simple student report, not an academic thesis, but we should not underestimate Steno’s disputation because its theme was one of the geoscientific topics observed in his Chaos manuscript. Indeed it contained a hint of his terminology “solid within solid.” Supervised by the Amsterdam-born professor Arnold Senguerd (or Senckward, 1610–1667), this traditional style of disputation was organized several times each year and encompassed 93 subjects (Scherz, 1960). The 35th one was assigned to Steno, that is, “De thermis,” whereas the 33rd and 34th were “De remosa,” the 36th was “De metallis,” the 37th and 38th were “De mineralibus,” and the 39–45th were “De lapidibus.” Steno’s assignment was one of the meteorological subjects. The

Figure 6. Steno’s first dissertation, De thermis (Steno, 1660) (the Library Company of Philadelphia, photo by G.B. Vai).

treatise consisted of 19 propositions (theses) and two corollaries, covering just six pages. First, Steno presented the philological account of the term “thermae” (thesis I–III), in which Gabriele Falloppio’s (1523–1562) work was mentioned (De thermalibus aquis, 1564). Next, he reviewed sources of heat in hot springs, citing examples of friction between water and rocks, burning sulfur, subterranean fire, and chemical heat such as that generated from quicklime poured with water (thesis IV–IX). Assuming that various causes of heat are reasonably involved, Steno asserted that it was more logical to explain “what, and how much, each of these causes contributes to the warmth of hot springs, and how each does it” (thesis X). Next, his attention was turned to mineral qualities and powers (qualitates et vires minerales) in hot springs. According to Steno, these properties were “generally from bodies in which the hot springs are contained and through which they flow (generaliter a corporibus, quibus aquae thermales continentur, et per quae fluunt)” (thesis XI). Moreover, to explain how those bodies might communicate their powers to the hot water, Steno answered:

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…just as there are in animals parts that contain ( partes continentes), parts that are contained (partes contentae), and parts that produce impetus ( partes impetum facientes), so a distinction should be made between parts that are spirit-like (spirituosus), humid (humidus), and solid (solidus). It is probable that parts of each type are communicated to the waters, but in such a way that blue vitriol, sulphur, alum, and bitumen share their whole substance with water, since they readily become liquid. But in the case of metals and stones, because these do not liquefy so readily, some particles are eroded. (Steno, 1660, thesis XII)

Thus, from hot springs, various kinds of odor, exhalation, mineral substance, and spirit are emitted (thesis XIII–XVI). Even metals, whether perfect or imperfect, are dissolved into springs (thesis XVIII–XIX). On one hand, he used Aristotelian terms for an example favoring a material cause (causa materialis) instead of an efficient cause (causa efficiens) for sulfur as its source of heat (thesis VII), Steno, on the other hand, introduced a corpuscularian explanation of heat that came from the motion of bodies (thesis X) or from the transparency of springs that arose from the agitation and consequent separation by water into small particles (thesis XVII). According to Kuang-Tai Hsu (1992, 1993), Steno was much influenced by Falloppio’s medical or physiological idea of “sediment” (sedimentum), which was adopted in his Canis of 1667. In diligent investigations of the tradition of medical interest in the heat and water of the hot springs and the chemical analysis of mineral waters, Hsu has underlined the transition of the term’s interpretation from medico-chemical in Falloppio to geological in Steno. Thus, Hsu has concluded that the 1660 treatise is the very turning point for Steno’s geological thinking. The opinion is interesting, and I agree with Hsu on the importance of the Steno’s De thermis. However, it is necessary to consider the importance of contemporary scholars or texts for Steno to have a general framework in mind to later establish his theory of Earth in Prodromus. In other words, the germ of the comprehensive scheme for “bodies within solid bodies” can be observed in the physiological textbook tradition. In the second half of De thermis, where he discussed the generation of minerals, Steno advanced an analogy between “microcosm” and “geocosm.” In the eleventh and twelfth propositions, he mentioned minerals generated in hot springs and contained in earthly solid bodies as well as containing parts, contained parts, and impetus-producing parts in animal bodies. According to Honma (2003a, 2003b), Renaissance physiological textbooks usually consisted of seven parts: elements, temperaments, spirits, humors, parts, faculties, and functions (activities), and their contents basically remained the same from the works of Jean Fernel (1497–1558) or Jean Riolan the father (1539–1606), up to those of Henricus Regius (1598–1679) or Anton Deusing’s (1612–1666) “Oeconomia animalis.” Riolan defined “physiology” in his text of 1577 (cited in Opera omnia of 1610) as an art that contemplates what contains, what is contained, and what gives impetus of human sanity or sickness (physiologia est ars quae hominis sani vel aegri continentia, contenta, et impellentia contemplatur). This stems from Hippocrates (Honma, 2003b, p. 6–8). In Latin

text De morbis popularibus (Lib. VI, Sect. VIII, 7), we find “continentia, aut contenta, aut intus permeantia corpora” and also similar words in Galen’s annotation to Hippocrates. In fact, Galen’s text gives “continentia, contenta, impetum facientia,” as Hippocrates’ expression (Galen, 1824, p. 278), which is exactly the same expression as Steno’s. Galen identifies “that which contains” with solid parts themselves (ipsas corporis partes solidas), “that which is contained” with humors (homores), and “that which produces impetus” with spirits (spiritus) (Galen, 1824, p. 278). Evidently, Steno adopted the formulation of the Galenic or early modern physiological textbooks into his descriptions of the mineral world. Thus, following Steno’s way of thinking, we can readily understand his rhetoric in Specimen of the Elements of Myology of 1667 and his description of animal bodies in Prodromus of 1669. In the text of Canis, added to the 1667 myological paper, Steno used an analogy between the influence of the diet on the humors of the microcosm (human body) and that of the sun and moon and various other factors on the humors of Earth (Steno, 1667, p. 102; Scherz, 1969, p. 107). His reference to Gassendi’s study on stones follows the previous analogy. This indicates Steno’s debt to Gassendi (cf. Yamada, 2006, p. 70). As Scherz (1969, p. 15) and later Kardel (1994, p. 80–83) have pointed out, Steno’s consideration of fluids within animal bodies in the Prodromus requires a study of his early physiological works. Let us remember that the title of Boyle’s 1661 treatise was “Certain Physiological Essays.” Of course, “physiology” originally meant the study of nature, almost the same meaning as “physics.” Boyle adopted the term like Walter Charleton’s (1620–1707) Physiologia (Charleton, 1654). Recently, a study reveals that Boyle used a contemporary doxographical compendium published in 1643 to write about mineral properties in the 1650s (Hirai and Yoshimoto, 2005). The compilation book contained the writings of Georg Agricola (1494–1555), G. Falloppio, Andrea Cesalpino (1524/25–1603), and Johann Mathesius (1504–1565). Now let us return to Boyle’s text in order to understand its broad background for geoscientific thought. BOYLE’S MANUSCRIPTS ON PETRIFACTION AND MINERALOGY The treatise Origine of Minerals that Boyle mentioned in his essay on gems (1672; Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 7, p. 3–72; Birch, 1772, v. 3, p. 512–561) has remained largely unknown until 1990, in spite of its likely circulation at the time it was written. Antonio Clericuzio has published a part of the manuscript, discussing Boyle’s corpuscular theory and mineralogy (Clericuzio, 1990). The new edition of his Works contains all the manuscripts of 1650s dealing with “petrifaction and mineralogy” in volume 13, under the headings of “Generation of Minerals,” “Lapidescent juice,” and “Subterraneal Steams” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 363–423). Although Boyle was interested in the subjects from the late 1650s, these manuscripts seem to have been partly written in the 1660s and 1670s (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. xvi, lvii, 403, 408, 415).

Hooke–Steno relations reconsidered: Reassessing the roles of Ole Borch and Robert Boyle In the first paper titled “Thoughts and Observations about the Generation of Mineralls To be annex’d by way of Additment or Appendix to the History of Fluidity and Firmnes” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 363–376), we can find “four principal ways” of mineral production: (1) creation at the beginning of the world, (2) coalition of congruous particles (cf. Calculus humanus), (3) disposition of parts under such seminal principles or rudiments that work in prolific wombs, and (4) hardening into minerals of bodies that were originally fluid. The fourth mode recalls Steno’s third proposition of Prodromus. After explaining the subterranean fire and the production of minerals “by the help of a Petrifick Juice,” Boyle describes three kinds of fossil object within bodies: the first category is petrified wood, flint, marcasite, and impressions of fishes in stone or marble; the second, silver with perfect lead, gold in tin ore, and other growing metals; and the third, talc stuffed with garnets, various metals and minerals in a piece of ore, and lapis lazuli pyrites (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 367–368). Boyle foresaw objections to his principles (especially to the fourth), which accounted for the production of stones and gems of great hardness from bodies that were originally fluid. He thus first studied the chemical process of metallic dissolution by strong acid and, inversely, of coagulation in the middle of fluids. He used these studies to explain transparency of minerals, their regular and curious forms, and the manner in which the mold influenced their concretion (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 368–370). As for a “Petrifick or Lapidifick Spirit” as the agent of hardening, Boyle thought it acted in the form of vapor or steam as well as of liquor. He argued that the fluid body coagulated by “Changing the Motion and Texture” and by “disabling certain active Corpuscles” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 373–374). Then he introduced three causes of hardening: a spirit that acted as “a sensible Ingredient,” as “an almost Plastick Agent,” or as “a Ferment.” He especially stressed “an Allmost Plastick Agent” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 372), partly because he maintained:

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event, in conclusion, Boyle stated that the alleged instances suffice to evince that “Stones may be produc’d of Matter that was once Fluid” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 376). The treatise “Of the Existence of the Lapidescent Juice” (p. 377–402) was probably influenced by Agricola’s notion of “succus” (cf. Morello, 2006a) or even Aldrovandi’s works (Vai, 2003, p. 95; Marabini, Donati, and Vai, 2003, p. 115–118, 123– 124; Vai and Cavazza, 2006, p. 54). Boyle declared that he, in contrast to traditional writers, endeavored to discover the differences of the “juice” to explain the variety of petrified bodies. He proposed three ways to classify petrifying juice when coagulated: (1) tender/solid; (2) crystalline/opaque; and (3) pure/mixed. In the last case, “from the various Combinations of which Differences may result new ones” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 382). He thus thought he would to be able to show the differences with chemical and physical tests. To Boyle, the aims of inquiring after the origin of the petrifying juice were to investigate “whence stones in generall had their first beginning” and “ whence Lapidescent Juice and bodys that are prtrifyd in or by Liquors here in the superficiall parts of the Earth have their production” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 398). It is certain that he distinguished the circumstances of subterranean mineralization from those at Earth’s surface. For, he referred to “menstruums” (some fluid like magma?) “in the bowels of the Earth very differing from those that we have here above ground” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 391). At the same time, Boyle was well aware of those sorts of petrified bodies generated in animals and plants. He said: I have seen, in I know not how many sorts of bodys, some of them belonging to the Animal, as well as many to the Vegetable Kingdom, that had no case of Stone, but seem’d to be petrify’d throughout even to their inmost parts: and that great piece of wood…tho it be turned into stone…yet it remains it’s pristine forme of Wood. (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 388)

He continued on the behavior of “petrifying corpuscles”: …the small Quantity of it in reference to the mass of matter it hardens into Stone makes its way of working seem very much to emulate that of Seminall principles properly so calld when they subdue the juices furnished by the mother of the Earth, and fashion them into hard Bones, sheds etc. (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 372)

…they seem capable of passing through the narrow pores of the roots, and other parts of plants, and of being thereby admitted into their innermost recesses, as part of their Alimentall juice. (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 389)

His reference here to the third principle of mineral production expresses some reservation in terms of the application to animal substances. He even replaced the word “Petrifick Spirit” with “Lapidific Seed” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 375) or “Petrific Seed” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 376). For Boyle, it is difficult to explain the mineral generation by “the bare Blending of the Elements without such a Plastick Agent” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 375). This is partly the reason why Clericuzio called him “Helmontian,” because Van Helmont was one of those who advanced the theory of seminal principle and influenced the young Boyle (Clericuzio, 1990; Yoshimoto, 1992; Debus, 2002, p. 473–484; Hirai, 2005, chapter 17). In any

The petrifying juice, drawn from the water, together with alimentary juice, turned entire plants into perfect stone. As Steno did in his Prodromus, Boyle adopted a corpuscular explanation for the production of solid bodies both in the geocosm and microcosm. Indeed, he would later publish two essays dealing with the porosity of animal and solid bodies (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 10, p. 103–156; Birch, 1772, v. 4, p. 759–793). Boyle also introduced the term “congruity,” which meant a kind of affinity or “sympathy” between corpuscles of matter, supposing pores of a body exposed to the matter. According to him, there was a sufficient congruity between the corpuscles of the menstruums and the pores of the body to be dissolved (Hunter

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and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 391, 402). This is one of corpuscular explanations of chemical process such as those invoked by Descartes or Hooke. For Boyle, the form of concretions depended on the characteristics of the menstruums in which they grew. He meant that the corpuscles were aligned in accordance with the outer figure of bodies. For example, according to Boyle, the solutions in which the salts coagulate with the stony substance may provide regularly shaped angular bodies. Thus, “As there may be divers Menstruums in the Earth capable of dissolving a Stony Substance; So there may be divers ways of concreting of that dissolv’d substance” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 396). On the other hand, the motion of liquor was important, for it is usual “for Ambient Fluids to give the Superficies of Bodys” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 397). This reminds us of Steno’s account of growing crystals in Prodromus, which claimed that “ambient or surrounding fluid” was necessary as well as “permeating fluid” (Steno, 1669, p. 42–44; Oldenburg, 1671, p. 59–62). As a result, there were three considerations concerning the transformation of liquor and stone into one another by way of concretion and dissolution, respectively: (1) stony concretions like stalactite, easily soluble in menstruums; (2) several sorts of natural stones, also dissolved by menstruums, for instance, lapis stellaris corroded by vinegar; and (3) “languid menstruums,” which may suffice to dissolve stones without any assistance from the fire, for example, stony crust by bare vinegar and marble by crude vinegar, etc. (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 400). These processes were applied in the lower parts of Earth, which was, however, abound in many places with subterranean fires. Even the hardest stones would be dissolved by a certain menstruum or solvent into the form of liquor (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 401). Consequently and lastly, the third part “Of suterraneall steames” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 403–423) dealt with the subject on the subterranean world. As I shall show, Boyle’s concern here was clearly the influence of subterranean phenomena upon the surface of Earth and the atmosphere rather than the subterranean world itself, since, with the definition of “suterraneall steames,” he mentioned “twofold notion.” The first was the production of metals, marcasites, stones, salts, sulfurs, bitumens, and other fossils or subterranean concretions, whether dry or liquid (he posited the existence of “subterraneal liquors” in which bodies of marcasites or embrionated metals or other unripe minerals drenched; see Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 422), and the second was the alteration of the qualities of the air, production of meteors, changes of weather, and other effects (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 406). Under the term “suterraneall steames,” Boyle meant exhalations, vapors, fumes, reeks, or “Effluviums and Emanations of the Terraqueous Globe,” which represented ascending corpuscles that were produced by the internal part of the terrestrial globe and transported to far distant places (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 406–407). There were very great “subterraneal Fires” in many parts of the globe, and their activities rarified and dispersed the materials that struggled to seek “Chimneys or Vents,” into the air. If the materials were sulfurous and bituminous and did not have any

convenient exit or “estuary,” and they caught fire, they caused earthquakes (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 407, also p. 419– 420). Whereas volcanoes usually burned real fires in the superficial part of the globe with the benefit of the air, the deeper and greater fires pushed to the surface materials such as ash, which spread great distances through the air as a result of the agitation of its particles. Indeed, there had happened nasty change of the air and roughness of the sea in the Mediterranean after the eruption of Mt. Etna (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 408). Boyle even suggested the possibility of foretelling changes in weather at Earth’s surface from the dampness or other characteristics of the air in the deep mines (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 411). It is not surprising that he thought that exhalations emitted from deep beneath the sea affected the atmosphere (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 422). It should also be said about the influence of subterranean exhalation from the observations of the color changes of a pond caused by the fumes or exhalations or of the discoloration of the water by the subterranean effluviums (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 412). Moreover, we can even recall Boyle’s interests in the conditions of the sea, which he presents in other writings (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 6, p. 343–364; Birch, 1772, v. 3, p. 342–354). Although fragmentary and partly ambiguous, the manuscript thus provides interesting texts for the historiography of geosciences. Considering Boyle’s attitude toward a “plastic agent,” these texts suggest some “transition” stage from an organic or living to a mechanic view of Earth in Oldroyd’s term (Oldroyd, 1974; Oldroyd, 1996, chapters 1 and 2). At any event, it is possible to say that Boyle stood at the very threshold of formulating his own “theory of Earth” at the end of the 1650s and continued the attempt well through the 1660s. Also, we note at the same time that Boyle studied the physical and chemical properties of the air linked to physiological themes like respiration (Frank, 1980, chapters 5 and 6). BORCH MEETS BOYLE IN ENGLAND Borch started his “grand tour” in 1660, just one year after the departure of his pupil Steno, who had left Copenhagen in November 1659 for Amsterdam via Rostock. Fortunately, since Borch’s travel journal survived, we can trace his detailed itinerary (Schepelern, 1983). After having stayed nearly three years in the Netherlands, Borch went to England. He arrived in London in May 1663 and then went on to Oxford, where he met scholars like John Wallis (1616–1703). On his way back to London, he visited Bristol, Bath, and Stonehenge near Salisbury (Schepelern, 1983, v. 3, p. 16–60). As for Stonehenge, after the meeting with Walter Charleton, Borch later took up the topic of antiquarian monuments including Danish ones (Schepelern, 1983, v. 3, p. 70). During his one month stay in London, he also visited many English scholars including Boyle. Borch’s journal of 5–6 August reveals 26 items that he discussed with Boyle at Chelsey (Schepelern, 1983, v. 3, p. 65–69). Almost all of them concerned chemical operations, which were of

Hooke–Steno relations reconsidered: Reassessing the roles of Ole Borch and Robert Boyle their mutual interest: tartar salt, which acted as a volatile solvent for flint, pearls, which were soluble in “alkahest” (Paracelsian or Helmontian universal solvent), changes of mercury, Mercuius Saturnus, reaction of quicklime, elicitation of water from mercury, urine spirit, and so forth. The changes of color in syrup of violet’s flower, green when alkali and red when acid (item no. 5 of August 5th) would be mentioned in Boyle’s book on color published the next year (Boyle, 1664, p. 245–246). They also discussed the properties of materials such as mineral electrum, a sample of white and red marble that seemed to display the figure of St. George and the dragon, and rock crystal. Interspersed among these topics were comments such as, “…Oldenburg, the German, is the secretary of the College of Nature (Royal Society)” or “Thomas Willis’s excellent work on brain was in the process of being published” (Schepelern, 1983, v. 3, p. 65–66). Seven months later in Paris, Borch wrote a letter to Boyle, dated 30 March 1664, in which he acknowledged his respect for Boyle’s “great public reputation” as well as “deep erudition and solid practical experience” (Hunter et al., 2001, p. 262). What he tried to discuss in the letter was the recently developed theories of the nature of cold, heat, and colors that related to geotheory. For example, why the mines of Potosi, where the richest vein of silver was found, were beyond the normal degree of cold in spite of the coldness of the caves (Hunter et al., 2001, p. 255) and why (continuing from his observation of 1658) sea water, when frozen, became ice two cubit (one meter) thick and free of salt? He explained the latter phenomenon by continuous precipitation of salt toward the bottom of the ice. Borch furthermore asked the addressee for information about the experiments of quicksilver “in the Boylean pneumatic machine,” which was famous for its experiments of vacuum (Hunter et al., 2001, p. 261). In Paris, Borch read Boyle’s treatise on colors during the summer of 1664 and left some extracts “From the Mr. Boyle’s book on colors” in his journal dated 13 August (Schepelern, 1983, v. 4, p. 70–79). As usual, he wrote down, among many topics, phenomena concerning the relations between color and chemical or physical changes. To mineral substances, he also paid attention. For instance, cracks appeared in rock crystal that, after being heated, was rapidly cooled, and there was an associated color change (Schepelern, 1983, v. 4, p. 71; Boyle, 1664, p. 58). Moreover, he wrote that metal dissolved into liquor changed color of bodies: gold dissolved in aqua regis (hydrochloric and nitric acids) dyed nails and ivory with purple color. He speculated on the reason why silver coins changed color when immersed in the hot spring at Bath (Schepelern, 1983, v. 4, p. 77; Boyle, 1664, p. 367–368). Last, he added a transcription from a short treatise “about a diamond that shines in the dark” (Schepelern, 1983, v. 4, p. 78–79; Boyle, 1664, p. 389–423). The appendix dealt with some real samples of diamonds as well as the description on gems in lapidaries of de Boot. Although these observations on diamonds were then up to date, they focused on optical properties and did not consider the formation of diamonds. The name of Steno appeared in Borch’s journal on 7 November 1664 (Schepelern, 1983, v. 4, p. 163); Steno had stayed

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in Paris until September 1665 (Scherz, 1971, p. 48). Although there is unfortunately no record on communication between them about Boyle’s work, it would have been natural enough for them to discuss such topics related to Boyle. In addition, Borch was familiar with some correspondents of Oldenburg’s network. He sometimes referred to Oldenburg’s letters addressed to some Frenchmen, among whom there was Borch’s friend J.P. Martell, Oldenburg’s main correspondent in Paris (Schepelern, 1983, v. 3, p. 235, 365, 418). Thus, we have enough reason to suppose communications between Borch (with Steno) in Paris and Oldenburg (with Boyle) in London. HOOKE’S ATTEMPTS: FROM AN ATTEMPT TO MICROGRAPHIA Next let us turn to the other main dramatis personae, Robert Hooke and his first work, An Attempt for the Explication of the Phaenomena, Observable in an Experiment Published by the Honorable Robert Boyle, Esq; In the XXXV. Experiment of his Epistolical Discourse touching the Aire (Hooke, 1661) (Figs. 7 and 8). Shedding light on the social status and identity of Hooke, Steven Shapin has pointed to his contemporary entitlement as a “philosophical servant” as well as a mechanic or a tradesman, comparing those with Boyle’s role as a Christian virtuoso (Shapin, 1989). In reality, Hooke was an assistant to Thomas Willis (1621– 1675) and then, in 1656, to Boyle. Boyle’s patronage of Hooke continued until 1664, even after Hooke’s appointment as curator to the Royal Society and just before his installation as professor in Gresham College (Shapin, 1989, p. 264; Kent, 2005). Thus, it is no surprise that Hooke began his scientific career by writing about the experiment on the pressure of the atmosphere he carried out with Boyle. That is why Hooke wrote a dedication to Boyle as “the first excitor and chief abettor” and “so great a patron” or “gracious countenancing” in the preface of his paper (Hooke,

Figure 7. Hooke’s birthplace at the Isle of Wight (photo by M. Yajima).

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Yamada taken up again in his main work Micrographia (Hooke, 1665, p. 10–32). Although this work is often referred to in the history of physical science (e.g., Nakajima, 1997, p. 55–57; Joseph, 2006, p. 92–94), I shall investigate it from a different viewpoint. It is noteworthy that its terminology relates to the concept of “solids within solids,” i.e., fluid/solid issues, similar to that of Boyle’s studies. The key dichotomy presented in this treatise was “conformity/unconformity” or “congruity/incongruity” (Henry, 1989; Ehrlich, 1995). Hooke used them to explain not only capillary phenomena but also general themes like hydrostatics, the ascension of sap in trees and plants, springs as a part of global water circulation, and macrocosmic ether. Hooke first explained the term: …by defining conformity or congruity to be a property of a fluid Body, whereby any part of it is readily united or intermingled with any other part, either of it self, or of any other Homogeneal or Similar, fluid, or firm and solid body: And unconformity or incongruity to be a property of a fluid, by which it is kept off and hindred from uniting or mingling with any heterogeneous or dissimilar, fluid or solid Body. (Hooke, 1661, p. 8)

Figure 8. Hooke’s first dissertation, Attempt (Hooke, 1661).

1661, p. A2r). However, for a period, Hooke tutored Boyle on geometry and Cartesian philosophy in Oxford. This suggests that Hooke was an equal collaborator with Boyle rather than a mere experimental assistant (Feingold, 2006). In a sense, the treatise of 1661 meant the emergence of Hooke as an autonomous researcher. The Royal Society regarded it as such, as evidenced by the fact that they employed Hooke as a curator in November 1662 (‘Espinasse, p. 4). Hooke’s short treatise was published in London in English. Its Latin version appeared in Amsterdam in 1662. As the title shows, the subject was related to Boyle’s experiments with the air pump, described in New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air (Oxford, 1660) (Hunter and Davis, 1999, v. 1, p. 250–253; Birch, 1772, v. 1, p. 79–81). Hooke explained the capillary phenomenon or meniscus, which would be

We can readily recognize that the concept implied the relationships between a fluid body and other fluid or solid body of various kinds as they touched each other and were separated by a defined boundary; consequently, for instance, in relation to the fluid in a glass tube, Hooke introduced the words, “the including solid”/“the included fluid,” which were paraphrased as “the including or included [body]” or “the contained and containing [body]” (Hooke, 1661, p. 13–14). How are the figures of bodies determined? Hooke pointed out that they were shaped by the pressures of the ambient bodies. If the ambient body was a solid, the included fluid received the shape of the solid body just like water in a pot or air in a bladder. If the ambient body was a fluid, the shape of the included fluid was determined by the pressures resulting from the gravity or properties of the both bodies. Hooke gave examples such as a drop of water or quicksilver in air. Thus, accidental pressure derived from various causes explained the diversity of figures of included fluid bodies. Since one body might be “included either with a fluid only, or only with a solid, or partly with a fluid and partly with a solid, or partly with one fluid, and partly with another, there will be found a very great variety of the terminating surfaces” (Hooke, 1661, p. 13). This explanation reminds us of a similar passage in Steno’s Prodromus on the definition of “place (locus).” He said: I understand therefore by the word Place, that Matter, which by its superfice immediately toucheth the superfice of that Body, which is said to be in that Place: which Matter admits of various differences; for, First, ‘Tis either all solid, or all fluid, or partly the one and partly the other. Secondly, ‘Tis either all sensible by it self, or in part so, and on part by its operations. Thirdly, ‘Tis either altogether contiguous to the Body contain’d, or in part continuous to the same. Fourthly, ‘Tis either always the same, or by little and little changed. (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 24–25)

Hooke–Steno relations reconsidered: Reassessing the roles of Ole Borch and Robert Boyle Steno presented this passage in the second proposition of his research method. He then gave examples for plant’s roots in the earth, water, or air and for animal embryos in amniotic fluid. Naturally, it could be applied to the generation of minerals or fossils. In his view, the place where incrustations like agate are made is the whole confine of the fluid and solid (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 35); the strata or beds of Earth belong to the sediments of fluids that are made by the laws of gravity, the upper surface of which is parallel to the horizon (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 37–39); the place whence a rock crystal increases is solid on which the crystal leans and otherwise fluid (Steno did not dare to say the ambient fluid to be “aqueous”) (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 53–54); and the outer surface where bivalve cockle shells are formed is made from the external fluid matter surrounding the shells, while the inner surface within which the animal body becomes great (cf. Oldenburg, 1671, p. 82–83). Let us return to Hooke’s text. After having concluded that the principal cause of this phenomenon was the air’s unequal pressure caused by its protrusion into unequal holes (Hooke, 1661, p. 25–26), he extended his discussion in the form of eight queries. Some of them are remarkable. In the second query, Hooke thought it possible to explain the “phenomena of gravity” by the idea that a very subtle fluid around the sphere of Earth detrudes or pushes down all earthly bodies toward the center of the globe (Hooke, 1661, p. 27–28). In the same manner, the heterogeneity of the circumambient fluid like ether determines the globular form of celestial bodies like the sun, stars, and planets (Hooke, 1661, p. 29). In the fourth query, figures of smaller bodies like fruits, pebbles or flints were investigated. For Hooke, they were at first liquor with heterogeneous ambient fluid and then turned into solid ball just like a shot produced as drops of lead or like hailstones that are congealed from a shower of rain. As a product of the similar process, Hooke also referred to “Kettering-Stone” of Northamptonshire, which contains many small and almost globular parcels of matter (Hooke, 1661, p. 30–31). It has now been identified as an oolitic limestone of the middle Jurassic formed by chemical and microbiological processes (Hull, 1997). Leibniz (ca. 1691) later repeated the supposition of this kind in describing the figure of Earth in its first stage (Leibniz, 1749). The sixth query seems especially relevant for geotheory (Hooke, 1661, p. 31–39). In this section, Hooke stated that water flowing from springs and fountains high in mountains arose from seawater that ascended through narrow caverns inside Earth. According to him, considering the proportion of gravity between seawater and river water, given the equilibrium of the both sides, the length of the pipe for river water should be longer than that for the heavier seawater. Thus, in Figure VI of Hooke’s paper, if G., H., and M. represented the sea and F and M. represent a pipe in Earth, which, beginning at the bottom of the sea, terminated at the top of the mountain, F and I would be the height of the mountain above the sea level (Fig. 9). Evidently, Hooke assumed this mechanism as a part of water circulation inside Earth (cf., Adams, 1954, p. 426–460; Commander, 1998, p. 437–441). However, based on his obser-

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Figure 9. Hooke’s explanation of the spring waters out of mountains linking with seawaters (Hooke, 1661). G. H. M. in the left part of the U-shaped tube represents seawater, whereas M. F. in the right part indicates a cavern in the earth, and I. F. is the height of the mountain. The seawater transforms into freshwater at a mediate part of L. M., rises up until F., and flows out there as spring or river water; thus, the water circulation of Earth is explained.

vations in mountain caverns, Steno favored the idea that water in mountain springs was due to condensation from the atmosphere rather than from the ebullition from subterranean waters (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 48–49; Scherz, 1969, p. 169). Boyle’s use of the term “congruous” or “congruity” was more limited. He adopted it just to explain the relation between a particle and pores through which the particle penetrates. For instance, Boyle claimed that “the Body abound with Pores into which the congruous particles of the Juice may be intimatly admitted, and penetrating even into the innermost recesses,… Natural Increase of the part” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 10, p. 109; Birch, 1772, v. 4, p. 761). He added in his manuscript that “amoung the Subterraneall Liquors some Menstruum might be found even for Sand, and those other stones that wee think insoluble seems the less improbable because ’tis not so much upon

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the Corrosiveness of the Menstruum, as upon the Congruity of its particles to the pores of the Body to bee dissolv’d, that it’s power of dissolving depends; …Aqua Fortis, Aqua Regis,…will dissolve Silver/Gold…” (Hunter and Davis, 2000, v. 13, p. 402). Hooke’s larger application of the term is also found in his Micrographia. In Observation 6 “Of Small Glass Canes,” which virtually repeated the same discussion in Attempt, Hooke reintroduced his version of congruity/incongruity. For him, congruity was a principle that not only unites and holds a body joined to it but attracts and draws a body placed very close to it. He said: …this Congruity is both a tenaceous and an attractive power; for the Congruity, in the Vibrative motions, may be the cause of all kind of attraction, not only Electrical, but Magnetical also, and therefore it may be also of Tenacity and Glutinousness. For, from a perfect congruity of the motions of two distant bodies, the intermediate fluid particles are separated and droven away from between them, and thereby those congruous bodies are, by the incompassing mediums, compell’d and forced neerer together; wherefore that attractiveness must needs be stronger, when, by an immediate contact, they are forc’d to be exactly the same… (Hooke, 1665, p. 31)

As Westfall (1969, p. xii–xvi) has mentioned, Hooke surely hinted in this statement that the principle of congruity/incongruity should play a role to explain the gravity and, ultimately, the production of the figures of all natural things. However, Micrographia had a limited use of the term only to describe things that form globular figures, as fiery sparks of heated steel cooled down (Obs. 8), particles of some solution that coagulated into crystals (Obs. 13), and water frozen into ice (Obs. 14) (Hooke, 1665, p. 46, 85, and 88). In his explanation for the formation of various crystals’ figures described in Observation 13, Hooke tried to utilize the concept. He suggests their formation, not as a random assemblage of globular particles, but as the most “necessary conjunctions of such figur’d particles.” He writes: …so that supposing such and such plain and obvious causes concurring the coagulating particles must necessarily compose a body of such a determinate regular Figure, and no other; and this with as much necessity and obviousness as a fluid body encompast with a Heterogeneous fluid must be protruded into a Spherule or Globe. (Hooke, 1665, p. 85; italics are Hooke’s)

Using the expressions like “texture of globules” or “position of globular bodies” (Hooke, 1665, p. 86), Hooke explained a sort of basic unit of various kinds of crystals. Because of the shortage of time, he did not answer questions such as “by what means Globules come to be thus context” (Hooke, 1665, p. 86), he just suggested methods for further investigations of dissolutions in various menstruums and coagulations by crystallizing of salts, metals, minerals, etc. However, it should be remembered that in the seventh query of his Attempt (Hooke, 1661, p. 40; Hooke, 1665, p. 27), Hooke thought that principles of congruity and incongruity could be applied to the chemical dissolution or mixing of several fluid/solid bodies. Thus, in spite of the overt atomistic illustra-

tion in Micrographia and, consequently, the assertion about the uselessness of his model in explaining the chemical properties of crystalline matters (Burke, 1966, p. 40), he in reality no less delicately treated this theme than Steno did in Prodromus. The Dane used the “example of the magnet” to explain the guiding power of particles of the ambient fluid onto a solid surface (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 62; Scherz, 1969, p. 179; cf. Yamada, 2006, p. 78). Other similar terminology and discussions are observed in both Micrographia and Prodromus. For example, “solid angle” in frozen urine (Hooke, 1665, p. 89) and “solid angle” of rock crystal (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 53); the formation of mold and remaining impression both on the containing and contained petrified substances such as shells and wood (Hooke, 1665, p. 111; Oldenburg, 1671, p. 84–85); and lapidescent or petrifying water of Hooke (1665, p. 129) and petrific juice (lapidescentus succus) of Steno (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 93; Steno, 1669, p. 65). Hooke’s rejection of a seminal principle or plastic virtue for the formation of minerals and fossils was shared by Steno, although Hooke held the principle in the case of generation of insects and germination of vegetable (Hooke, 1665, p. 123, 153–154; cf. Emerton, 1984, p. 133). HOOKE’S DISCOURSE COMPARED WITH STENO’S PRODROMUS: EARTHQUAKES AND SOLIDS REINTERPRETED Before moving on to the comparison of the works of Hooke and Steno, we should here remember that the term fossil meant at that time anything that was dug up (Rudwick, 1976, chapters 1 and 2; Ellenberger, 1988; Morello, 2003). It is also recalled that they were among the first to distinguish between fossils as remains of once-living beings and any other things that were dug up. Although, even in the first half of the seventeenth century, Colonna in the 1610s (Morello, 1977) and Peiresc and Gassendi in the 1630s (Yamada, 2006) had already realized the significance of fossils, Hooke and Steno are usually considered to have played a crucial role in the 1660s in making geology a science. What was crucial about “fossil” in calling their contribution “science?” Martin Rudwick has suggested two points: “a clear understanding of the processes of fossilisation” and a “satisfactory explanation of geographical change” (Rudwick, 1976, p. 28 and 39). What was behind the scenes of making the science? Micrographia has been said to have its “social origins” in the activities of the Royal Society (Harwood, 1989, p. 123), but when it was to be published, Hooke’s interpretation of some observations was criticized from the society’s council, especially on petrifaction. As a result, publication was delayed. Subsequently, Hooke kept in mind a project of discussing the origin of fossils. During his activities as a surveyor and architect of London after the Great Fire of 1666, he plotted out his theory on earthquakes. His Discourse of Earthquakes, ended 15 September 1668, which discussed the origin of fossils, was published only late in his Posthumous Works (Waller, 1705, p. 279–328). It consisted of an introduction, description of fossils, seven items in enumeration of

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phenomena, two objections, eleven propositions, and seven corollaries. Hooke was wrestling with the subject utilizing the term “earthquake,” which determined the figuration of Earth in various ways. First, in the introduction, Hooke declared the domain his theory would cover: our whole globe from the utmost limits of the atmosphere to the subterranean world including all the composites and species of elemental and organic things, in other words, inanimate and animate beings (cf. Waller, 1705, p. 279). Next, Hooke classified “figured stones” into two groups. The first included things that have by nature geometrical form of their own material such as salt and other crystals; the second included things that were shaped from an external and accidental mold, in a process called “petrifaction” (Waller, 1705, p. 280–281). The second group was itself subdivided into two kinds. The first was the petrified substance such as fruit, wood, bones, and shells that plants and animals themselves produced; the second, the mold of the first kind replaced and filled with mineral or earthy substance. In the enumeration of phenomena, Hooke presented numerous examples of fossils, gathering from natural history and geographic books including Varenius’ Geographia Generalis (1650), which Steno also consulted in his student years in Copenhagen. Next, he produced two possible objections against his opinion of fossil origin:

portation by waters and airs, were also attributed to earthquakes. Thus, for Hooke, the notion of “earthquakes” was so broad that it might even replace the role of “plastic virtue.” In fact, he claimed the effects of earthquakes on petrifaction or fossilization so that Albert Carozzi has pointed to the concept very close to that of the diastrophism in the later period (Carozzi, 1970, p. 86; cf. Drake, 1996, p. 181). At the same time, we recognize that Hooke tried to reinterpret the action of earthquakes by applying it to the molding relation, as revealed in the following case. The characteristic notion of cyclic change or “compensation” of Earth’s crust in Hooke was first presented simply as follows:

The greatest Objections that can be made against it, are, First, by what means those Shells, Woods, and other such like substances should be transported to, and buried in the Places where they are found? Secondly, Why many of them should be of Substances wholly differing from those of the Bodies they represent; there being some of them which represent Shells of almost all kinds of Substances, Clay, Chalk, Marble, soft Stone, harder Stone, Marble [sic], Flint, Marchasite, Ore, and the like. (Waller, 1705, p. 290)

That most of these Mountains and Inland places whereon these kind of Petrify’d Bodies and Shells are found at present or have been heretofore, were formerly under the Water, and that either by the descending of the Waters to another part of the Earth by the alteration of the Center of Gravity of the whole bulk, or rather by the Eruption of some kind of Subterraneous Fire or Earthquakes, great quantities of Earth have been deserted by the Water and laid bare and dry. (Waller, 1705, p. 320–321)

As these were essential for fossil problems, Hooke naturally concentrated himself on them in the following propositions. The first five propositions out of the eleven answered to the second objection; the next five, from sixth to tenth, answered mainly against the first objection; and the last eleventh, was a remarkable suggestion about the possible extinction and generation of species (Waller, 1705, p. 291; Drake, 1996, p. 97–100). As for the fossilization or “taphonomical” argument related to the second objection, Hooke repeated the classification of the petrifaction and explained the first kind by introducing “some petrifying liquid substance” with which the pores of plants or animals fill up and become cemented together “in their natural position and contexture” (Waller, 1705, p. 290). Then, in the third proposition, he embraced the action of heat from subterranean fire and earthquakes, chemical crystallization, coldness, and physical compression (Waller, 1705, p. 293–294). In the sixth proposition, which was the main part of the discourse, Hooke explained the influence of earthquakes on Earth’s surface in four ways, that is, (1) upheaval, (2) subsidence, (3) subversion and transposition, and (4) liquefaction, petrifaction, transformation, distillation, etc. Besides these, inundation of waters and trembling of airs, in other words, the agency of erosion and trans-

Thus, according to Hooke, many histories prove that diverse places were raised by earthquakes. He refers even to mythical stories presented in Ovid or Vergil and Egyptian or Chinese chronologies (cf. Rossi, 1984, p. 12–17; Birkett and Oldroyd, 1991). Later, he went further to develop his own theory of Earth including the idea of axial displacement or change of diurnal rotation of Earth caused by some reason within the body of Earth (Oldroyd, 1972; Turner, 1974; Oldroyd, 1989; Drake, 1996, p. 87–95; Drake, 2005). This hypothesis was peculiar or rather “advanced” for his contemporary thought about the earthquakes or geotheory (Oldroyd, 2006, p. 35–40; cf. Willmoth, 1987, p. 32–50), but it explained the movement of sea waters and cyclic changes on the surface of a spheroid-shaped Earth. Meanwhile, after having published his Canis in 1667, Steno, court physician to the Grand Duke Tuscany, devoted himself to establishing his own geotheory until August 1668, when he finished writing his “Prodromus” to a dissertation about solid bodies naturally contained within solid bodies (Scherz, 1969, p. 25). Although he did not clearly affirm the organic origin of fossils in general in a “digressio” of the 1667 treatise, in Prodromus he explicitly stated that some of the fossils are the remains of once-living beings and used the principle of molding

That a great Part of the Surface of the Earth hath been since the Creation transformed, and made of another Nature: that is, many Parts which have been Sea are now Land, and others that have been Land are now Sea; many of the Mountains have been Vales, and the Vales Mountains, etc. (Waller, 1705, p. 297–298)

Hooke aimed to explain seashells on the mountain tops with a covering/covered relationship between water and earth caused by the repeated global movement of waters. For him, this kind of cycle happened by the means of causes described in the eighth proposition:

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as his rationale in terms of solids within solids (solidum intra solidum). Today, some readers think it strange or “unintelligible” for a book title (Gould, 1984, p. 69), but the readers of the present paper will understand well the meaning of the terminology in its historical context. Steno divided his dissertation into four parts: (1) historical and methodological arguments; (2) basic propositions for solving the problems; (3) interpretation of particular fossils; and (4) construction of Earth history. In the first part, after having discussed the problem of fossils from the ancient time and especially the methodological issues related to tongue stone (glossopetra), he formulated his corpuscular theory and three causes of motion: (1) fluid permeating all bodies, (2) animals or artificial, and (3) the first cause or something divine. The basic proposition of the second part was that “a body of a certain figure, and naturally produced, being given, [makes it possible] to find in the body itself arguments, …[that enable the discovery of] the place and manner of its production” (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 8). This was extended particularly into three propositions: (1) to read the mutual relationship of two solid bodies as a procedure of production; (2) to interpret actualistically the production of such bodies as strata related to sedimentation from turbid waters; and (3) to consider the production of bodies out of a fluid. The third part led to his classification of fossils. Incrustations such as amber, strata, mineral crystals, shells, teeth and bones of animals, and petrified plants were clearly described. Discussing the remains of animal bodies, Steno evidently affirmed that glossopetra were originally shark’s teeth (Steno, 1669, p. 61–62; Oldenburg, 1671, p. 88–89). Last, in the fourth part, he maintained the six stages of morphological changes of the Tuscan region and more generally of Earth history (Fig. 10). Adopting the Cartesian tectonic perspective of

collapsing crust, Steno explained the formation of mountains, hills, and plains. This scenario implied that the sediments of plains and hills were contained within the strata of mountains, which had been covered with water flooded from the inner part of Earth. Moreover, the sediments of mountains were the products from the primitive fluid that once covered Earth’s surface. It should be emphasized that Steno’s aim was to establish “a general consideration of a solid contained within a solid” (Oldenburg, 1671, p. 34). Putting celestial bodies of the macrocosm aside, he tried to interpret the organic and inorganic worlds or microcosm and geocosm by using the concept of “solids within solids” (Yamada, 2006). For him, they were similar issues related to molding (Kardel, 2009). At a glance, Steno’s organized demonstration is impressive, whereas Hooke’s discourse looks rather tumultuous and repetitive. With a close examination, however, we realize the arguments of both men have a quite similar structure. For instance, the basic statement presented in the second part of Prodromus is similar to the content of two objections that Hooke advanced, referring to the place and matter of fossils. Moreover, the mutual relationship of bodies was discussed in the first proposition of Hooke’s Discourse, whereas the production of solid from fluid was clearly stated in propositions four and five. Also, we can observe that they shared chemical actualism. In Hooke, it was seen in the phrase that mineral crystals or concretions of the past “may be in a short time made artificially by chemical operations” in laboratory experiments (Waller, 1705, p. 296). The important conclusion derived from these arguments was that Earth has a history that can be described by means of certain reliable procedures. According to Hooke, fossil specimens collected and kept in curiosity cabinets, or wunderkammer, were

Figure 10. Steno’s presentation of Earth history (Oldenburg, 1671) courtesy of the British Library, 954.a.11. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.

Hooke–Steno relations reconsidered: Reassessing the roles of Ole Borch and Robert Boyle “the greatest and most lasting Monuments of Antiquity, which, in all probability will far antedate all the most ancient Monuments of the Worlds, even very Pyramids, Obelisks, Mummys, Hieroglyphicks, and Coins, and will afford more information in Natural History” (Waller, 1705, p. 335). Thus, the collections corresponded to a natural chronology. It is needless to say that Steno knew very well the method of reading past information fixed in solid bodies (Hansen, 2009). However, it is necessary to assess the differences between Hooke’s and Steno’s discourse and emphasis. Although it is certain that both presupposed the Cartesian conception of matter and Earth, their attitudes toward the application of corpuscular theory to mineral generation were fairly different. Whereas Hooke took an atomistic approach to explain the geometrical regularity by the assemblage of globular bullets, Steno concentrated himself on the surface of the bodies and elucidating the variety of figures and crystal growth without adopting any particular image of corpuscles. While Steno was much aware of the correspondence of nature to scripture in his geohistory of Tuscany, Hooke did not seem to consider such correspondence indispensable for his own geotheory (Davies, 1964), even regarding the description of Noah’s Flood in scripture as a sort of physico-mythological fable. It is true that both men tried to explain the cyclic formation of land and sea (Taylor, 1950; Ito, 1988; Gould, 1987, chapter 2; Oldroyd, 2006, chapters 3 and 4). However, Steno’s thesis involved a combination of underground reservoir and crustal collapses in the action of subterranean fires, while Hooke, based upon the history of earthquakes, hinted at the global recession of the seawater by changes in the center of gravity of Earth, and he extended the theory of axial displacement, using experimental models and astronomical arguments. Also, we notice that Hooke positively identified the problematic specimens like ammonite as organic origin, probably because he was familiar with such fossils produced out of English land, including his birthplace (Drake, 1996, p. 60–68; Drake, 2007). It is certain that Steno had sufficient knowledge of such fossil objects, especially by virtue of Italian background (Vai, 2009), but he was too prudent to identify them as having an organic origin and recognize the possibility of the extinctions or changes of species (Yamada, 2008). Additionally, Findlen’s (1993) discussion of the different circumstances of Tuscany and England could explain differences in Hooke and Steno’s discourse. As a court physician, Steno’s style of research along with that of his partner Francesco Redi’s seemed to match the courtly manner and Catholicism as well as the methodology of the Accademia del Cimento under the influence of Galileo. By contrast, Hooke, a curator of the Royal Society, developed his geotheory while facing opposition from the Royal Society’s fellows (Rappaport, 1986), so that the discourses, edited by Richard Waller, came from the manuscripts for the lectures at meetings. That is why the text had many paraphrases, repetitions, and digressions. However, whereas Hooke subsequently pursued his theory of earthquakes for more than thirty years, Steno simply published a “precursor” for an intended, longer dissertation, which he would never complete.

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CONCLUSIONS The relationship between Hooke and Steno, often discussed in the history of geoscience, should be reconsidered from the point of a wider network of both personal contacts and exchanges of ideas of their time. In the present paper, I have examined the influence of Ole Borch on Steno and that of Robert Boyle on Hooke. As a result, some new aspects of their relations have emerged, especially on the exchange in terminology. First, the idea of “solids within solids,” in discussing fossils and fluid/solid issues in Earth theory, came (1) from the Galenic medical and physiological tradition of the Renaissance, as is observed in Steno’s De thermis (1660); and (2) from the physical and chemical usages, as represented in Boyle’s manuscripts in the 1650s, Certain Physiological Essays of 1661, and Hooke’s Attempt of 1661. Second, in this setting, Borch, himself embodied with the chemical tradition, played an important role. He motivated Steno to study Earth theory by linking the two traditions (medico-physiological and physico-chemical). He was also a probable mediator between Boyle and Steno. Third, Boyle was a key figure whose work should be considered a common source for Hookian and Stenonian geoscientific thought, and Boyle’s geotheory itself should be reevaluated in this historical context because he provided a larger framework for scientific discussion of molding relations, including “solids within solids.” ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Gary Rosenberg, chair of the History of Geology Division (HOGD), Geological Society of America (GSA), for inviting me to present this paper at the GSA 2006 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, and I thank the division for providing travel funds. I also thank Yildirim Dilek, chair of the International Division, GSA, for providing additional travel funds from his division. I am most grateful to Ellen T. Drake, Jens Morten Hansen, Hiro Hirai, Eio Honma, Troels Kardel, Koji Kuwakino, David Oldroyd, Gary Rosenberg, Kuninobu Sakamoto, Gian Battista Vai, Michiko Yajima, and Hideyuki Yoshimoto for helping me in writing, developing, and completing my manuscript. REFERENCES CITED Adams, F.D., 1954, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences: New York, Dover, 506 p. (first published in 1938). Ascani, K., Kermit, H., and Skytte, G., eds., 2002, Niccolò Stenone (1638– 1686): Anatomista, Geologo, Vescovo: Roma, L’Erma, 83 p. Bennett, J., Cooper, M., Hunter, M., and Jardine, L., 2003, London’s Leonardo—The Life and Work of Robert Hooke: Oxford, Oxford University Press, 224 p. Birch, T., 1772, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, Volumes 1, 3, and 4: London, Johnston, 799 p., 803 p., and 821 p. (reprinted in Hildesheim, Olms, 1965). Birkett, K., and Oldroyd, D., 1991, Robert Hooke, physico-mythology, knowledge of the world of the ancients and knowledge of the ancient world, in Gaukroger, S., ed., The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition: Dordrecht/Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, p. 145–170.

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The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Prompters of Steno’s geological principles: Generation of stones in living beings, glossopetrae and molding Troels Kardel† Gammel Holtevej 117B, DK 2840 Holte, Denmark

ABSTRACT Some incidents during his youth presage later research and may contribute to explain the sudden transition from anatomical to geological studies by Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686), the Danish anatomist, geologist, and later bishop, in Tuscany in 1666 as a scientist to the Grand Duke. (1) In 1659, during medical studies at Copenhagen University, Steno wrote small notes and made comprehensive excerpts from books on many subjects, the so-called Chaos manuscript. Pondering the shape of a stone in the bladder of an ox, he wrote that something was shown here about the generation of stones in living beings. When presented with the appropriate material and having the support for studies in Tuscany, he took up aspects of lithogenesis such as crystals growing by accretion in water-filled spaces of rocks in the “Prodromus on Solids” of Florence, 1669. He was able to maintain that in living beings, stones are formed likewise in the body’s so-called external water space. (2) In the “Prodromus on Solids,” Steno proposed the principle of molding as a marker for the relative age of related objects, the first of three criteria that allow reliable inferences to be drawn from present processes back to those unobservable processes of Earth in the past. The process of molding was in itself well known to Steno from his childhood, being commonplace in the family’s goldsmith workshop. It is shown here that Steno used molding in his “Dissection of a Dogfish” less than two years before he included the molding principle as a clue to relative age in past processes. (3) The study of teeth from the head of a giant shark led Steno to conclude that such teeth and glossopetrae have common origin, i.e., that fossils have a biological origin, as described in the “Carcharodon-head Dissected” (1667). Steno could have been primed by a long-held knowledge of glossopetrae learned from his teacher, Professor Thomas Bartholin, who recorded them in a manuscript that he listed as lost in a fire in 1670. Steno applied comparisons showing sufficient similarity as his second criterion for obtaining reliable information on processes of the past. Keywords: Nicolaus Steno, molding, myology, glossopetrae, relative age dating, Chaos, Prodromus.

†

E-mail: t [email protected].

Kardel, T., 2009, Prompters of Steno’s geological principles: Generation of stones in living beings, glossopetrae and molding, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 127–134, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(08). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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INTRODUCTION After his arrival in 1666 as a scientist in residence at the court of the Grand Duke Ferdinando II of Tuscany, the Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) took up studies of fossils and Earth’s history in works published in Florence, the “Carcharodon-head Dissected,” (Canis carchariæ dissectum caput; Steno, 1667) and “The Prodromus: A Dissertation Concerning a Solid Body Enclosed Within a Body” (De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis Prodromus; Steno, 1669). In these works, Steno outlined the principles of modern geology (Scherz, 1976, p. 34), principles that were followed up by Charles Lyell in his “Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation” from 1830 to 1833. Steno’s major geological papers were produced during a very short time span while preparing research on muscles for publication and while he was continuing investigations on the anatomy of sharks. It only took approximately six months from initiation to the publication of the “Carcharodon-head Dissected” and a further 18 months until the manuscript of the “Prodromus on Solids” was completed. The aim of the present paper is to direct attention to incidents from Steno’s youth that may be regarded as prompters to different aspects of Steno’s efficient, albeit brief, geological enterprise in Tuscany in 1666–1669. ON THE TRAIL Nicolaus Steno was the son of a goldsmith in Copenhagen. He entered the university for medical studies in 1656 with professor Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680) as his preceptor. On his father’s side, there were several clergymen in the family, and an elder half-brother became a priest (biography: Scherz, 1976, 1987–1988; Kermit, 2003). Steno’s youth was a time of extraordinary events. He suffered as an infant from weakness due to an unspecified illness. He went to school in a city that was hit by plague, and he studied medicine when the city was besieged by enemy troops. In 1659, seemingly undisturbed by the siege, comes proof of young Steno’s dedication to academic studies in the form of 92 folio pages tightly written in which he excerpted, paraphrased, and annotated the writings of some of the most important scholars of his time. This is the so-called Chaos manuscript that was transcribed and translated by August Ziggelaar in 1997 (Fig. 1). Steno left his home city as was customary for the traditional grand educational tour late in 1659. He arrived in Amsterdam in 1660 to study anatomy. After a few weeks, he was granted permission by the teacher Gerard Blasius (ca. 1625–1692) to undertake a dissection on his own. In the head of a sheep bought in a market and in his first dissection, he discovered the excretory duct of the parotid gland. The duct was afterward named the ductus Stenonianus. By this discovery, the source of saliva and the function of a well-known anatomical structure, the parotid gland, had been discovered. The young student from abroad had to endure a

Figure 1. First page of Chaos, the student notes from 1659 by Nicolaus Steno, in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence, Italy (photo by the author with permission).

strenuous conflict on priority on the discovery of the duct with the established teacher. The discovery was decided in favor of the student, who also took a lesson from this experience, as expressed in his first letter back to his professor, Thomas Bartholin, in Copenhagen, “I cannot but expose to you briefly also the envy which this small discovery caused against me and, along with it, what profit I drew from this envy, not to seek fame in trifles but to drive away from myself the hateful crime of plagiary” (Maar, 1910, v. 1, p. 3). Steno continued studies on glands with the renowned iatrochemist and physician, the professor of anatomy, Frans de la Boë Sylvius (1614–1672) after moving to the University of Leiden. Steno, like Sylvius, macroscopically distinguished glands without an excretory duct—that is the lymphatic glands—from lookalike glands with an excretory duct—the exocrine glands. Steno discovered other excretory ducts, those of the lacrimal glands, and thereby recognized that tears come from tiny glands and not from the liquor of the brain. He also described that breast milk is a filtrate from arterial blood and not a derivative from chyle as had been proposed based on the fact that chyle is white as milk. These observations were described in small dissertations published in Leiden while taking up new studies on the heart and the muscles. His pace and penetration are truly amazing from the beginning. This drive would reappear on successive subjects of research, on the muscles, the heart, the brain, zoo-anatomy, in particular on the reproductive organs of fishes, and on geosciences. Steno was triggered by an observation at hand showing something new or something different than expected from the books. His early research was within the curriculum of a doctoral student. He later became a full-time researcher sponsored by benefactors, but he never obtained formal university affiliation. After returning to Copenhagen in 1664, Steno, then aged 26, published a summary of his research on glands and on muscles in a book with a dedication to the Danish king, Frederik III (Kardel, 1986). He did not receive a vacant chair at Copenhagen University and resumed his educational tour now bound

Prompters of Steno’s geological principles for France. He received there his doctoral degree in absentia from Leiden University. In Paris in 1665, Steno gave a lecture, the “Discourse on the anatomy of the brain,” published in 1669 (Steno, 1965). This is a study on the proper methods to investigate the brain, along with some anatomical descriptions and several excellent illustrations. This work contains a critique indicating errors in newly published works by René Descartes (1596–1650) and by Thomas Willis (1621–1675). The “Discourse” is a very readable text given in French and later translated into several languages. Near its end, there is a valid list of Steno’s investigative priorities. The list shows his ability to stratify a new area of research to make this a discourse: on the insufficiency of the systems to describe the brain, on the shortcomings of the method which has been followed to dissect and to know it, on the infinity of researches which should be undertaken in man and in animals and this in the different states in which they should be examined, on how little light we find in the writings of our predecessors and on all the attention necessary when working on such delicate pieces. All this must undeceive those who keep to what they find in the books of the ancients. (Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 26)

In a similar way, still valid guidelines for studies of what is not known about muscles are found near to the end of his myology soon to follow (Kardel, 1994a, p. 211ff.). Emphasis on what is not known about a subject characterizes Steno’s work in science, as also expressed in his adage: “By far the most beautiful is the unknown,” and he was thus in contrast to contemporary trends (Kardel, 1994b, p. 89–92). Early in 1666, Steno headed south from Paris toward Montpellier in southern France. In the old university city, he met a group of traveling British naturalists, some of whom were members of the newly formed Royal Society of London. Among them was William Croone (1633–1684), physician, who, like Steno, had published a book on the muscles in 1664 (Croone, 2000), and with whom Steno later had a small correspondence on friendly terms. He also met John Ray (1627–1705) and Martin Lister (1639–1712). The latter assisted Steno in a dissection of the head of an ox. According to Lister, Steno showed his discoveries on the glands and the new structure of muscles (Scherz, 1958, p. 292). In Lister’s account, nothing indicates later activities within geosciences of these gentlemen. Steno continued to Tuscany, probably having in mind meeting and discussing anatomy with Giovanni Alphonso Borelli (1608–1679), the professor of mathematics at Pisa, formerly the chair of Galileo, since Borelli and Steno shared an interest in the contraction of muscles. As recorded in Borelli’s letters, he met Steno with suspicion, and their encounter was marked by disharmony (Kardel, 1994a, p. 33–37; Kardel, 1997). Nevertheless, Steno continued working on the muscles and published the “Elements of Myology” (Elementorum myologiæ specimen) with grand ducal dedication in 1667 (Kardel, 1994a, p. 76–242). In geometrical manner, Steno described a model (mensura) of muscle contraction that was based on two main proposals. The

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first is that skeletal muscles are built up by uniform, parallel fibers in pennate structures. The second is a functional proposal stating that muscles shorten when muscle fibers shorten. The model was a parallelepiped, a figure from Euclid’s geometry that was indeed known to Steno right back from his school classes, since in Chaos on Wednesday, 16 March 1659, young Steno suggested the parallelepiped (Euclid XI.24) to be one of various parts of hexagonal snow crystals. However, Steno’s functional and structural proposals on the muscles were flatly rejected by Borelli in the “De motu animalium,” published posthumously in Rome in 1680–1681 (Borelli, 1989; see Kardel, 1994a, p. 33–37), at which time Steno had left science to become a bishop in northern Germany. Steno’s myology was even to be ridiculed by one of Borelli’s followers, the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli (1667–1748) in 1694 (Kardel, 1997, 2008). Without any support, Steno’s myology was barely mentioned in science and later in the history of science except when perpetuating its alleged infelicities. Furthermore, Steno had no pupil or assistant who took over his research on muscles or, as a matter of fact, in any other area of his research. Meanwhile, after 1981, this three-dimensional timerelated theory on muscular action, described according to Euclid XI.29 and briefly recorded here, was verified anatomically and confirmed functionally in computer simulations of animal movements (Kardel, 1994a, p. 51; Kardel, 2008). GLOSSOPETRAE AND THE GENERATION OF STONES While concluding his study of the muscles, Steno unexpectedly received a request from his noble benefactor to dissect the head of a giant Carcharodon shark. Part of this investigation, the study of the teeth of the shark, generated his study on fossils. The report, “Carcharodon-head Dissected,” was appended to the book in preparation on muscles. Meanwhile, there are indications that Steno was primed by his teacher in Copenhagen, Thomas Bartholin, to take up the study of glossopetrae fossils. Thomas Bartholin had visited the island of Malta in 1644 and brought back to Copenhagen samples of glossopetrae (Garboe, 1949, p. 67ff; Noe-Nygaard, 1986, p. 169; Cutler, 2003, p. 30). Unfortunately, the draft of Bartholin’s manuscript, the De glossopetris Melitensibus Dissertatio, was among the listed losses in a fire that destroyed the library on Bartholin’s estate Hagestedgaard in 1670 (Bartholin, 1961, p. 28). In another booklet, “On medical travel,” Bartholin gave one more hint on fossils, mentioning that “in the mountain rocks of Basilicata (S. Italy) I found fossil sharks’ teeth like those of Melita (Malta), although of different color, and some shellfish pressed into the stones” (Bartholin, 1961, p. 72). In Malta, glossopetrae could be “collected by the barrel” (Gould, 1981, p. 40). Doubtless, Bartholin passed this interest not only to his son, the target for his booklet, but also to his student Steno, who, on Tuesday, 5 April 1659, according to the Chaos manuscript, had seen, “at the castle that famous room which is decorated with manifold conches and the shells of various animals.”

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Among the objects of the King’s wunderkammer were most likely his tutor Thomas Bartholin’s glossopetrae. However, the strongest indication of an influence from Bartholin on fossils is Steno’s reference to Bartholin’s visit to Malta when discussing controversies on the origin of glossopetrae: “I have not yet seen what my very famous teacher Bartholin observed in his journey to Malta” (Scherz, 1969, p. 95). Stone formation as seen from a medical point of view can also be traced back to Steno’s student notes. In Chaos, on Wednesday, 9 March 1659, he inscribed an excerpt from the French author Pierre Borel (1620–1689): Generation of stones in the bladder A stone in the bladder of an ox, of uncommon shape. Here something is said on the generation of stones in living beings. They always have something like a splinter as base to which sediments of urine adhere from all sides. Sometimes it also comes from a stone-making faculty.

Other quotations from Chaos (Hansen, 2000, p. 120–121, Rosenberg, 2006, p. 794) show that Steno had already taken an interest in lithogenesis in the body during his medical studies in Copenhagen. Thus, when making observations at appropriate locations in Tuscany, he was primed to recognize the crystals and their growth by accretion in water-filled spaces of rocks as described in the “Prodromus on Solids” (Scherz, 1969, p. 173ff). He maintained from the Chaos manuscript that gall and bladder stones are generated outside the tissues of the body in the so-called external fluid (Kardel, 1994b, p. 81–83; Hansen, 2000, p. 123; Yamada, 2003, p. 79). The external fluid he defined as the fluids of the body contained by the alimentary and uro-genital tracts and communicating with the outside of the body through its natural openings. It should be noted also that somewhat at variance with studying anatomy, Steno’s first academic work is a dissertation related to geology, “On hot springs,” (De thermis) from Amsterdam in 1660 (Scherz, 1969, p. 49–63). Even here, there is a link back to studies in Copenhagen (Scherz, 1960; Yamada, 2003, p. 97), since he mentions the very same subject in Chaos on Wednesday, 6 April 1659: “[Hot springs are] generated in veins of the Earth; when water flows through them, it is infected with the taste of sulfur and by the influence of heat it becomes warm, as in thermal springs, etc.” Further indications of young Steno’s commitment to the study of geosciences include the long excerpts in Chaos from the works of Peiresc, Gassendi, and Kircher (Yamada, 2006). CLUES TO PAST PROCESSES The inter-relation of objects in time and space is an important issue in geology as well as in general cognition and is dealt with by Steno in the “Prodromus on Solids.” He describes an inter-relation “that deals with the objects’ location, material and motion” (“id agit vel ut locus, vel ut materia, vel ut movens”; Scherz, 1969, p. 146). Steno’s project was: “given a substance endowed with a certain shape, and produced according to the laws of nature, to find in the substance itself clues disclosing the place and manner of

its production” (Scherz, 1969, p. 141; see Gould, 1981, p. 24). Based on field observations, he reflected on, “how the present state of anything discloses the past state of the same thing is made abundantly clear by the example of Tuscany” (Scherz, 1969, p. 203). He proposed for this purpose three numbered criteria (Scherz, 1969, p. 150ff.): 1. a principle of molding (Gould 1981, p. 23), or chronology criterion (Hansen, 2000), based on how objects in contact make an impact on each other; 2. a principle of sufficient similarity (Gould 1981, p. 24), or recognition criterion (Hansen, 2000), based on comparing objects for identification of common origin; and 3. a principle of preservation of objects that are solid, the preservation criterion. (Hansen, 2000) These criteria have received penetrating analysis by Jens Morten Hansen (2000, p. 111ff), who paraphrased the third criterion as the title of his book in Danish, “The Line in the Sand, the Wave on the Sea” (Hansen, 2000). In 1981, Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), in an essay on Steno, “The Titular Bishop of Titiopolis,” emphasized the first two criteria as being basic in geological classification: “with these two principles—molding and sufficient similarity—Steno established both requisites for geological, or any historical, reconstruction. He could determine how and where objects were formed, and he could order events in time” (Gould, 1981, p. 23). Next, we will look at traces back to incidents in Steno’s youth or in his earlier writings. On criterion 1, please see the following section on Molding. Criterion 2 is on matching observation and theory in sufficient similarity. In Steno’s first biological dissertation, dated Leiden 1661, he wrote on comparisons in anatomy that the ancients had the belief that glands were like sponges, and, Since indeed some points would seem to be common to some glands and to sponges, they stopped at this similarity, and assigning to them the task of sponges. …For no other reason, when [the ancients] see a rare texture in the glands, they say that they are sponges like the other ones.

Steno had discovered an excretory duct from the parotid gland and assigned it to produce rather than to absorb fluids: This veil of similitudes which hid knowledge of the glands with its cover began little by little to be removed after some peculiar paths were found in them. Hence indeed it appeared that they do not drink-in superfluous moistures like a sponge nor are they common dregs of the viscera and all the body, but they are devoted to a by far nobler function. (translation by P. Maquet from Maar, 1910, v. 1, p. 18–19)

Thus, a myth valid for two-thousand years was refuted by a 23-yr-old investigator who replaced it by a new theory for the function of excretory glands. Comparisons with other glands enabled him to discover the tiny excretory ducts of tears. The inherent subjectivity in the expression “sufficient similarity” of criterion 2 lies in the everlasting risk that conclusions from comparisons will be refuted by new findings.

Prompters of Steno’s geological principles Criterion 3 deals with preservation that takes place as solid objects that are produced from a fluid. Solid objects retain clues to the place and manner of their production, while, implicitly, the containing fluid does not store information. Reconstructions on past processes dealt with by Steno are related to fossils, crystals, mineral ores in rocks, and sedimentary strata; in everyday language “solid evidence.” There is a link here to considerations that young Steno made in Chaos on Wednesday, 16 March 1659, when he pondered the great variety of snow crystals, adding six small sketches (see copy in Poulsen and Snorrason, 1986, Fig. 1, p. 15), and alluded to their fragility: “How suddenly the small flakes of snow or ice on the wooden frame in front of my window vanish away! They do not even leave behind a wet mark.” One week later, he mentioned Kepler’s little book on hexangular snow (Kepler, 1611). Patterns formed by ice crystals in a window, snow flakes, or footprints in snow vanish when the ice melts or evaporates and are thus lost forever unless a description, a photo, or drawing is made to remind us. Steno could have been stimulated to study snow crystals by Erasmus Bartholin (1625–1698), the younger brother of Thomas and, like him, a university professor, who had returned to Copenhagen from his grand educational tour in 1656, the year Steno entered Copenhagen University as a student. Erasmus Bartholin undertook a study of snow flakes in a small dissertation in which he described their flat, varied hexagonal form (Erasmus Bartholin, 1661; see Garboe, 1954, p. 33, note 42). In Chaos, Steno did not however mention Erasmus Bartholin (Ziggelaar, 2008, personal commun.). It looks like a connection, although it may have been coincidental, that an interest in drawing sketches of snow crystals in one of the coldest winters ever in Copenhagen shortly preceded two pioneering reports on crystals to be published by Danes in 1669: Steno’s on crystals that retain the interface angles during growth by accretion, and Erasmus Bartholin’s on experiments with the birefringent Icelandic crystal. In the following section, my focus will be on molding, a technique as well as a principle that may have been the seed for the first of Steno’s three criteria.

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MOLDING: A TECHNIQUE AND A PRINCIPLE Among solid objects in contact before hardening is complete, the one which makes an imprint on the others is the oldest—the mold is older than the cast. This general “principle of molding” of solid objects allowed Steno to draw inferences on the relative age or chronology of related objects such as fossils, crystals, and mineral ores included in rocks. The aim was not to answer “how long ago” but to answer “which came first” (Cutler, 2003, p. 113). Steno’s first criterion, that on molding, represents an early step toward a chronology of Earth, a main theme in the “Prodromus on Solids” of 1669, which was communicated as follows: Therefore, if at least all solids have grown from a fluid, if bodies mutually alike in all respects were also produced in the same way, if of two solids mutually in contact the first to harden was that which impresses its surface characteristics on the other surface, it will be easy, given the solid and its location, to make a definite statement about the place of its production. And this indeed is a general consideration of a solid enclosed by a solid. (Scherz, 1969, p. 159)

A primer on molding is found in 1667. Bound next to the “Carcharodon-head Dissected” is the “Dissection of a Dogfish” (Historia dissecti piscis; Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 147–155), the final in a series of three treatises. The latter two were appended—or hidden (Springer, 1971, p. 318)—after the main treatise, that on muscles. The so-called “geological” works of Steno from Florence 1667 and 1669 have many intertwining themes with biology. At first, they appear “uncoordinated, a curious compendium of diverse observations that a modern scientist would consider unrelated” (Rosenberg, 2001, p. 141). To get an idea of the variety of biological themes included in Steno’s socalled “Geological Papers,” please consult Table 1, or Scherz (1969, p. 20–21). Thus, the “Dissection of a Dogfish,” involves the dissection of a female shark, a Scymnus lichia as defined by Scherz (1987– 1988, v. 1, p. 180), a work that is best known because of a remarkable statement, soon recorded in a review in the Transactions of

TABLE 1. BIOLOGICAL SUBJECTS DEALT WITH IN STENO’S “GEOLOGICAL” PAPERS Page Subjects In the “Carcharodon-head Dissected” (1667) 75–77 The ampullary tubes and the system of mucous canals in the shark. These were later described in the Torpedo fish and named after Stefano Lorenzini who paid great homage to Steno. 79–81 Skin and membranes of shark. 83–87 Eye of shark. 87 Ear of shark. 87–89 Brain and motor system of shark. The “Steno-experiment,” i.e., reversible hind-limb paralysis induced instantaneously during temporary clamping of the abdominal aorta. The paralysis is later shown to be caused by ischemia of the spinal cord. 91–93 Teeth of shark. 120 Illustrations of the eye and the brain of shark (Tabula II). In the “Prodromus on Solids” (1669) 155–159 Compartmentalization of the water space in animals partly to show that “stones inside our body (gall-stones, kidney-stones, etc.) are produced in an external fluid”; see also Yamada (2003). Note: The pagination refers to the English translation in Gustav Scherz: Steno—Geological Papers (1969).

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the Royal Society of London (1667, v. 2, p. 628), that ovaries in viviparous animals, then called female testes, were analogous to the ovaries of oviparous animals (see Kardel, 1994b, p. 46). This treatise starts as follows: I will not yet end my previous straggling, since the most serene Grand Duke sent me another dogfish to be dissected in Pisa. I wished to add its description briefly related to the previous descriptions since it presents many connections with them. (Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 149)

However, the main connection thematically between these two appended studies is, as far as I can see, that they both deal with anatomical examinations of two different shark species. The reason for bringing Steno’s “Dissection of a Dogfish” to the reader’s attention here is a thematic parallel between a main geological theme of the “Prodromus on Solids” published two years later and the following quotation and illustration (Fig. 2) taken from the “Dissection of a Dogfish”: Substance of the oviducts. To look at the substance of the oviducts more thoroughly, I examined them after they were boiled. I saw something fairly pretty as appears in figures. [They] show a cross section of an oviduct, [and] the inner surface of the same oviduct. Here I observe three things. 1. The substance itself of the tunic has appeared fibrous to me, which is observed in like manner in other animals. 2. All the inner surface is full of nipples arranged in parallel lines extending over the length of the oviduct. It is perhaps through these nipples that the milky humour which is to be changed into the substance of the embryo is secreted. It is perhaps through these nipples that the egg increasing with time is attached to the oviduct. 3. The amount of milky humor left in the oviduct has been hardened by boiling. This proves that there is a great affinity of this humour with white of egg. On the surface of this hardened milk, as I had taken away the tunic of the oviduct and its nipples, a parallel structure of nipples appeared most elegantly for the same reason that shapeless wax poured in plaster moulds, when hardened, represents the shape of the mould once the plaster has been removed. So that one actually should not assign this to imagination rather than to experience, I call upon the testimony of Vincenzio Viviani, mathematician of the most serene Grand Duke, who was present as a keen observer of these facts and of others contained in the present book. (Translation from Latin by Paul Maquet by permission, from Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 153–154. My emphasis in italics added.)

This is indeed the description of an application of molding. The research was expressly witnessed by Vincenzio Viviani (1622–1703), the mathematician and member of Accademia del Cimento of Florence, who, in Steno’s absence, would soon take care of the printing of the “Prodromus on Solids.” In the Prodromus, molding was proposed as a principle to determine the relative age of related geological elements. The practice of molding was familiar to Steno from his youth in a goldsmith family. However, a search for the word “mold” (or “mould”) in the English translation of Steno’s biological works (Paul Maquet, unpublished, ~150,000 words) and a similar search for the Latin word “modulus” including a search in Chaos (Ziggelaar, 2008, personal commun.) were otherwise negative.

Figure 2. The surface of the genital tract of a female shark drawn by Steno (Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 155). The application of a molding technique enabled Steno to visualize minute surface structures by studying the cast.

COMMENTS AND CONCLUSION For more than three centuries serious misunderstandings of some of Steno’s researches hampered the proper evaluation of his scientific works as a whole (Kardel, 1994b, p. 55, thesis II): a theory integrating the structure and motion of the muscles unwarrantably was considered to be a complete mistake until its rehabilitation in the 1990s. A survey of Steno’s biological and geological research then showed the author working throughout with speed and accuracy in his research on multiple subjects, always with an eye for formulating observation-based theories oriented in space and time. There is no cleft between the biological and the geological works. Another important feature brought along within recent years is the publication of Steno’s student notes, the Chaos manuscript (Ziggelaar, 1997). Several aspects of Steno’s research can be traced back to his teaching in the school or to books read at the university. Thus primed, Steno took up biological as well as geological research when requested and when offered the right conditions by benefactors. The coincidence of several factors in time and place made the transition from anatomical studies to emphasis on geosciences possible in 1666. Tuscany possesses a great variety of geological formations that are fairly easily accessed, and this part of Italy had a long tradition in the study of geosciences. Such studies met grand ducal interest and gained support as academic research. What triggered Steno was seeing with his own eyes the teeth of a giant shark when commissioned to study its head. He already knew about their match, the glossopetrae fossils. It is evident from Steno’s reports on glands, heart, reproductive organs, muscles, and the brain, and from reviews in London and Paris, as well as from contemporary comments that he was

Prompters of Steno’s geological principles

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equipped with highly recognized skills as the first to observe anatomical structures and interpret their physiological significance. Discrepancies between concepts and observations falsified old theories and triggered their replacement, while similarities corroborated new as well as old theories (Kardel, 1994b, p. 80). Steno explicitly avoided drawing conclusions from single observations. He was stimulated when meeting opposition as he did in Amsterdam, as described earlier, but he was also shaken, as shown here in the “Elements of Myology”: I have often desired to undertake this work [on muscles]. But I would never pretend that what pleases me should be accepted by all others. According to an old saying, love makes people blind to their own progeny, and it is a frequent experience that what displeases other people is often what pleases authors most. (Kardel, 1994a, p. 93)

The geometrical theory of muscle contraction clearly displeased people. Steno’s discoveries and interpretations corrected errors in the anatomical literature from classical authors to Descartes (Kardel, 1994b, p. 92). He even took to task his teacher, Thomas Bartholin in Copenhagen, who, against the ancient authors, declared with a will that the heart and not the liver is the seat of the production of the blood, but his 26-yr-old student concluded the heart is only a muscle. Upon his arrival in Tuscany in 1666, Steno came up with three criteria to reconstruct those past processes that formed the present days’ outlook of Earth. As hinted at previously by Gould, such criteria are even essential when trying to reconstruct how these criteria were themselves proposed. In the lack of solid evidence such as references or written comments by involved persons, there are circumstantial evidences. Reconstructing Steno’s proposal of these criteria then relates to an already long tradition for geosciences in Italy (Drake, 1996, p. 113; Vai and Cavazza, 2006, p. 59), to inspiration from French authors Gassendi and Descartes quoted in Chaos (Yamada, 2003, p. 97), and to the fact that similar studies were undertaken in Britain by Hooke (Drake, 1996, p. 112–120). I found it relevant to give this input on links back to Steno’s youth and education. Lines of connection between Steno’s research in geosciences and his Chaos manuscript have also been drawn by Hansen (2000), Rosenberg (2006), and Yamada (2006). Because of an unmistakable thematic link between research and the Chaos manuscript, one more example is to be given, although unrelated to geology. On Thursday, 10 March 1659, Steno quoted the case record from Borel on a girl who died from hydrocephalus. Ten years after writing this in the Chaos, at Innsbruck, Austria, Steno took up this issue when reporting the dissection of a calf with hydrocephalus. In both cases, a tumor of the brain resulted in accumulation of water in the brain’s cavities, causing deformities of the brain and skull. In the latter case, Steno described an obstruction of liquor flow from the cavities to the brain’s surface thereby antedating the discovery of cerebrospinal fluid dynamics (see Kardel, 1993) and the application of such an insight into

Figure 3. Enigmatic notes in Steno’s handwriting, partly in English (source, see Ziggelaar, 1997). Reproduced by permission Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence, Italy.

brain surgery and pathology initiated unknowing of Steno’s contribution by Walter E. Dandy in 1921. The Chaos manuscript ended on the shelves of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence, Italy, where it was found in 1946 by the scholar on Steno, Gustav Scherz (1895–1971) (Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 11). The 92 folio pages of the Chaos are bound together with many more sheets of paper and manuscripts. Many are relevant to the history of geosciences, notably a sermon using geological metaphors is the “Ornaments, Monuments, Signs, Arguments” (Ornamenta). It dates from Steno’s time as a priest in Florence in 1675–1677 (Scherz, 1969, p. 249–269). Other papers contain hardly comprehensible remarks written in Steno’s hand, partly in English, on geographical items in North and South America, Africa, and Asia (see Kardel, 1994b, p. 87, note 221) (Fig. 3). They are all bound together with the printer’s manuscript to the “Prodromus on Solids.” Altogether, they show the long impetus to obtain knowledge about Earth, which reached its impressive climax within barely two years in Tuscany. Now, to end up in Florence, Italy, the Chaos manuscript must have followed Steno at least during some of his extensive travels. It could have served him as a source book of literature and information that was presented to him in his childhood, in the school, and at

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the university in Copenhagen by his esteemed teachers, written down in a chaotic, unstructured blend with his own early observations and reflections. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I acknowledge the inspiration from an expert panel assembled for a symposium by the History of Geology section of the Geological Society of America in Philadelphia, October 2006. I thank Gary D. Rosenberg for inviting me to participate and also to make a contribution for the present volume and for valuable critique, and the History of Geology Division and the International Division, Geological Society of America, for funding that facilitated my travel to Philadelphia. At crucial moments, I have benefited from the support and critique by Toshihiro Yamada. I am indebted to Jens Morten Hansen for constructive critique and to August Ziggelaar for contributing researches from his e-file of Steno’s Chaos manuscript. I thank Paul Maquet for permission to quote unpublished translations. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence, Italy, gave the permission to print photographic material from manuscripts. REFERENCES CITED Bartholin, E., 1661, Figura nivis dissertatio: Copenhagen, Matthias Godichen, 42 p., one plate. Bartholin, T., 1961, On the Burning of His Library (1670); and On Medical Travel (1674) (trans. Charles D. O’Malley): University of Kansas Publication 9, 101 p. Borelli, G.A., 1989, On the Movement of Animals (1680/81) (trans. Paul Maquet): Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag, 469 p. Croone, W., 2000, On the reason of the movement of the muscles (1664) (trans. Paul Maquet with introduction by Margaret Nayler): Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, v. 90, part 1, 130 p. Cutler, A., 2003, The Seashell on the Mountaintop: New York, Dutton, 228 p. Dandy, W.E., 1921, Diagnosis and treatment of hydrocephalus due to occlusion of the foramina of Magendie and Luschka: Surgery, Gynecology & Obstetrics, v. 32, p. 112–124. Drake, E.T., 1996, Restless Genius: Robert Hooke and His Earthly Thoughts: Oxford: University Press, 386 p. (Euclid’s Elements can be found on Google as they are indicated in the text.) Garboe, A., 1949, Thomas Bartholin, Volume 1 (of 2 vol.): Copenhagen, Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, 212 p., v. 5. Garboe, A., 1954, Nicolaus Steno (Niels Stensen) and Erasmus Bartholinus; Two 17th Century Danish Scientists and the Foundation of Exact Geology and Crystallography, in Geological Survey of Denmark, series IV, v. 3, no. 9, 48 p. Gould, S.J., 1981, The titular bishop of Titiopolis: Natural History, v. 90, p. 20–24. (Also published for the centennial of Charles Darwin in the author’s essay collection, 1984, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: New York, Norton Paperback, p. 69–78). Hansen, J.M., 2000, Stregen i sandet, bølgen på vandet: Copenhagen, Fremad, 440 p. Kardel, T., 1986, A specimen of observations upon the muscles, in Poulsen, E., and Snorrason, E., eds., Nicolaus Steno, a Reconsideration by Danish scientists: Gentofte, Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, p. 97–134. (Annotated facsimile reprint of 1710 English translation of Steno’s De musculis, Copenhagen, 1664.) Kardel, T., 1993, Steno on hydrocephalus: Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, v. 2, no. 3, p. 171–202. Kardel, T., 1994a, Steno on muscles: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, v. 84, part 1, 252 p. (English translation by S. Emmanuel Collins and Paul Maquet of the Elementorum myologiæ specimen, 1667.)

Kardel, T., 1994b, Steno—Life, Science, Philosophy: Copenhagen, Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 42, 159 p. Kardel, T., 1997, Function and structure in early modern muscular mechanics. Four episodes and a dialogue between Stensen and Borelli on two chief muscular systems: Acta Anatomica, v. 159, p. 61–70, doi: 10.1159/000147966. Kardel, T., 2008, Nicolaus Steno’s new myology (1667): Rather than muscle, the motor fibre should be called an animal’s organ of movement: Nuncius (Firenze), v. 23, no. 1, p. 37–64. Kepler, J., 1611, Strena seu de Nie Sexangula: Francof ad Meonium, 24 p. Kermit, H., 2003, Niels Stensen, the Scientist Who Was Beatified: Leominster, Gracewing, 179 p. Maar, V., ed., 1910, Nicolai Stenonis Opera Philosophica, 2 Volumes: Copenhagen, Tryde, 264/367 p. Noe-Nygaard, A., 1986, Nicolaus Steno, paleontologist, geologist, crystallographer, in Poulsen, E., and Snorrason, E., eds., Nicolaus Steno, a Reconsideration by Danish Scientists: Gentofte, Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, p. 167–190. Poulsen, J.E., and Snorrason, E., eds., 1986, Nicolaus Steno, a Reconsideration by Danish scientists: Gentofte, Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, 224 p. Rosenberg, G.D., 2001, An artistic perspective on the continuity of space and origin of modern geologic thought: Earth Sciences History, v. 20, no. 2, p. 127–155. Rosenberg, G.D., 2006, Nicolaus Steno’s Chaos and the shaping of evolutionary thought in the Scientific Revolution: Geology, v. 34, p. 793–796, doi: 10.1130/G22655.1. Scherz, G., ed., 1958, Nicolaus Steno and his Indice: Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, Copenhagen, v. 15, p. 21–26 and 292–293. Scherz, G., 1960, Niels Stensen’s first dissertation: Journal of History Medicine and Allied Sciences, v. 15, no. 3, p. 247–264. Scherz, G., ed., 1969, Steno Geological Papers: Copenhagen, Odense University Press, Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 20, 370 p. Scherz, G., 1976, Stensen, Niels: Dictionary of Scientific Biography, v. 13, p. 30–34. Scherz, G., 1987–1988, Niels Stensen, eine Biographie, 2 Volumes: Leipzig, St. Benno Verlag, 376 + 318 p. (most comprehensive biography). Springer, S., 1971, It began with a shark, in Scherz, G., ed., Dissertations on Steno as Geologist: Copenhagen, Odense University Press, Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 23, p. 308–319. Steno, N., 1965, Nicolaus Steno’s lecture on the anatomy of the brain; introduction by G. Scherz: Copenhagen, Nyt Nordisk Forlag, Arnold Busck, 208 p. (Facsimile of original in French, with annotated translations in English and German.) Steno, N., 1667, Canis Carchariae dissectum caput, in Steno, N., Elementorum Myologiae Specimen: Florence, Stella, p. 90–110. (English translation in Scherz, G., ed., 1969, Steno—Geological Papers, p. 66–131.) Steno, N., 1669, De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus: Florence, Stella, 78 p. (English translation in Scherz, G., ed., 1969, Steno—Geological Papers, p. 134–234.) Vai, G.B., and Cavazza, W., 2006, Ulisse Aldrovandi and the origin of geology and science, in Vai, G.I., and Caldwell, W.G.E , eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 43–63, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(04). Yamada, T., 2003, Stenonian revolution or Leibnizian revival?: Constructing geo-history in the seventeenth century: Historia Scientiarum, v. 13, p. 75–100. Yamada, T., 2006, Kircher and Steno on the “geocosm,” with a reassessment of the role of Gassendi’s work, in Vai, G.I., and Caldwell, W.G.E., eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 65–80, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(05). Ziggelaar, A., 1997, Chaos, Niels Stensen’s Chaos-manuscript, Copenhagen, 1659: Copenhagen, Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 44, 520 p. (References in the text to the Chaos are given as the date of the note heading each text. Steno’s Chaos manuscript is preserved in “Posteriori di Galileo, tomo 32, Accademia del Cimento, parte III, Carteggio, v. 17, Scritti di Niccolò Stenone” in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence, Italy.) MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008 Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

The age of Earth in Niels Stensen’s geology August Ziggelaar† Sankt Knuds Stiftelse, Stenosgade 4 A, 1616 Copenhagen V, Denmark

ABSTRACT The interest of the Danish scientist Niels Stensen (1638–1686) in geology begins with his manuscript Chaos of 1659. It shows how he is influenced by Pierre Borel (ca. 1620–1689), René Descartes (1596–1650), Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680), Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), and others. His main contribution to geology is his pioneering work from 1669 De Solido intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento Dissertationis Prodromus. The Deluge described by Holy Scripture plays an important role in Stensen’s theory and his reconstruction of Earth history. Stensen had become a Catholic in 1667. However, his acceptance of what scripture says about the Deluge is sincere. He had no means of checking time scales nor would deviation from Holy Scripture be dangerous for him, since a Jesuit, Martino Martini (1614–1661), in 1658 had published a history of China that did not fit well with the time scale in Holy Scripture. The present paper mentions other scientists’ sincere adherence to diluvial theories, like Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), whereas Carl von Linné (Linnaeus, 1707–1778) was more reserved. After 1840, diluvianism was finally dropped because of Agassiz’ (1807–1873) discovery of glaciations. Keywords: Niels Stensen, Nicolaus Stenonis, Deluge, Prodromus, Descartes, Kircher, Leibniz, Martino Martini. INTRODUCTION The eleventh-century philosopher Ibn Sîna, known to western civilization as Avicenna (980–1037), accepted that Earth was once covered by the sea. He concluded that parts of aquatic animals, such as shells, can be found in many stones when they are broken (Avicenna, 1927, p. 28). Bernard Palissy (ca. 1510–1590) wrote in 1563 that he believed that fossils were remnants of animals and plants. However, he rejected the idea that they were remnants of the biblical Flood, suggesting that inland fossils occurred where lakes once were (Palissy, 1563; Gillespie, 1981, v. 10, p. 280–281). †

E-mail: [email protected].

In 1616, Fabio Colonna (1567–1640) published a dissertation on glossopetrae. He recognized that they were fossils, but, as Morello (1981, p. 70) notes: “The idea of the geological history of the Earth which emerged from later studies of geology, is absent.” NIELS STENSEN’S EARLY YEARS The Chaos Manuscript On Niels Stensen’s first interest in geology, we have information from his Chaos manuscript. Niels Stensen (1638–1686) studied medicine at Copenhagen University from 1656 onward. From August 1658 to March 1660, an army of the Swedish King

Ziggelaar, A., 2009, The age of Earth in Niels Stensen’s geology, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 135–142, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(09). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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Carl X Gustav (1622–1660) besieged Copenhagen after having occupied most of the country. During this period, Niels Stensen could continue his studies only privately by reading books and in conversation with competent tutors. About this, we have a rare document in his Chaos manuscript, which was composed between the 8th of March and the 3rd of July 1659 and has now been edited and published (Stensen, 1659, in Ziggelaar, 1997). It contains excerpts from the books that he read, but also interesting remarks on his own method of studying and researching. These remarks are results of his readings, but also of the advice that others gave him, particularly his former school teacher and now dear friend Ole Borch (1626–1690). René Descartes (1596–1650) Clearly, in these early studies, Stensen is inspired by Cartesian philosophy and tries to follow Cartesian method, at least in an effort for exactness, but he differs from Descartes (1596– 1650) in his emphasis on observation. Descartes’ own method was: mathematically exact derivations from evident principles; Niels Stensen starts out from accurate observation. Descartes pretended to arrive to his conclusions by sheer deductions. Stensen is guided by everything that others have found and demonstrated before him, which explains his many excerpts from books. Also, in science, Stensen followed a habit that he had acquired as a boy but that was opposite to the method Descartes claimed to use: Stensen sought the company of reliable people in order to learn from them. Thus, conversation with good Catholics strongly influenced his conversion to the Catholic Church. However, it also functioned in his scientific method: He was informed by earlier authors, their findings, their methods, their opinions, but in the final analysis, he relied on his own experience, experiments, and criteria. This does not mean that Stensen fell back on the gullibility of many scientists to which Descartes reacted. If Stensen’s first manuscript without too much criticism collects what others had written, his later practice and writings would show how he subjects all information to severe control by his experiments. Already in Chaos, Stensen, among other criticism, has critical notes on Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680), Bernhardus Varenius (Bernhard Varen) (1622–1650), and Nicolas Peiresc (1580–1637). Thus, in his Chaos manuscript, Stensen adhered to Cartesian method, and he would continue to do so during all his life. However, as he formulated it later on: he did not criticize the Cartesian method, but lack of faithfulness to this method (Stenonis, 1941, v. I, p. 394). Toward the end of the manuscript, Chaos has an elaborate excerpt from Pierre Gassendi’s (1592–1650) edition of Epicurus’ philosophy (Gassendi, 1649; Stensen, 1659, col. 161–184, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 393–447). Stensen himself did not make the excerpt; he copied one made by Ole Borch. Apparently Ole Borch tried to present Stensen with a broader choice of modern philosophy as a correction to Stensen’s too exclusive enthusiasm for Cartesianism. Also in the manuscript, we find some critical remark on Descartes himself, which probably can be traced back to Ole Borch.

Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680) The relations between Niels Stensen and Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680) are of special interest, first of all because the two persons are so different as to seem to be opposite poles. Stensen very accurately limited himself to that which he had observed himself with certainty; Kircher made a lot of observations, by himself and others, to support his far-fetched speculations on the connection between the most diverse phenomena. Kircher was 37 yr older than Stensen. Stensen was only 21 yr old when he read the book on magnetism that Kircher had published in 1643. Kircher, born in central Europe, Germany, a Jesuit, and afterward settled in Rome, was a staunch Catholic. Niels Stensen was a Lutheran of strict observance as it was practiced in Scandinavia and north Germany. Stensen, however, came into good relations with Kircher, visited, and corresponded with him. Most of this is already evident from Chaos. The second large work that Stensen excerpts, next after Pierre Borel’s (ca. 1620–1689) four Centuriæ (Borel, 1656), is Kircher’s book on magnetism. Stensen had at his disposal the second edition, from 1643. It is the longest excerpt in Chaos. Here, one might ask: What has the physical discipline of magnetism to do with geology? Not as much in those days as now, but Kircher named magnetism a kind of active principle “a hidden quality,” pervading all matter and making it active, and thus also applicable in geologic activities of Earth. Stensen notes that Kircher does not totally deny Epicurus’ atoms (Stensen, 1659, col. 34, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 116). He also excerpts Kircher’s speculations on “a certain force” causing the shapes in fossil stones (Stensen, 1659, col. 39, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 125–126). However, in 1669, in his book on geology, Stensen does not mention Kircher’s speculation, although he makes the important observation that in quartz crystals, the faces always make the same angles with each other (Steno’s law). Kircher has a chapter on electric (electric bodies, like amber), on electric attraction, and on mercury and their actions. Stensen excerpts it but adds a personal note that research should be done on all this (Stensen, 1659, col. 42, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 132). In the middle of Stensen’s long excerpt he has another personal note (no. 59): One sins against the majesty of God by being unwilling to look into nature’s own works and contenting oneself with reading others; in this way one forms and creates for oneself various fanciful notions and thus not only does one not enjoy the pleasure of looking into God’s wonders but also wastes time that should be spent on necessities and to the benefit of one’s neighbor and states many things which are unworthy of God. Such are those Scholastics, such are most philosophers and those who devote their whole lives to the study of logic. Time is therefore not to be spent on explaining and defending, indeed scarcely on examining them, and one must not boldly and impetuously assign anything to art on the basis of observing a single thing. From now on then I shall spend my time, not on musings, but solely in investigation, experience and recording of natural objects and reports of the ancients on the observation of such things, as well as in testing out these reports, if that be possible. (Stensen, 1659, col. 57–58, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 159–160)

The age of Earth in Niels Stensen’s geology Probably this note reflects a conversation with Ole Borch and aims at Kircher’s scientific method. This does not mean that Stensen altogether rejected what Kircher had written. At the end of the excerpt, he has a note about how to digest all of Kircher’s stories under some titles (Stensen, 1659, col. 63, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 169). Again, we may guess that critical remarks are due to Ole Borch. Stensen retained a lifelong respect for the person of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher along with a critical attitude to Kircher’s method in science. For the influence of other persons on Stensen during his writing of Chaos, one should consult its 1997 edition (Stensen, 1659, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 461–465). Geology in Chaos Niels Stensen’s road to geology is straightforward. His first inspiration to it came from France and from Denmark. Already in 1659 as a student of medicine at the age of 21, he read the observations of the French physician Pierre Borel from 1656. The first evidence of Stensen’s interest of geology is in his Chaos in column 10 on Thursday the 10th of March (Stensen, 1659, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 46) in his excerpt of observation 62 of Pierre Borel’s second Centuria (Borel, 1656). Borel wrote that he had found shells from marine animals, even fossilized fishes at places far from the sea. For Borel, this was evidence that either the fossils were a remnant from the “Old Flood” (they were found at places far from the sea) or that the sea level had slowly changed. Borel even appeals to a story about an anchor and a ship and skeletons found far from the sea. Niels Stensen noted some of this with interest in his Chaos manuscript, though not the story about ship, anchor, and skeletons (Stensen, 1659, col. 16, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 58–59). It is true that Stensen carefully excerpted every observation in Borel’s book, but here he adds one of his marginal notes, which are otherwise rare around this place in the manuscript: “That seas change their beds” (Stensen, 1659, col. 10, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 46). In col. 16, Stensen underlines that the bed of the seas has slowly been changed and quotes Borel’s words: “On the change of the surface of the Earth I plan a book” (Stensen, 1659, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 58–59). In the pen of him whose most important contribution to the origins of modern science would be his book of 1669 on geology, this looks like a prophetic or programmatic sentence. However, Stensen does not do more here than copy word for word what Pierre Borel had written. Nevertheless, the excerpt and underlining in the manuscript suggest that Borel may have inspired Stensen and are in any case evidence of Stensen’s personal interest in the subject. From Gassendi’s (1592–1655) biography of Peiresc (1580– 1637) (Gassendi, 1658), Stensen only takes a few notes, but one of these is Peiresc’s explanation of volcanism by subterranean channels (Stensen, 1659, col. 102, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 258). On the 24th of April, a Sunday, when he was possibly indulging in his own interests, he excerpted Bernhard Varen’s (1622– 1650) Geographia Generalis (1650, 1 ed., 1681, 2 ed.) and,

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among other things, passages about subterranean water, fire and channels, also applying it to hot springs (Stensen, 1659, col. 104, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 262–263). Stensen’s first literary scientific production would be the disputation that he held in Amsterdam, on the 8th of July 1660, on hot springs (Stenonis, 1660). Glossopetrae and Teeth of Sharks However, the previous notes are not sufficient to explain how later on the anatomist Niels Stensen became a pioneer in geology. For this, we have to look to what he wrote on the teeth of sharks. He knew fossil shark teeth, called glossopetrae, from his preceptor Thomas Bartholin and his museum (Bartholin, 1662). He had probably also seen them in the Royal Danish Kunstkammer when he was a student in Copenhagen, in 1659. In 1666, Niels Stensen dissected a shark, caught off Leghorn, and its head was brought to Florence, when Stensen was there. As the sharp-eyed anatomist he was, he observed that the teeth of this shark were in all details like glossopetrae and thus realized that fossils had organic origin (Stenonis, 1667; Cutler, 2003). As a pioneer of geology, Stensen utilized rational arguments to indicate how these fossilized shark teeth ended up in sediments now present above sea level, even atop mountains. How the anatomist could become, not only a geologist, but even a pioneer in geology is better explained by Keith Thomson (2005, p. 165–166): Steno had a knack for getting straight to the processes underlying phenomena, and to do this he relied not on old-fashioned hypotheses, but the evidence of his eyes. Perhaps it was from his training as an anatomist, perhaps it was also because he had not been trained in the geological orthodoxies of the day; for whatever reason, before three years had elapsed, Steno had grasped some of the fundamentals of how the earth works.

As Martin Guntau expresses it: Niels Stensen was the first scholar who arrived at a historical analysis of a region from a geologic viewpoint…His first ordering of the history of the Earth in several phases beginning with an actualistic starting point is one of the notes which make Stensen one of the most originally thinking geologists of his time. (Guntau, 1996, p. 87)

Only in the eighteenth century would the present way of looking at history finally prevail, but Stensen is one of those who prepared geology for this development. He did so because he saw the geological changes in Tuscany in a sequence of time that included also events before and after the Deluge (cf. Guntau, 1996, p. 85). In his work about the history of geology, Helmut Hölder (1960, p. 28) noted that Steno was the first to present a history of the Earth “before the Flood.” Hölder writes (1960, p. 130) that “during the 17th and 18th centuries the teachings about the Flood that were included in the first outlines of the history of the world prevailed for some time because the biblical account of it and the geological findings seemed to overlap.” Leibniz

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(1646–1716) (Fig. 1) thought similarly to Stensen, and it may be one of the reasons for Leibniz’ enthusiasm about Stensen’s geological research. In 1749, the editor of Leibniz’s Protogæa, Christ L.V.D. Scheid, noted that it would be difficult to deny that some miracle happened at the Deluge. Therefore, Scheid also finds it a waste of time when Niels Stensen, though otherwise very sharp and subtle in his judgment, wanted, Scheid says, to prove the possibility of the universal Flood by apodictic mathematical arguments (Leibniz, 1749, introduction, p. XVIII). EARTH’S HISTORY AND HOLY SCRIPTURE Right from his first publications, during his stay as a young student in Holland, Niels Stensen demonstrated his admiration for a personal God who reveals himself in creation (Stenonis, 1910, in particular, v. I, p. 13–15, 17, 81, 142, 206). Stensen never publicly denied his faith in God’s revelation in Holy Scripture. On the contrary, he displayed a profound faith when he converted and was devoted to the cause of the Catholic Church until he ended his days in north Germany. A most striking example is his letter to Kircher (1601–1680) explaining why he had become a priest. He writes: “I found that God’s benefits toward me are so great that I cannot do else than give Him the best in the best way, as far as my weakness permitted me” (Stenonis, 1952, v. 1, p. 301). Today, one may wonder how Stensen could hope to reconcile his history of Earth with the chronology of the Bible. Could Stensen be sincere in his efforts to reconcile Holy Scripture and geology? Two considerations are in order: the state of the relationship between the Christian faith and science in those days and the scientific view of geological history in the early days of geology. We know what happened with Galileo (1564–1642). When Stensen published his Prodromus on geology, only 36 yr had elapsed since the condemnation of Galileo for having defended the Copernican system. Stensen must have known of that, he lived in the town where Galileo had lived. Indeed, he praises the “great Galileo” in his Prodromus, though not just for his ideas on astronomy. Niels Stensen was not an astronomer himself, and it may have been hard for him to take a well-founded stand on the question about the astronomic world system. When he does speak about astronomy, his position is not quite clear. One might get the impression that he is oriented toward the ideas of Descartes, e.g., Stensen is sure that “the sky” (the celestial sphere) consists of parts contiguous to each other. This fits with Descartes’ vortex theory (col. 97, note 91, in Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 250 and 437). Descartes (1596–1650) had proposed his special system of the world in such a way that it escaped condemnation by the Church. On the other hand, Stensen did publish his Prodromus 36 yr after the condemnation of Galileo, and by then the astronomy of Copernicus had already conquered the conviction of most astronomers. Mikolaw Copernicus (1473–1543) himself had not been condemned by the Church. Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who thus lived before Stensen, was burned on the stake for purely religious heresies, not for his opinions about the world system, which were more or less Copernican. Had this not been the case,

Figure 1. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716).

then his condemnation would have been used as a precedent in Galileo’s trial. Bruno was sentenced for dogmatic errors, e.g., that Christ was, like his Apostles, a magician and that the Holy Spirit was the soul of the world (Thorndike, 1941, v. 6, p. 427–428). The question of Earth’s history and biblical history, particularly the Flood, was not so much a question of space as of time. One might doubt how relevant this distinction is, but, after all, the danger of the Copernican system was not just that it proposed another world system. The scientific ideas about Earth had at all times been different from that of the Bible. In the Old and New Testament, Earth is thought of as a flat disk resting on some pillars located in the Far East and West, but long before Stensen, scientists had known that it was a sphere. In the Bible, earthquakes are definitely presented as God’s shaking the pillars that hold up the Earth (Job 9:6, 26:11; Psalms 75:4; cf. also Psalms 104:32; Amos 9:5, 2:13; Psalms 18:8.16, 82:1–5; Isaiah 24:18–21; Hebrews 12:26; Aggaeus 2:6.21). This terrible phenomenon in nature had to be explained quite differently by “modern” science since at least the beginnings of the Christian era. What was more serious about Copernicus’ system—certainly in the view of the Pope—was that the new world system pulled the chair out from under God: the heavens, God’s seat, was no longer seen as a fixed place in space. With regard to the question of time, one must deal with the chronology of the Old and New Testament differently. Indeed, it would be very dangerous to deny that, e.g., Jesus was born in the

The age of Earth in Niels Stensen’s geology days of Herod the Elder and died under Pontius Pilate. The last event is even part of the Creed, and thus it is one of the articles of faith. There is no good reason to doubt the dating of this event. On the other hand, nothing in the Creed is stated about the Flood or the chronology of creation, only the fact that God is the creator of Heaven and Earth, i.e., the entire universe. After the six days of creation, the Bible measures history in generations of people. Surely from this “information,” one could come up with dates, e.g., for the Flood. This dating is now unacceptable. However, it may be said that right after this story and onward, i.e., after the history of the patriarchs, biblical chronology is substantially correct. Apparent differences between modern opinion and biblical chronology may even be due to hypercriticism more than to the Bible itself. With regard to the scientific view of geological history in the early days of geology, we have little idea of how scientists and other people looked at the dimension of time. At a time when geology and more generally, science had no experimental tools for either measuring or imagining the true length of geological time…one can understand the acceptance of the less common and most ancestral pre-historical process to explain the facts observed. (Gian Battista Vai [2004, p. 237] about the Flood in geology)

Nowadays, we are accustomed to a time scale of some billions of years. That was a big step, since only millions of years were still usual until the end of the nineteenth century. The step was caused by the discovery of radioactivity in the beginning of the past century. This came along without much alarm also within the Church communities. Going back in history of science, we see the step taken in the eighteenth and nineteenth century from a few thousands of years to millions of years in the time scale of Earth history. This change in time scale may seem less significant for our eyes, but impressions made on our minds grow with their external cause in a logarithmic scale. Plotted on a logarithmic scale, the step from thousands to millions of years is as large as that from millions to billions of years. We still wonder how Niels Stensen and others at his time could have believed that the history of Earth is measurable in so few thousands of years, but Stensen’s geology is built on “sequences of catastrophes”—most of all the biblical Flood, but also, after undermining erosion of upper strata of Earth and sudden filling up again by some other flood. Stensen and others do not seem to have taken sedimentation rates into account when measuring the time elapsed. Stensen and others—particularly Leibniz (1646–1719)—were quite taken by the apparent qualitative agreement between biblical history and geologic history. Widespread inundations have occurred, also in historical times when and where humans lived. In 1749, Leibniz (posthumously) stated in his Protogæa (p. 12–13) that Steno had already had some not so horrible thoughts about breakdowns and sediments. He had done research in a large part of Europe and at several places noted traces of broken down faults. I remember that I heard him often tell us and congratulate himself because he could confirm the belief in Holy Script and general deluge by natural arguments, not without fruit for piety.

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No doubt Stensen was sincere. We have no reason to doubt it knowing his personality and life. He had no reason to dissimulate, being in Hannover, far from Rome’s control and face to face with a tolerant protestant. Leibniz’s Protogæa shows that he himself was interested in the harmony between faith and science, and it is generally known that he also sought peace between Christian confessions. Writing in his Protogæa about the Great Flood, Leibniz accepts that everything was merged in the water: “It is told us by the holy monuments of our religion and the old tales among the nations agree,” Leibniz writes (§VI, p. 9), and Leibniz acknowledges that evidence from the Mediterranean Sea supports the faith (§VI, p. 9). Stensen did stop publishing about geology after his Prodromus in 1669, but he did not stop his geological research. The reason why he had committed to another one, Viviani, to publish his Prodromus was that during the preparation of the publication in 1669, he was far away from Florence. From November 1668 to July 1670, he journeyed for geological research to many places in Europe, until, in June 1670, the serious illness of his patron the Grand Duke of Tuscany called him back to Florence. Was Niels Stensen perhaps not aware of the novelty of his ideas nor of a possible clash with Holy Scripture? Stensen answers the question himself. After proposing a detailed view of Earth’s history divided into six periods or phases, Stensen prefaces a detailed discussion of the consensus between Holy Scripture and his own geology: Lest anyone be afraid of the danger of novelty, I set down briefly the agreement between Nature and Scripture, reviewing the main difficulties that can be raised about individual aspects of the earth.

This quotation is taken from the translation by Alex J. Pollock (Stenonis, 1669, in Scherz, ed., 1969, p. 205). It might appear from this translation, that Stensen did not at all see his geology as a novelty, and therefore he feared no clash with scripture: “Lest anyone be afraid of the danger of novelty.” So there is no novelty! However the original Latin reads: “Ne vero a novitate periculum quisqvam metuat” (Stenonis, 1669, in Scherz, ed., 1969, p. 204), i.e., Lest anyone would fear any danger from the novelty. No novelty? Yes novelty, but no danger from the novelty. Stensen views his ideas as novel but sees no reason to fear. He is aware of the novelty, but he does not see that it is dangerous. In the subsequent discussion, Stensen compares his six phases (aspects) of Earth with Holy Scripture. The first one is the situation when everything was covered with water. Figure 25 of his famous drawings in the Prodromus illustrates this (Fig. 2). Stensen concludes that there is “obvious agreement between Scripture and Nature” (Stenonis, 1669, in Scherz, ed., 1969, p. 205). In Figure 22 of the Prodromus (Fig. 2), Niels Stensen identifies the Deluge with the fourth phase of Earth’s history. “With regard to the time of the universal deluge, sacred History, reviewing everything in detail, is not opposed by secular history,” Stensen says (Stenonis, 1669, in Scherz, ed., 1969, p. 207). Note that

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Ziggelaar Chinese annals, Noah’s flood should have happened three thousand years before Christ; Western chronologists made the time interval much shorter. Despite admittedly ridiculous assertations in the Chinese annals, Martini was open to the Chinese position as were some chronologists in Europe (Martini, 1658, p. 3). According to Martini, the annals indicate that the world must have existed many thousands of years before the Great Flood (Martini, 1658, p. 9–10). The first emperor Fohius would have reigned for 115 yr starting in the year 2952 B.C. (Martini, 1658, p. 11). Father Martini readily accepts that China was populated before the Great Flood, but then he is at a loss to explain how the Chinese could have remembered so much of what happened before the Flood if all mankind had drowned during the Flood, except Noah and his family (Martini, 1658, p. 10). The reign of Yaus, the seventh emperor, began in 2357 B.C. During his reign, a flood happened. Father Martini is inclined to believe that this at least has to do with Noah’s deluge, but, again, all that had been written about Chinese history before this seventh emperor should be fiction because nobody survived the Great Flood apart from Noah, far away in the West (Martini, 1658, p. 26–27). The proposed change in chronology does not appear revolutionary to us; moreover, Martini shows reservations about the data of the Chinese annals. Nevertheless, he is clearly very willing to open a discussion about the exactness of the prevailing chronology of the Bible. A modern scholar, Toshihiro Yamada (2005, personal commun.), says The marvelous duration of Chinese chronology revealed by Martini made new difficulties for Christian chronology. Leibniz basically accepted Martini’s report as a reliable document and employed a Greek version of the Bible to save the validity of the chronology.

Figure 2. Niels Stensen’s history of Tuscany, from the Prodromus of 1669.

Stensen seeks only agreement between scripture and secular history, not geology. Only history had an exact chronology. Stensen has more difficulty finding agreement between nature (geology) and scripture concerning how high the sea level rose during the Flood. He puts forward three arguments. The fourth is an appeal to God’s omnipotence, a weak argument when science should account for phenomena in nature: However, the Deluge was a special action of God (Stenonis, 1669, in Scherz, ed., 1969, p. 207). Even today one may try to identify the Flood of the Bible with some large inundation in the history of geology of which mankind may have kept some vague remembrances.

In 1689, Leibniz (1646–1716) visited the Jesuit Claudio-Filippo Grimaldi in Rome and questioned him about Chinese issues, including the ancient Chinese chronology. Carl von Linné Time was a key also for Carl von Linné, or Linnaeus (1707– 1778), and his view of the development of Earth. In his autobiography, Linné (1957) writes that he would readily accept an age for Earth even older than that indicated by the Chinese annals, “if Holy Scripture would allow.” Linné said that he had not seen relics of the Deluge, but only time’s continuous effects (Linné, 1957, p. 172). Perhaps this is what is meant when Frängsmyr (1971, p. 211) says that Linné rejected the Deluge as a geological factor: its duration was too short.

Martino Martini and China’s History THE END OF DILUVIANISM In 1658, 11 yr before Stensen’s Prodromus, the Jesuit Martino Martini (1614–1661)—a former Christian missionary in China—published a History of China (Martini, 1658). It was based on accurate and detailed Chinese annals of the histories of all the emperors until the birth of Christ. According to the

In the end, one could not escape the conclusion that the few thousands of years indicated by the Bible, and certainly the short time for the Flood, were insufficient to account for the thick layers of sediments found in many places. On the European

The age of Earth in Niels Stensen’s geology continent, René Réaumur (1683–1757) first noted this publicly in 1720. He argued that the thickness of layers of shells in the region of Tours—up to seven meters in some places—when viewed in conjunction with the slow rate of changes in the topography of the coastline, meant that it would have taken thirty to forty centuries for the sea to recede from Tours to its present position. This amount of time would have been half the time of the world’s history according to the Bible (Réaumur, 1720). The scientific world did not immediately accept Réaumur’s discovery with gratitude. Thus, in a dissertation of 1749 (Voltaire, 1786, v. 31, p. 376–389), Voltaire wrote The mountains which Dr. Burnet and so many others consider the ruins of an ancient world, dispersed here and there without order, without plan,...I on the contrary see them arranged in a boundless order from one end of the universe to the other. (p. 383) There is no system that can give the least probability to that idea so generally spread that our globe has changed its face, that the ocean has been for a very long time on the habitated earth...It would be very strange if the grain of millet eternally kept its nature, and the entire globe changed its face. (p. 385–386)

Noah’s flood continued to play an important role in the history of geology. In Italy, diluvianism and anti-diluvianism lived side by side. Both positions were to be found in England also. A keen supporter of diluvianism was John Woodward (1665–1728), but William Buckland (1784–1856) was also a staunch diluvianist until the second half of the 1840s. Only after 1840 did diluvianism die out with acceptance of Hutton’s plutonic theories and independent evidence from Agassiz’s (1807–1873) discovery of glaciations (Vai, 2004, p. 246). CONCLUSIONS Niels Stensen shared the firm belief of his days that the Deluge in Holy Scripture had to be understood literally. Not only did it fit well in his system of geology, but he also found it confirmed by his research. His contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was of the same opinion. The teaching of the Church was no constraint on ideas about the length of time involved in the history of Earth. The development of geology finally made researchers abandon the traditional view on the role of the biblical Flood in geology. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Most of all I want to thank Gary Rosenberg for his initiative to this study on Niels Stensen, his recognition of the importance of Niels Stensen’s manuscript Chaos, and his encouraging and indefatigable help in pursuing it. I thank the Geological Society of America’s History of Geology Division and its International Division for travel funds and the History of Geology Division for the initiative for the meeting in October 2006 and for inviting me among excellent scientists to give a small contribution, which is the origin of this paper. Among those who assisted

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me, most of all, I have to mention Elsebeth Thomsen, Tromsø, Norway, who patiently helped me since I am not a specialist in geology, particularly for the reference to Thomas Bartholin and his museum. Rev. Fr. Scott Binet, MD, of the Order of St. Camillus is thanked for correcting my English. Thanks also are due to the Jesuits at the Old St. Joseph’s Church, Philadelphia, for kind hospitality during my stay. REFERENCES CITED Avicenna, 1927, Avicennae, De Congelatione et Conglutinatione Lapidum: A Section of the Kitâb Al-Shifâ’, quoted from Holmyard, E.J., and Mandeville, D.C.: New York, American Mathematical Society, 1982, Paul Geuthner, 86 p. Bartholin, T., 1662, Domus Anatomica Hafniensis brevissime descripta: (Brunn, N.W., 2007, ed., translator, and commentary): København, Peder Haubolds Forlag, 62 p. (Frederiksberg, Loldrups Forlag, p. 9–174). Borel, P., 1656, Historiarum et Observationum Medico-Physicarum Centuriæ IV: Paris, Jean Billaine, 384 p. Cutler, A., 2003, The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth: New York, Dutton, 228 p. Gillespie, C., ed., 1981, Dictionary of Scientific Biography: New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, v. 10, sub voce Palissy, p. 280–281. Frängsmyr, T., 1971, Steno and Geological Time, in Scherz, G., ed., Dissertations on Steno as Geologist: Odense, Odense University Press, p. 204–212. Gassendi, P., 1649, Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laërtii, qui est de vita, moribus placitisque Epicuri, v. I–II: Lyons, Guillaume Barbier, 1768 + IX p. Gassendi, P., 1658, Viri Illvstri Nicolai Fabricii De Pereisc Senatoris Aqvisextensis Vita, 1641, in Opera Gassendi: Lyons, Laurentius Anisson, v. V, p. 237–362. Guntau, M., 1996, Die geologischen Vorstellungen von Niels Stensen (1638– 1686) über die erdgeschichtliche Vergangenheit von Versteinerungen, in Beiträge zur Geologie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Dresden, Staatliche Naturhistorische Sammlungen, Museum für Mineralogie und Geologie, 143 p. (Abhandlungen des Staatlichen Museums für Mineralogie und Geologie zu Dresden, Volume 42). Hölder, H., 1960, Geologie und Paläontologie in Texten und ihrer Geschichte: Freiburg, Karl Alber, 566 p. Kircher, A., 1643, Magnes sive de Arte Magnetica (2nd edition): Cologne, Jodocus Kalcoven, 28 +797 + 39 p. Leibniz, G.W., 1749, Summi polyhistoris Godefridi Guillielmi Leibnitii Protogæa sive de prima facie telluris et antiqvissimae historiae vestigiis in ipsis naturae monumentis dissertatio ex schedis manuscriptis viri illustris in lucem edita: Göttingen, [2] Bl., XXVI p. [1] Bl., 86 p., [5] Bl., [7] gef. Bl., XII 4 p. Linné, C , 1957, Vita Caroli Linnæi, Carl von Linnés Självbiografier, in Malmeström, E., and Uggla, A.Hj., eds.: Stockholm, Uppsala, 235 p. Martini, M., 1658, Sinicae Historiae decas prima: Amsterdam, Blaeu, 413 p. Morello, N., 1981, “De glossopetris Dissertatio”: the Demonstration by Fabio Colonna of the true Nature of Fossils: Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, v. 31, p. 63–71 (106 [1981] Wiesbaden). Palissy, B., 1563, Recepte véritable par laquelle tous les hommes de la France pourront apprendre à multiplier et augmenter leurs trésors, in Cameron, K., 1988, From Valois to Bourbon. La Rochelle: Rochelle, Droz, 200 p. Réaumur, R.-A., 1720, Mémoire sur les coquilles de quelques cantons de la Touraine: Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences 1720 (1722), p. 400–416. Scherz, G., ed., 1969, Steno Geological Papers (Pollock, A.J., trans.): Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 20, 370 p. Stensen, N., 1659, Niels Stensen’s Chaos-manuscript, in Ziggelaar, A., ed., 1997, Chaos: Niels Stensen´s Chaos-manuscript Copenhagen 1659; Complete Edition with Introduction, Notes and Commentary: Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 44: Copenhagen, Munksgaard, 520 p. Stenonis, N., 1660, Disputatio Physica De Thermis, in Scherz, G., ed., and Coturri, E., 1966: Terme di Montecatini, 87 p.

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Stenonis, N., 1667, Historia dissecti piscis ex canum genere. Florentiae, in Maar, V., ed., Opera Philosophica, 1910: Copenhagen, Vilhelm Tryde, v. 2, p. 147–154. Stenonis, N., 1669, De Solido intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento Dissertationis Prodromus: Florentia, Stellae, 78 p. Stenonis, N., 1910, Opera Philosophica (Maar, V., ed.): Copenhagen, Vilhelm Tryde, v. 1, 264 p, v. 2, 367 p. Stenonis, N., 1941, Opera Theologica (Larsen, K., and Scherz, G., eds.): Copenhagen, Nyt Nordisk Forlag, v. 1, 508 p., v. 2, 574 p. Stenonis, N., 1952, Epistolae et epistolae ad eum datae (Scherz, G., ed.): Hafniae (Copenhagen), Nyt Nordisk Forlag, v. 1–2, 1027 p. Thomson, K., 2005, The Watch on the Heath: New York, Harper Collins, XIV + 314 p. Thorndike, L., 1941, A History of Magic and Experimental Science: New York and London, v. 6: The Sixteenth Century: Columbia University Press, XVIII + 766 p.

Vai, G.B., 2004, A liberal diluvianism, in Vai, G.B., and Cavazza, W., eds., Four Centuries of the Word Geology: Ulisse Aldrovandi 1603 in Bologna: Bologna, University of Bologna, Minerva Edizioni, 326 p. Varenius, B., 1681, Geographia Generalis (Newton, I., ed.): Canterbury, Henry Dickson, 186 p. Voltaire, F.M.A., 1786, Dissertation sur les changemens arrivés dans notre Globe, in Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Basel, Jean Jacques Tourneisen, v. 31, p. 373–389. Ziggelaar, A., 1997, Chaos: Niels Stensen’s Chaos manuscript Copenhagen 1659; Complete Edition with Introduction, Notes and Commentary: Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 44: Copenhagen, Munksgaard, 520 p.

MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Nicolaus Steno and the problem of deep time Alan H. Cutler† Carnegie Institution for Science, 1530 P Street, NW, Washington, DC 20005-1910, USA

ABSTRACT The development of the geological concept of “deep time” was based on the principles of historical geology first proposed by Nicolaus Steno in 1669 with the publication of De Solido. In De Solido, Steno compared his geological history of Tuscany with the biblical account of the Creation but did not acknowledge the possibility that the six-thousand-year biblical time scale might need to be expanded. Many modern commentators have suggested that the conflict between deep and biblical time represented a quandary for Steno, but evidence from the text of De Solido indicates Steno was more concerned that even the short biblical chronology would stretch the credulity of his readers. In particular, he was concerned that readers might find the preservation of fossil shells for even a few millennia implausible, and that they would be inclined to question the reliability of ancient reports that described geological change. More important threats to faith included the possibility that the world was eternal and that the biblical flood was merely a local event. Keywords: Nicolaus Steno, deep time, biblical chronology, historical geology. INTRODUCTION The concept of the vast age of Earth, often called “deep time,” is arguably geology’s major contribution to human thought. This concept, along with the science of geology, developed slowly over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from ideas sown in the seventeenth century as the geologic time scale gradually replaced the biblical time scale. In a sense, this process is not yet complete, even in the twenty-first century, as some fundamentalist religious groups still cling to the notion of a sixthousand-year-old Earth in the face of a well-established scientific consensus that Earth is 4.6 billion years old. The story of how this intellectual shift took place—from a time scale of thousands of years to one of billions—is complex, but a common theme in many accounts is that widespread belief in biblical chronology hampered the progress of geology, ei-

ther because it blinded researchers to clear scientific evidence of longer time scales, or because researchers kept silent about such evidence for fear of retribution from religious authorities (Haber, 1959; Frangsmyr, 1971; Albritton, 1980; Toulmin and Goodfield, 1982; Wagner, 1986; Oldroyd, 1996; and many others). In this view, biblical chronology was a kind of “intellectual straightjacket” that stifled the early development of the science. This view has been challenged by several authors, notably Martin Rudwick (Rudwick, 1985, 2005) and Rhoda Rappaport (Rappaport, 1997). In their alternative view, the stifling effect of religious belief on geology was minimal. The development of the geologic time scale took a long time because the scientific evidence supporting it was not clear, at least initially, and biblical chronology provided a framework for investigation that may actually have encouraged research into Earth history. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the secular alternative to biblical chronology, Aristotelean eternalism, which held that the

†

E-mail: [email protected].

Cutler, A.H., 2009, Nicolaus Steno and the problem of deep time, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 143–148, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(10). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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world was infinitely old and cycles of time repeated eternally, offered no prospect that Earth had an interpretable history. Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) is an important figure in the early history of geology, and he is frequently offered as an example of the interplay between religion and science. In his seminal work on geology De Solido Intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento Disstertationis Prodromus (Prodromus to a Dissertation on Solids Naturally Enclosed in Solids, 1669), he explicitly juxtaposes biblical and geological narratives. Some writers (e.g., Albritton, 1980; Wagner, 1986) have even speculated that the conflict between the extended time span implied by his geological work and the short time span implied by the Bible was a deciding factor in Steno’s later abandonment of scientific research in favor of the priesthood. That he felt this kind of tension in reconstructing geological history would appear to be supported by an often-quoted statement in De Solido: But lest anyone be afraid of the danger of novelty, I set down briefly the agreement between Nature and Scripture, reviewing the main difficulties that can be raised about individual aspects of the earth. (Steno 1969, p. 205)

What was the dangerous “novelty” he feared, or at least expected others to fear? Steno nowhere makes this explicit, but many modern writers have assumed, at least implicitly, that he was referring to the threat his geological studies posed to the biblical time scale. To blunt this threat, he therefore reconciled his geologic narrative with the biblical time estimate by “compressing” geologic events into a few thousand years. This forced him to neglect gradualistic processes and resort to catastrophic mechanisms to explain the geologic changes he hypothesized for Tuscany. In this view, Steno experienced an internal struggle that foreshadowed the catastrophist/uniformitarian debate of later centuries. I will argue here that while Steno clearly accepted the biblical time scale, protecting it from scientific challenge was not of particular concern to him. He was more concerned that readers would reject his scientific conclusions about rocks and fossils because the thousands of years of biblical time seemed too long, and because significant uplift of Earth’s solid crust (raising marine fossils to their positions in mountains) was difficult for most people to imagine (as it is for many nongeologists today). His disclaimer about “novelty” was more likely in reference to other issues, such as the universality of Noah’s flood and the heresy of eternalism. Most of Steno’s writing on geology, in the form of notes for a full-length dissertation on geology, has been lost. Somewhere in those notes, Steno may have set down his ideas on time, geology, and their relationship to religion and the Bible, but because they are unavailable, we have to deduce what we can from his extant writings relevant to historical geology. Because it is in De Solido that Steno explicitly mentions the biblical time scale, and also there that he most fully develops his ideas of geological history, I will focus primarily on that work. I should add also that although Steno was a controversial figure owing to his conversion from Lutheranism to Catholicism,

I am aware of no evidence that he personally feared imminent persecution by Catholic or Protestant authorities for any of his scientific conclusions. Steno was surely aware of the fate of Galileo, but he also worked in Florence under the protection of a Grand Duke and a Cardinal who both openly admired Galileo and encouraged scientists to pursue his methods (Cutler, 2003). The religious and scientific politics of the time were complex, and Steno’s personality was complex as well, so we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of conscious or subconscious intimidation, but I do not think it is necessary to invoke such factors to explain Steno’s scientific caution with respect to time scales. BACKGROUND Originally trained as an anatomist, Steno was drawn into geological questions by the long-standing problem of how marine fossils came to be found in rocks far from the sea and at the tops of mountains. This puzzle had engaged thinkers from the earliest pre-Socratic philosophers to medieval theologians to “Renaissance men” such as Leonardo da Vinci, and it was still a live issue in the seventeenth century (see Rudwick [1985] and Cutler [2003] for extended discussions). Diverse explanations had been proposed, including natural fluctuations of land and sea level (favored by the Greeks) and a miraculous flood (favored by some theologians). In Steno’s time, however, the prevailing view was that the sea shells and other “marine bodies” found in rocks grew in situ, through spontaneous generation or as a result of a “plastic virtue” inherent in nature. They were not the remains of preexisting organisms, and their presence at high elevations therefore did not imply any kind of change or movement of Earth’s crust. This view of fossils was accepted by many churchmen, such as the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), with whom Steno was on friendly terms, but it was in no sense a religious doctrine or orthodoxy. It was considered a scientific explanation, particularly because, in principle at least, it was amenable to experiment. Some researchers did in fact attempt to grow fossils in the laboratory or observe them growing in mines (e.g., Beaumont, 1683). On the other hand, deposition of the fossils by the biblical flood or any other historical explanation was considered to be beyond the pale of science. As Rappaport (1997, p. 2) put it, “even to contemplate a science of the past seemed to be a contradiction in terms” to philosophers. In fact, for many, any kind of historical inquiry was philosophically suspect. With the exception of the Bible, which was held to be infallible, human accounts of past events were thought by many of the new philosophers to be so riddled with errors, distortions, and deliberate falsehoods as to be nearly useless. In his Discourse on Method, René Descartes (1596–1650) lambasted the study of history, and many of his followers were similarly skeptical of historical documents (Rappaport, 1997). In the early part of his career, Steno considered himself to be a Cartesian, and so he was doubtless keenly aware of the objections his peers might raise against relying on any kind of historical evidence.

Nicolaus Steno and the problem of deep time Steno began his geological investigations in 1667 in Florence, under the sponsorship of Ferdinand D’Medici (1610–1670), Grand Duke of Tuscany. His first work on fossils was an addendum to a report on the anatomy of a shark, Canis Carchariae Dissectum Caput (A Shark Head Dissected), published in 1661. In Canis, he argues for both the biological origin of shark’s teeth and other marine fossils and for the sedimentary origin of stratified rocks. From the tentative tone of this work is clear that that he expects strong opposition to his theories on fossils (“Many and great are the men who believe that the said bodies have been produced without the action of animals” [Steno, 1969, p. 115]). Two years later, Steno published De Solido, which further developed his ideas on the origin of fossils and sedimentary rocks. In De Solido, he laid down the foundations for historical geology in the form of his principles of superposition, original horizontality, and lateral continuity. He did not separate out these three principles or give them special emphasis (that was done by later authors), but it is clear that in De Solido, he was deliberately trying to set down the logical principles for a scientific inquiry of past events. He applies these principles at all spatial scales, from the sequence of incrustations filling a void in a hand specimen to the sequence of events in Tuscany’s (and by implication Earth’s) geologic past. It is also clear, as will be discussed later, that he expected these ideas to face skepticism from his scientific peers. De Solido was intended to be simply a prolog to a much longer work that would more fully develop and support his ideas. It was also written in haste—he had just been summoned by the Danish king to leave Florence and return to his native Denmark—and so it consists of less than eighty pages. Steno never completed the longer work and, as mentioned already, his extensive notes have been lost. After his ordination as a priest in 1675, Steno abandoned his geological work, but there is no evidence that he ever retracted or repudiated it. From accounts of colleagues such as Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) and Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) who communicated with him during his years as a priest, Steno held firm to the ideas presented in De Solido. TIME IN DE SOLIDO The chief purpose of De Solido was to advance two ideas: (1) the biological origin of fossils and (2) the feasibility of reconstructing past changes in Earth through the study of its rock strata. Steno had good reason to expect that both ideas would be controversial and face stiff opposition. Steno was not trying to develop an argument either for or against the biblical time scale. This explains why it can be so difficult to discern the extent to which he appreciated the long time periods required for geologic processes such as sedimentation and erosion. He describes sedimentation as occurring “gradually” and erosion as operating “daily” without giving any quantitative estimates of rates that might give clues to the spans of time involved. Those kinds of data were unavailable to Steno, and he was characteristically loath to speculate on issues that might expose him to

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criticism and ridicule. In the introduction to De Solido, he states his belief that much confusion had resulted because “in considering the natural world those things that cannot be determined with certainty are not kept separate from those that can be so determined” (Steno, 1969, p. 143–145). Throughout De Solido, Steno is at pains to confine his discussion to questions that can be resolved with “certainty.” Steno’s conception of “demonstrative certainty” was central to his scientific philosophy (Hansen, 2000, this volume) and presumably grew out of his early involvement with Cartesian philosophy (Olden-Jørgensen, this volume). The first explicit mention of a time scale occurs after his lengthy discussion of animal fossils and fossilization. He writes “There are those to whom the length of time seems to destroy the force of the remaining arguments” (Steno, 1969, p. 199), noting that in the 4000 yr since the receding of the flood, as estimated in the biblical chronology, there were no reports of marine incursions to high elevation. He continues: …nor does it seem in accordance with reason that a part of an animal body has resisted so many years of wear, when we observe often in the space of a few years the complete destruction of the same bodies. (Steno, 1969, p. 199)

So besides the lack of human reports of sea-level changes (which he deals with later), Steno’s primary concern here is that 4000 yr might seem too long a time span for sea shells to remain preserved in rocks. If shells cannot remain intact for long periods of time, in “earthy” as well as “rocky” strata, then the force of his arguments for the biological origin of fossils is destroyed. Steno answers this objection by pointing out the presence of shell fossils in the paving stones and walls of the Etruscan city of Volterra, more than 2400 yr old. He further argues that the fossil-bearing strata underlying Volterra and other Etruscan cities must be older still, yet they contain perfectly preserved mollusks (Steno, 1969, p. 199). Steno’s logic aims not to limit the age of the shells to within biblical bounds, but to demonstrate that fossils can be as old as the biblical time scale requires, and he does this not to evaluate the adequacy of the biblical time scale, but to defend his scientific theory of fossil origins. His logic admits the possibility that the strata are much older than 4000 yr (it establishes only a minimum age for the youngest beds), but if this occurred to Steno, he does not mention it. It was not germane to his argument. Steno returns to the subject of time in a later section entitled “Different Changes that have Occurred in Tuscany,” which he illustrates with a schematic diagram showing six phases of Tuscany’s geologic history (Fig. 1). In the first phase (diagram 25), a thick sequence of sedimentary strata is deposited, followed by undermining of the sequence by the development of caverns (diagram 24), and then collapse of the caverns to produce tilted strata and an irregular landscape (diagram 23). The next three diagrams repeat the cycle of sedimentation, cavern formation, and collapse. He correlates the first period of sedimentation (diagram 25) with the initial creation of the world, during which the biblical account holds that the face of Earth was covered by waters. The

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second period of sedimentation (diagram 22) he attributes to a “universal deluge,” which is clearly Noah’s flood (although Steno does not mention Noah by name or cite any biblical passages). In his discussion of the flood, he repeats his earlier argument that the historical age of ancient cities establishes a minimum age for underlying marine deposits, and that this age nearly reaches the biblical estimate of 4000 yr: With regard to the time of the universal deluge, sacred History, reviewing everything in detail, is not opposed by secular history. The ancient cities of Tuscany, some of which are built on hills produced by the sea, were founded more than three thousand years ago; in Lydia, however, we come nearer to four thousand years, so that it is possible to reckon from this fact that the time at which the earth was abandoned by the sea is in accordance with the time of which Scripture makes mention. (Steno, 1969, p. 207)

He mentions the biblical time scale a final time when he considers the changes to the Tuscan landscape that have occurred since the flood (diagram 20). Describing those changes, he writes, “Plains were changed into various channels, valleys, and precipices, mainly through erosion by the waters, and sometimes by fiery conflagrations” (Steno, 1969, p. 211). It is notable that while he mentions “fiery conflagrations,” which surely were catastrophic events, he attributes the sculpting of “channels, valleys and precipices” mainly to erosion by water, which is not so obviously linked to rapid, catastrophic change. Elsewhere in De Solido, he describes erosion as a “daily” process and speculates that the recession of the flood waters may have taken place over “the course of centuries.” In this section, Steno seems primarily interested in assessing the reliability of ancient writings that might provide evidence of changes in the landscape. He admits that much early writing was “confused” or dedicated to celebrating “the deeds of illustrious men but not the miracles of nature” or lost altogether. As part of this discussion, he raises the issue of time in the following passage: …insofar as the remaining authors, whose writings have been preserved, report almost every year among the marvels, earth movements, eruptions of fires from the earth, flooding by rivers and seas, it is easily seen that many and various changes have occurred in four thousand years. (Steno, 1969, p. 211)

He then continues: so that those who point a finger at the many errors in the writings of the ancients on the grounds that various things are found there which do not agree with present day geography, are much mistaken. (Steno, 1969, p. 211)

It is clear that Steno believed 4000 yr to be a realistic span for erosion to sculpt the present landscape, although it is not clear just how much of the present landscape he saw as postdating the flood. The major valley depicted forming in diagram 23 (Fig. 1) is actually older than the flood. It is therefore hard to know how he would have assessed the sufficiency of gradualistic

Figure 1. Schematic cross sections from De Solido (Steno, 1969) illustrating the geologic history of Tuscany. The chronological sequence begins at bottom of the figure (diagram 25), showing the deposition of the oldest strata, and continues in reverse numerical order to the present-day landscape (diagram 20). Steno discusses these six phases of geologic history in relation to biblical chronology.

processes to produce the changes he hypothesized, but it does seem clear that in this section, Steno was primarily making a plea for open-mindedness regarding the reliability of historical documents and the possibility of significant geological change in Earth’s crust. His intent was not to champion any particular tempo of geologic change, or to “cram” changes into an uncomfortably short time scale. ETERNALISM AND THE FLOOD If Steno was unconcerned about a clash between his geological history and the biblical time scale, what motivated his disclaimer regarding the “danger of novelty,” cited earlier? It may simply have been a general sense of caution about treading too close to the jealously guarded territory of theologians. According to the strictures of Catholicism, to which Steno was

Nicolaus Steno and the problem of deep time a recent convert, lay persons were not supposed to indulge in the interpretation of scripture. In fact, in Steno’s discussion of the agreement between nature and scripture, nowhere does he cite chapter and verse or summarize the content of biblical passages. In his text, he sticks entirely to arguments from nature. Steno’s caution might also have been motivated by the fact that he was preparing to return to Denmark where his newly embraced Catholicism was sure to meet a hostile reception. Lutheran attitudes toward the Bible were more strictly literalist than Catholic attitudes, which relied on the authority of the Church to resolve problems of interpretation. There were two specific issues, however, that may have merited Steno’s concern. One was the issue of eternalism, the idea that Earth was infinitely old and that time had no beginning and would have no end. This idea had been promoted by Aristotle and other ancients who had championed the mutability of land and sea. Aristotelean eternalism had been almost uniformly denounced by Christian theologians because, among other things, it appeared to deny the existence of a Creator (if Earth was eternal, it had not been created) (Rudwick, 1985). By resurrecting ideas about fossils first proposed by the ancients (as Steno acknowledged he was doing), Steno might have felt vulnerable to the charge he was also resurrecting eternalism, or at least opening the door to it. The first of the “difficulties” Steno addresses when evaluating the agreement between nature and scripture has to do with the nature of the oldest sequence of strata in his diagram (Steno, 1969, p. 205). He emphasizes that because these beds lack fossils, they must have been deposited before the creation of animals (though they are, in fact, largely Mesozoic and younger deposits; Vai and Martini, 2001). Steno raises and dismisses the counterargument that the beds may have originally contained fossils that had been later destroyed diagenetically. Steno’s use of fossils as an indication of age has sometimes been cited as foreshadowing the use of index fossils in biostratigraphy (e.g., Gohau, 1990), but it is likely that for Steno, a more important consequence of this argument was that the history of Earth had a direction and an identifiable beginning. In this sense, the geological record would have been a strong vindication of religious doctrine. Had the oldest strata in Steno’s cross section been as abundantly fossiliferous as the youngest strata, the record could have been used to support an eternally cycling Earth in the fashion of Aristotle. Steno avoided that theological disaster by emphasizing the distinction between the two sequences of strata. The second theological issue that Steno may have felt compelled to face was the universality of the flood. Some seventeenth-century writers had come to doubt the global extent of the flood given the discoveries of new animals, lands, and peoples in the Americas and elsewhere. How could all these animals have fit into the ark, how could they have dispersed afterwards across oceans, and how could the sea rise high enough to cover lofty mountains such as the Andes? One notorious writer, Isaac Lapeyere (1596–1676) scandalized many Christians by suggesting that the Bible was simply a history of the Jewish people, not

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all humankind. Humans had existed before Adam and the flood was a local event affecting only the Jews and their neighbors. It is this question, the plausibility of a universal flood, to which Steno devotes the most space in his treatment of the “difficulties” in his geological history (Steno, 1969, p. 207–209). He writes: “Nature does not contradict what Scripture determines about how high the sea was.” Yet, though the Bible describes the flood as covering the tops of the highest mountains, Steno’s figure represents the second sequence of sedimentary strata (diagram 22) as being confined to preexisting valleys. Nowhere are these strata present at high elevations. From the diagram (and presumably from the distribution of fossiliferous strata Steno observed), it would appear that the sea-level rise did not flood the entire landscape. In the text, Steno emphasizes the flood’s universal nature, nowhere mentioning the apparent contradiction or the possibility that the marine strata might represent a local or regional inundation. Earlier, in his general discussion of marine strata above sea level, he allows that they could result from the sea’s “own overflow or by the upheaval of mountains” (Steno, 1969, p. 163). However, in explaining this phase of his geological history, he considers only global mechanisms, such as the medieval theory of shifts in Earth’s center of gravity with respect to the “sphere of waters,” and the theory that Earth’s interior contained vast reservoirs of water that could have been a source for waters during the flood and a sink for them afterward (Steno, 1969, p. 207–209). The arguments in this section are less cogent than others he makes in De Solido, and he does not settle on a mechanism for producing a global inundation. He appears to have been concerned mainly with establishing that a large-scale eustatic change had in fact occurred, as evidenced by widespread marine strata, and that nothing in nature or scripture precluded such a global event. The idea that supporting the doctrine of a universal flood was important to Steno is buttressed by one of the few references to geology later in his life. During Steno’s time as a Bishop in Germany, Leibniz reported him as “congratulat[ing] himself with having come to the aid of piety in supporting the faith of the Holy Scripture and the tradition of the universal deluge on natural proofs” (quoted in Haber, 1959, p. 52). CONCLUSION In De Solido, Steno discussed the magnitude of time available for geological processes mainly in context of his main scientific arguments regarding the origins of fossils and the possibility of reconstructing past events from present-day geological evidence. He argues that physical evidence (specifically fossils) could have survived unaltered for thousands of years and that ancient reports of geological change should be taken seriously. Though it is clear that he accepted the biblical time scale, he was not concerned with defending it or in evaluating what types of geological processes might be consistent with it. Because he appears to consider the full range of geological processes from gradualistic erosion to catastrophic “conflagrations,” it is difficult

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to argue that the biblical time scale per se limited his thinking. Strictly speaking, because the logic of his arguments established only a minimum age for the end of “diluvial” deposition, he in fact placed no limit on the age of geological events. This does not mean that he in any way anticipated the later expansion of time that the new science of geology would eventually embrace, but it does cast doubt on the idea that he was worried about exceeding biblical time limits from either a religious or scientific standpoint. In retrospect, we see the importance of Steno’s principles in expanding the time scale of Earth history, and it is tempting to project modern-day controversies regarding creationism and biblical literalism back to Steno’s time, but I would argue that, for Steno, the question of time scale was not a particularly salient issue. From a religious standpoint, he was more likely concerned with other questions, such as whether the world had a fixed origin or was eternal and whether the flood was a universal event affecting all humanity or whether it was a local event, affecting only the Jewish people. These issues represented a greater threat to his faith than did the issue of time, and it is apparent that in De Solido, Steno resolved them to his satisfaction. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Gary Rosenberg for inviting me to participate in the Geological Society of America (GSA) symposium that led to this volume. Thanks are also due to Keith Meldahl, Gary Rosenberg, and Jens Morten Hansen for their reviews of this paper and for their helpful comments. Finally, I thank the University Press of Southern Denmark for permission to reproduce Figure 1 from Steno—Geological Papers. REFERENCES CITED Albritton, C.C., Jr., 1980, The Abyss of Time: Changing Conceptions of the Earth’s Antiquity after the Sixteenth Century: San Francisco, Freeman, Cooper & Company, 251 p.

Beaumont, J., 1683, A Further Account of Some Rock-Plants Growing in the Lead Mines of Mendip Hills, Mention’d in the Philosophical Transactions, Numb. 129. by the Ingenious Mr. John Beaumont jun. of StonyEaston in Sommerset Shire: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, v. 13, p. 276–280. Cutler, A., 2003, The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth: New York, Dutton, 228 p. Frangsmyr, T., 1971, Steno and geological time, in Scherz, G., ed., Steno as Geologist: Odense, Odense University Press, p. 204–212. Gohau, G., 1990, A History of Geology: New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 259 p. Haber, F.C., 1959, The Age of the World: Moses to Darwin: Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 303 p. Hansen, J.M., 2000, Stregen i sandet, bølgen på vandet: Copenhagen, Fremad, 440 p. Hansen, J.M., 2009, this volume, On the origin of natural history: Steno’s modern, but forgotten philosophy of science, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(12). Olden-Jørgensen, S., 2009, this volume, Nicholas Steno and René Descartes: A Cartesian perspective on Steno’s scientific development, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(11). Oldroyd, D.R., 1996, Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology: Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 410 p. Rappaport, R., 1997, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–1750: Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 308 p. Rudwick, M.J.S., 1985, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology (2nd ed.): Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 287 p. Rudwick, M.J.S., 2005, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 708 p. Steno, N., 1969, Steno—Geological Papers: Odense, Odense University Press, 370 p. Toulmin, S., and Goodfield, J., 1982, The Discovery of Time: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 280 p. Vai, G.B., and Martini, P., 2001, Anatomy of an Orogen: The Apennines and adjacent Mediterranean basins: Boston, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 632 p. Wagner, P.H., 1986, Steno and Ray; two geologists and men of faith, in Poulsen, J.E., and Snorrason E., eds., Nicolaus Steno, 1638–1686, a ReConsideration by Danish Scientists: Gentofte, Denmark, Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, p. 153–166. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Nicholas Steno and René Descartes: A Cartesian perspective on Steno’s scientific development Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen† Saxo-Institute, History Section, University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 80, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark

ABSTRACT As a young student in Copenhagen, Nicholas Steno was well acquainted with the work of the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes and adopted his methodological principles and many of his theories as well. Empirical anatomical research on glands, muscles, and brain gradually made Steno more and more critical of Descartes’ stringent but wholly deductive reasoning. Nevertheless, on a deeper level, most of Steno’s path-breaking research in anatomy, as well as in geology, operated within a mechanist Cartesian framework, and several of his path-breaking discoveries can be linked to his testing of crucial points in the Cartesian theory of how the “human machine” works. It might be a little too much to cast Steno as a Popperian avant la lettre, but viewed from a Kuhnian perspective, Cartesianism can aptly be described as Steno’s research paradigm. Keywords: Nicholas Steno, Cartesianism, anatomy, geology, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn. INTRODUCTION Was the Danish anatomist and geologist Nicholas Steno (1638–1686) a Cartesian, that is, a follower of the great seventeenth-century French philosopher and scientist René Descartes (1596–1650)? The short but confusing answer would be yes and no, as it requires defining a seventeenth-century Cartesian, which is about as simple as defining a twentieth-century Marxist. Traditionally, Steno has been portrayed as basically an inductive empiricist who, after a period of youthful enthusiasm for Descartes, inevitably became disenchanted with grand deductive theorizing and turned into one of the sharpest critics of Cartesianism, even if he did acknowledge the soundness of Descartes’ principle of methodological doubt (Faller, 1958; Rothschuh, 1968; Scherz, 1987–1988). There is much truth in this interpretation, which nevertheless can be expanded and developed. The †

E-mail: olden@hum ku.dk.

thesis of this article is that, on a deeper level, Steno was and remained a Cartesian in all his scientific work. However, he was no dogmatic Cartesian but a heuristic Cartesian. This becomes especially clear when his scientific achievements are measured against modern theories of how science works. I will explore this thesis by following Descartes’ own prescription and break down the problem into more simple and operational questions like: Did Steno know Descartes and how? What was Steno’s opinion of Descartes? Did his opinion change? When and how did it change? What role did Descartes play in Steno’s scientific thought? And how can we relate him to modern classics of theory of science like Karl R. Popper and Thomas S. Kuhn? STENO’S EARLY READINGS OF DESCARTES Steno never had a chance to meet Descartes in person. When Descartes actually visited Copenhagen, probably in 1631, and discussed the quadrature of the circle with professor Christian

Olden-Jørgensen, S., 2009, Nicholas Steno and René Descartes: A Cartesian perspective on Steno’s scientific development, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 149–157, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(11). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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Sørensen Longomontanus (1562–1647), Steno was not yet born, and when the philosopher in 1649 traveled north to the court of Queen Christina of Sweden—where he died on 11 February 1650 of “fever and inflammation of the lung” (pneumonia?)—he went by sea, and there is no evidence of any stop in Copenhagen (Maar, 1931, p. 29–35; Kragh and Sørensen, 2007). In other words: Steno knew Descartes only as an author, albeit an author who presented his own idealized intellectual autobiography in his most famous work, the Discours de la Méthode (Discourse on Method) from 1637 (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 1–515; Maclean, 2006), a work that Steno read as a student of medicine at Copenhagen University in the spring of 1659 at the latest (cf. later discussion here). As for how Steno came to know Descartes’ work, it has been speculated that professor Rasmus Bartholin (1625–1698), the most prominent first-generation Cartesian at the University of Copenhagen, should have introduced Steno to Cartesianism (Faller, 1958, p. 145). Even if this hypothesis is certainly possible, it would be wrong to accept it as probable—according to the Cartesian principle of “never accepting anything as true, that I did not know incontrovertibly to be true; that is to say, carefully to avoid both prejudice and premature conclusions” (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 19; Maclean, 2006, p. 17). Nowhere in Steno’s writings (six folio volumes of letters and scientific and theological works in the modern standard editions) is Rasmus Bartholin ever mentioned. More crucial than the mere silence of the relatively rich but nevertheless fragmentary sources is the fact that Steno fails to mention Rasmus Bartholin at exactly the moment when, according to the academic decorum of his times, one would expect him to give a roll call of all his patrons, that is, in the dedications of his earliest scientific works, the dissertations on the glands and ducts of the mouth and the eyes De glandulis oris and novis inde prodeuntibus salivæ vasis (On the Glands of the Mouth and New Salivary Ducts Proceeding from Them) (1661) and De glandulis oculorum, novisque earundem vasis observationes anatomicæ (Anatomical Observations on the Glands of the Eyes and Their New Ducts) (1662) (Maar, 1910, v. 1, p. 9–51, 75–90). On these occasions, he named Otto Kragh, Danish ambassador in Holland, Hans Svane, archbishop of Denmark and Norway, Thomas Bartholin, professor of medicine in Copenhagen and Steno’s tutor, Simon Paulli, royal physician to the Danish king, Jørgen Eilersen, headmaster of Steno’s grammar school in Copenhagen, Ole Borch, Steno’s old teacher and professor in Copenhagen, Franz Sylvius, professor of medicine in Leiden, Johan van Horne, professor of anatomy in Leiden, and Jacob Golius, professor of mathematics and Arabic in Leiden. From this background, it does not seem farfetched to conclude that Rasmus Bartholin played no significant role in the scientific formation of Steno. There can thus be little doubt that Steno’s first acquaintance with Descartes was through his prodigious reading during his years of study in Copenhagen 1656–1660. He had all the more time for this because the university was de facto closed down due to the siege of Copenhagen during the second war with Sweden

1658–1660. Luckily, we are able to follow part of Steno’s readings of Descartes in the so-called Chaos manuscript, which is made of 92 folios of excerpts from his readings intermingled with some observations and personal notes, all put down in the spring and summer of 1659. On Tuesday 22 March 1659, in the midst of a long passage from Athanasius Kircher’s Magnes sive de arte magnetica (The Magnet or On the Magnetic Art) (Rome 1641; Steno used the second edition, Cologne 1643), Steno reminded himself of the need to proceed “more accurately and orderly following Descartes’ method” (“accuratius et ordine ad methodum cartesii”; Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 123). This is a direct reference to Descartes’ famous Discours de la méthode (1637), which Steno probably used in the Latin version of 1644 (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 517–720). The Discours de la méthode is a classic volume of scientific and intellectual history. It is here where Descartes formulates his famous axiom “I am thinking therefore I exist,” normally quoted from the Latin edition of 1644: “cogito, ergo sum” (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 33, 558; Maclean, 2006, p. 29), as well as his proof of the existence of God and the immortal soul. However, these metaphysical highlights alone do not make the reading of Discours such a stirring experience. It is, not least, the aforementioned autobiographical parts that are intertwined with a truly heroic vision of science and human progress. Descartes casts himself as brilliant young nobleman who, after having received the best possible education (at the Jesuit La Fléche College), is disillusioned with all he has learned because it cannot quench his thirst for “clear and sure knowledge” but seems to him to be built on “shaky foundation.” He therefore abandons the study of letters and sets out traveling in order to study “the great book of the world.” However, several years of visiting courts and theaters of war and mixing with all sorts of people only deepen his distrust of conventional wisdom. Then one day he makes up his mind to “look into myself and to use all my mental powers to choose the path I should follow” (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 10; Maclean, 2006, p. 11), and after a single day of intense meditation, he comes up with the famous four rules for scientific research: (1) never to accept anything as true that he did not know incontrovertibly to be so and to include nothing in his judgments other than that which presented itself to his mind clearly and distinctly, (2) to divide all difficulties into as many parts as possible, (3) to conduct his thoughts in a given order beginning with the simplest and gradually ascending step by step, and (4) to make complete enumerations and general surveys of the subject matter (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 18; Maclean, 2006, p. 17). Descartes’ claim was that by ridding himself of all received opinion and applying these simple rules, he made such progress in all fields of science (metaphysics, astronomy, physics, medicine) during the following years that it would be a crime not to share his method and discoveries with everybody. The first fruit of this was the Discours, which was printed together with three long exemplary appendices on light, La Dioptrique, celestial bodies and phenomena, Les Météores, and geometry, La Géométrie.

A Cartesian perspective on Steno’s scientific development In the Chaos manuscript, there is a second approving reference to Descartes’ method (Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 124), as well as references to two of the Discours’ three appendices: La Dioptrique (Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 286, 293) and Les Meteores (Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 125, 260, 294). However, Steno also refers a couple of times to Descartes’ Principia philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy) of 1644 (Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 26, 177, 216; Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 8, p. 1–353), and once to Pierre Borel’s biography of Descartes, Vita Renati Cartesii of 1656 (Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 76). Even if it seems a little robust to flatly conclude that “the Steno of the Chaos-manuscript is a Cartesian” (Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 472)—after all, Steno read and excerpted so much else from other scientific traditions—these references to Descartes certainly testify to a broad acquaintance with Descartes’ work and an expressed approval of his methodology. Descartes was, in other words, an authority to young Steno. However, the last comment on Descartes in the Chaos manuscript strikes a more critical note, admitting the possibility of criticism of Descartes on his own “geometrical” home ground (cf. following discussion) and making fun of the great philosopher’s death: There are people in Holland who after accurate examination of the Cartesian philosophy have noted certain unacceptable things in it. There even is one who has written against him geometrically. When in Sweden he had contracted fever he wanted to cure himself according to the method of his own philosophy and killed himself by continuous water drinking. (Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 447)

This incipient critical stance based on hearsay hardened into serious doubts a few years later during Steno’s years of study and research in Holland (1660–1664) and culminated in the celebrated lecture on the anatomy of the brain in Paris in 1665. To understand how, I will follow the Cartesian trail in Steno’s scientific work during these years when he quickly matured from a bright student into a brilliant scientist. GLANDS After four years at Copenhagen University, Steno traveled abroad to complete his medical education in Germany, Holland, and France, just like any other ambitious student of his age and class. After a short stay in Rostock, he went to Amsterdam and dwelled there during the first half of 1660. In Amsterdam, he contributed to a series of disputations on metals and minerals held by Arnold Senguerd (1610–1667), professor at the Amsterdam Athenaeum. The disputation De Thermis (On Hot Springs) (Scherz, 1969, p. 50–63), actually a short student’s essay, has no real scientific merit but testifies to Steno’s geological interests. The disputation was dedicated to professor Senguerd himself but also to the doctor and professor of medicine Gerard Blaes (latinized Blasius, ca. 1625–1682). Blasius was a friend of Steno’s patron in Copenhagen, the famous professor Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680), and presumably Steno lived

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in his house while in Amsterdam. That would explain why it was in Blasius’ study where Steno made his first real scientific discovery: the parotid duct (ductus stenonianus) between a salivary gland by the ear and the oral cavity. It would also explain why Blasius thought that he “owned” Steno’s discovery and became very sore when Steno publicly defended his claim to it! The discovery of the parotid duct was only the beginning of extensive research in the anatomy of glands and ducts of the eyes, the nose, and the mouth region (Moe, 1986), which Steno continued at Leiden University where he matriculated on 27 July 1660. There, he studied under the auspices of professor Franz de le Boë (latinized Sylvius, 1614–1672) and professor Johannes van Horne (1621–1670), and he published the result of his research in the aforementioned dissertations in 1661–1662. These discoveries became the occasion for criticism of Descartes, who taught that tears derived directly from the condensed vapors of the blood. According to him, these vapors were driven forth by an excess of heat in the heart caused by love or joy and were exuded from the surface of the eyeball proper, like sweat on the surface of the skin, because of the large size of the optic nerve and its many small arteries. At this point, one must remember that Descartes thought that the nerves were hollow conductors and that the blood flowed directly and strongly from the heart to the base of the brain (the pineal gland, cf. following text). Steno, on the other hand, described the lachrymal gland and duct and correctly defined the function of tears as lubrication (Maar, 1910, v. 1, p. 85, 109; Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 11, p. 423–426). Even if Steno disagreed with Descartes on the matter of tears, he wholeheartedly shared Descartes’ mechanist conception of the material world and hence also his predilection for the machine-metaphor when describing the functioning of bodies. This is evident from the following passage from the beginning of his dissertation on the glands and ducts of the eyes from 1662: What the mechanics have learned from experience maybe also can be observed in animals, namely that the movement of the moving parts is made easier by lubricating them with an oily liquid. This has been done most perfectly by the most ingenious of all mechanics [God] in the first construction of animals. They [the mechanics] have seen that if between the moving and the fixed parts [of a machine] is placed a third more easily moved then the work proceeds much more conveniently... In the automatic bodies of animals all this functions more ingeniously, even divinely; and both the liquid that is used as well as the way it is used demonstrate a much higher art. (Maar, 1910, v. 1, p. 81)

This paragraph chimes perfectly with Descartes’ words in his Discours about the human “body as a machine which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered and has in itself more amazing movements than any that can be created by men” (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 56; Maclean, 2006, p. 46). Yet, how did the human machine differ from the animal machine? Descartes’ opinion was that animals were mere machines only and reacted mechanically to external stimuli, whereas the human machine possessed an immortal soul, which was like a pilot in a ship and hence endowed with language

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and reason and hence consciousness and free will (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 55–59; Maclean, 2006, p. 46–48). The corollary of this was that because animals possessed no souls, they did not really suffer pain. Like many others, Steno voiced his doubts concerning this point: The Cartesians glory in the certainty of philosophy; I wish I could be just as confident as they are that animals have no souls and that it makes no difference whether you touch, cut or burn the nerves of a living animal or the strings of a moving automaton; then I would more often and gladly for several hours have explored the viscera and vessels of a living animal and have made discoveries that one would not otherwise have reason to expect. (letter to Thomas Bartholin 12 September 1661; Maar, 1910, v. 1, p. 57; Scherz, 1952, v. 1, p. 142)

The concrete background for this comment is probably the fact that, at that time, young students of anatomy had only two cheap means of procuring material on which to practice dissection: to buy dead animal parts from a butcher or catch one of the numerous stray dogs. The latter option allowed for vivisection, which presented opportunities for understanding anatomy, but also ethical problems of animal suffering. Steno’s comment shows an interest in the nervous system and muscle movement, and that was exactly the direction his studies now took him. MUSCLES In spring 1663, Steno was able to present an abstract of a new theory of muscle movement in a letter to professor Bartholin (Maar, 1910, v. 1, p. 155–160; Kardel, 1994a), and a year later— in a vain attempt to ingratiate himself with King Frederick III of Denmark and Norway—he presented it publicly in a summary of all his scientific discoveries, the Observationum anatomicarum specimen (A Specimen of Anatomical Observations) (Maar, 1910, v. 1, p. 161–192; English translation of the muscle part in Kardel, 1986). In these works, Steno rejected the traditional teaching that muscle contraction was caused through “inflation” by “vital spirits” flowing through hollow nerves from the brain or the heart. The heart, according to Steno, was a muscle pump, pure and simple, and no “furnace” of the vital spirits, and muscle contraction was not due to a swelling operated by the infused vital spirits but by shortening of the muscle fibers. Steno never explicitly mentioned Descartes’ name in these two works, which need not be a surprise, because Descartes’ theory of muscle movement (inflation by vital spirits) was quite conventional. Nevertheless, there was a clear Cartesian relevance to the question of muscles and especially of the heart. In the Discours, Descartes had assured the reader that his method was as excellently suited for discovering physical laws of nature as it was for demonstrating the existence of God and the immortal soul. To prove this, he added the aforementioned three appendices on light, meteors, and geometry to the Discours, but also included in the Discours itself a short explanation of the heart and the circulation of the blood (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 41, 46–56; Maclean, 2006, p. 35, 39–46). He explained

how the heart contracts and expands through its heat, which makes the blood entering it expand like liquid falling into a very hot vessel, rather like a steam-engine one could say. The blood then communicates the heat of the heart to the different parts of the body. According to Descartes, the most remarkable thing about the heart is the generation of animal spirits, which, like a very subtle wind, or rather like very pure and living flame, rise continually in great abundance from the heart to the brain, pass from there through the nerves into the muscles, and impart movement to all our members. (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 54; Maclean, 2006, p. 45)

This was, admittedly, a very summary description of the connection among the heart, the brain, and the muscles, but, according to Descartes, he had already written a long treatise where all these things and much more concerning the fabric of the universe and the human body were set out in detail. He had been about to publish it when the condemnation of Galileo Galilei’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems in 1633 made him draw back because he himself subscribed to the heliocentric system and under no condition wanted to enter into dispute with the church. However, in 1662, this treatise on the fabric of the universe and the human body was published posthumously in Leiden in a Latin translation with the title De Homine (On Man). Two years later, it appeared in the original French with Descartes’ own title Le Monde (The World) (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 11, p. 1–290). It was a literary event of the first order, and Steno had every reason to be interested because Descartes in the closing remarks of the Discours had promised to devote the rest of his life “to nothing other than trying to acquire some knowledge of nature which may be such that we may derive some rules in medicine which are more reliable than those we have had up to now” (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 78; Maclean, 2006, p. 63). Steno reported the publication of De Homine in a letter from Leiden 26 August 1662 to professor Bartholin with the following cutting remark: During these days Descartes’ Tractatus de Homine with figures has been published by Florence Schuyl, councilor of the famous city of s’Hertogenbosch and professor of philosophy there, in which some not inelegant figures are seen that certainly proceed from a clever brain— but I seriously doubt whether such things can be seen in any brain. (Maar, 1910, v. 1, p. 120; Scherz, 1952, v. 1, p. 163)

THE CARTESIAN CONNECTION The publication of the De Homine in 1662 might very well have been the impulse that turned Steno to research on muscles and brain. As mentioned already, he did not make the results of this research public until 1664–1665, but a newfound source confirms the intimate connection between exactly these two research topics in a Cartesian perspective as early as 1662. The document in question is a report Steno wrote in 1677 to the Holy Office in Rome on the Jewish-born philosopher Baruch

A Cartesian perspective on Steno’s scientific development (Benedict) Spinoza (1632–1677), who in 1656 had been expelled from the Jewish community of Amsterdam for unorthodoxy and subsequently had become known as an atheist and the master of the so-called new philosophy (Cartesianism). It has long been known that Steno came to know Spinoza during his study years in Holland because he says so himself in an admonitory letter he wrote to Spinoza in 1671 as a response to the publication of the latter’s controversial Tractatus Theologicopoliticus (Theological-Political Treatise) in 1670 (Scherz, 1952, v. 1, p. 231–238). The report from 1677 adds to our knowledge because it tells us how and why the two met: About fifteen or sixteen years ago when I studied at the university of Leiden in Holland I had occasion to familiar dealings with the said Spinoza, of Jewish origin but professing no religion at all. Of his teachings I only knew in general that he had given up the rabbinic studies which he had pursued for some time and influenced by a certain van Emden (Franciscus van den Enden 1602–1674), suspected of atheism, and by reading the philosophy of Descartes, he had begun to create his own philosophy in which he explained everything solely by matter. During several days he came to me every day at that time to see the anatomy of the brain which I studied in different animals in order to find the seat of the principle of movement and the ending of the sensations. (Totaro, 2000, p. 100)

Steno’s recollections date these dissections to 1661–1662, which is a little early for my hypothesis—that it was the publication of the De Homine in 1662 that sparked off Steno’s research on muscles and brain. However, Steno is himself a little unsure on the exact number of years, and what he writes fully confirms the Cartesian connection between the two topics of Steno’s research: “the principle of movement” (muscles) and “the endings of the sensations” (brain). The interest of Spinoza, which prompted him to spend hours watching the young Dane’s dissections, indicates that the problem Steno tried to solve was no mere trifle. Actually, it bears on a central difficulty in the philosophical system of Descartes: the sharp distinction between res extensa (extendend substance, i.e., matter) and res cogitans (thinking substance, i.e., spirit). Matter moves in three-dimensional space and has form, extension, and movement, whereas spirit such as God, language, or the human soul, has no form, extension, nor movement. This dualism enabled Descartes to propose a totally mechanist and deterministic model of the physical and animal world and allowed him to dispense with a lot of categories and difficulties associated with traditional scholastic (Aristotelian) philosophy, such as substance and accident and the system of the four causes (formal, material, efficient, and final). However, it also left him with the problem of defining the connection between the two totally different substances of matter and spirit, which nevertheless had to be combined in order to account for specific human abilities such as rationality, consciousness, and intentionality. Descartes’ solution was to identify the so-called pineal body or gland (the epiphysis) situated at the base of the brain as the switchboard between body and soul. As mentioned already, Descartes supposed that the animal spirits were generated in the

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heart, from where they flowed directly to the brain, or, to be more precise, to the pineal gland situated in a cavity at the base of the brain. From the pineal gland, the animal spirits were distributed to different parts of the inner surface of the cavity to be absorbed by the mouths of the (hollow) nerves and conducted by them to different parts of the body. Depending on the position of the pineal gland, different parts of the inner surface would receive more or less intensive gushes of animal spirit with subsequent movement and other processes, like, for example, digestion, as a result. Descartes compared this system to the elaborate fountains and church organs of his time. In order to explain how sense impressions reached the pineal gland, Descartes compared the nerves to a doorbell string: When, for example, heat stimulated the nerve endings in the foot, the corresponding mouths on the inner surface of the cavity would dilate, and the subsequent suck would sway the pineal gland in their direction. This looks very much like an automatic stimulus and response system, and that is also how it worked in animals, which were mere machines. However, according to Descartes, in humans, the pineal gland was not moved solely by the “sucking” from the nerves but also directly by the human soul, which he compared to the organ player or fountain master who pulls the handles and turns up the volume of now this, now that pipe (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 11, p. 131, 165–166; Gaukroger, 2002, p. 180–214). SHOWDOWN WITH THE DOGMATIC CARTESIANS Whether considered solely as a mechanical explanation of movement or with an eye to explaining the connection between body and soul, if Descartes’ theory should work, the pineal gland had to be able to move incessantly, the nerves had to end in a cavity surrounding the pineal gland, and the blood had to flow directly from the heart to the pineal gland in order not to lose its heat. These were exactly the three points which Steno attacked in his famous Discours sur l’anatomie du cerveau (Discourse on the Anatomy of the Brain). This lecture on the anatomy of the brain, printed in Paris 1669 and reprinted and translated many times, was held in the beginning of 1665 in Paris in the private academy of Melchisédec Thévenot (ca. 1620–1692), scholar, patron, and guardian of the tradition of Mersenne and Gassendi. The timing was perfect because Descartes’ Le Monde, the aforementioned French version of his De Homine, had been published, and Steno expressly referred to it in his lecture (Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 8, 27–28; Scherz, 1965, p. 13, 58–60, 79, 127). On all three points, Steno proved the contrary of what Descartes supposed to be the case: the pineal gland was embedded in the substance of the brain and could not move, there was no cavity dotted with nerve endings surrounding it, and the blood vessels connected to the pineal gland were not arteries but veins, carrying the blood from the brain to the heart and not the other way round (Scherz, 1965, p. 12–22, 129–133; Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 7–12). Taken together with Steno’s demonstration that the heart is no “furnace” but a muscle pure and simple that contracts and expands like all other muscles, one could well say that he

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had dismantled central parts of Descartes’ man-machine. Steno was by no means the first to point out differences between Descartes’ tightly reasoned deductions—his machine—and the physical facts that could be observed empirically. In the lecture, he mentioned, among others, his own teacher Franz Sylvius from Leiden, but he presented his argument in a tightly argued form backed by great skill in dissection. This was a severe blow to Descartes’ whole system, and that was also how it was understood, if we trust the poet and intellectual broker Jean Chapelain (1595–1674) in a letter he wrote to his scholarly friend Pierre Daniel Huët (1650–1721) on 5 April 1665: Through your absence from Paris during the last few months you have missed a lot in the field which interests you so much because M. Steno, the Dane, has performed the most marvelous experiments ever in this field. He has even forced the obstinate and dogmatic Cartesians to admit the error of their leader with regard to the gland of the brain and its function and this in the presence of the most highly respected people in this city whom he bombarded with the deductions of a calm and reasonable intelligence. (Scherz, 1965, p. 70)

As an example of such “bombarding,” one could cite the following pieces of witty ridicule from Steno’s lecture: One should not, therefore, condemn Monsieur Descartes if his system of the brain is not wholly in conformity with experience. The excellence of his mind, apparent chiefly in his “Treatise on Man,” makes up for the errors of his hypotheses...The friends of M. Descartes, who take his Man for a machine, will no doubt be so good as to believe that I am not speaking here against his machine, the artifice of which I admire, but as for those who try to show that M. Descartes’ man is made like other men, anatomical experience will make them see that such an attempt must be unsuccessful. (Scherz, 1965, p. 13, 21–22, 128, 133; Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 8, 12)

Many have read these words as Steno’s final reckoning with Descartes and his siding with the anti-Cartesian camp (Faller, 1958; Rothschuh, 1968; Schiller and Théodoridès, 1968, p. 161–163; Scherz, 1987–1988, v. 1, p. 133; Yamada, 2006, p. 69, 71). However, Steno was no simple empiricist who proved Descartes wrong just to discard him. On the contrary, he explicitly acknowledged the theories of Descartes for their critical and heuristic value, even where they were wrong empirically: Only he has mechanically explained all the actions of man and principally those of the brain; the others describe for us man himself; Monsieur Descartes speaks to us only of a machine which, nevertheless, makes us see the insufficiency of what the others tell us and teaches us a method of investigating the uses of other parts of the human body with the same clarity as that with which he shows us the parts of the machine of his man. (Scherz, 1965, p. 13, 128; Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 8)

The passage merits close reading. It stresses the value of Descartes’ “machine” for its critical potential to “show the insufficiency of what the others tell us” as a well as a “method of investigation.” In other words, Steno emphasizes the critical and heuristic function of a theory. Even when it does not entirely

or even generally fit the facts, a clever theory can help us think clearly and pursue interesting questions. It is passages such as this that lend some substance to the view that Steno was a Popperian avant la lettre, because to modern ears, it is so reminiscent of the deductive method of testing (Rafaelsen, 1986, p. 141; Kardel, 1994b, p. 73–74, 96–98; Popper, 1968, p. 30). Even if Steno thus had a proto-Popperian understanding of the heuristic value of scientific theories (hypotheses), it is nevertheless difficult to identify any clear notion of the process of falsification so central to Popper’s concept of what constitutes real science. As most good scientists, Steno in practice seems to have lived up to this Popperian precept too, the lecture on the anatomy of the brain being the best example of systematic testing of theories, but he did not formulate the principle of falsification in the Popperian sense theoretically. The lecture on the anatomy of the brain might have been a showdown with the dogmatic Cartesians, but it was no farewell to Descartes. Also, from the following years, there is decisive evidence for a Cartesian interpretation of Steno’s scientific thought. MUSCLES “MORE GEOMETRICO” By the summer of 1665, Steno was a scholar of some renown with good friends in the scientific world but without means apart from his dwindling inheritance. His excellent reputation and modest means are borne out by the fact that the University of Leiden in December 1664 agreed to simply send him the diploma conferring the doctorate in medicine upon him “in absentia” without the normal elaborate and very expensive ceremonies. In other words, he was in need of a patron, and his continued travels are expressions of that fact. A few months after the Parisian lecture on the anatomy of the brain, Steno continued his travels southward, and, in late autumn 1665, he visited the (Protestant) university of Montpellier, where he came to know several present and future members of the Royal Society (London): Lord Robert Bruce, Earl of Ailesbury (1626–1685), Martin Lister (1639–1712), Philip Skippon (1641–1691), and probably also William Crone (1633–1684). In the beginning of 1666, he continued to Italy, where, in the person of Grand Duke Ferdinando II (1610–1670) of Tuscany, he eventually found the generous and sympathetic patron he hitherto had lacked. Grand Duke Ferdinando provided a generous stipend, lodgings in the Palazzo Vecchio, and excellent opportunities for dissections on human material—otherwise so hard to come by— in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova (Scherz, 1969, p. 22). Steno quickly made friends in the lively intellectual milieu of Florence and became a member of the scientific Accademia del Cimento as well as the literary Accademia della Crusca. In Florence, Steno finished his muscle studies with Elementorum myologiae specimen (A Specimen of the Elements of Myology) (1667), a rather difficult and controversial work that has not been understood and valued according to merit until quite recently (Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 55–145; Kardel, 1986). Even if Steno in this work only mentions Descartes in order to prove him

A Cartesian perspective on Steno’s scientific development wrong on the point of the muscular structure of the heart (Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 99), it is in many ways the most Cartesian of all the literature Steno ever wrote because of its method, for the subtitle of the work is musculi descriptio geometrica (a geometrical description of muscle), and it was exactly the “mos geometricus” (Arndt, 1971), we would say “mathematical method,” that constituted the scientific ideal to which Descartes subscribed. In the dedication to Grand Duke Ferdinando II, Steno explains: I have wished to show that the parts of a muscle cannot be named distinctly, nor can its movement successfully be considered, if not mathematics becomes part of myology. And why should we not do for muscles what astronomers have done for the heavens, geographers for the earth and—to choose an example from the microcosm—what writers on optics have done for the eyes? They have treated natural things mathematically in order to more precisely know them, and the structure of muscles seems to demand that they be explained mathematically. (Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 64; Scherz, 1969, p. 68–71)

This eulogy of mathematics is fully in the spirit of Descartes, who in the Discours had exalted geometry as the paradigm of all true science and dedicated the first of the three long appendices to a demonstration of its merits exactly in the field of optics (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 6, p. 19, 81–228; Maclean, 2006, p. 17–18). FROM MYOLOGY TO GEOLOGY BY MEANS OF A SHARK On the title page of the Elementorum myologiae specimen, Steno flaunted the Medici coat of arms advertising his new patron, and in the preface, Steno duly told the world how much he owed Ferdinando II. Among the things he owed the Grand Duke was also the head of a giant shark that turned his scientific work in quite new directions and made him one of the founding fathers of paleontology and stratigraphy (Scherz, 1971; Cutler, 2003). In the autumn of 1666, the fishermen of Leghorn, the free port of Tuscany, caught an extraordinary large specimen of the great white shark (Carcharadon cacharias, up to more than six meters long). The Grand Duke was notified and handed over the head of the giant beast to Steno, who set to work and published the results as an appendix to the Elementorum myologiae specimen (Scherz, 1969, p. 65–131). Steno dutifully recorded his observations on the skin, the excretory vessels, the eyes, the membranes, the muscles, the nerves, the brain, and the teeth. Looking at the teeth, he noted that they looked exactly like the socalled “glossopetrae” (tongue stones) found in the soil in many places in Italy and especially abundantly on Malta. Today, we know that these tongue stones are fossil shark teeth, but, with a few exceptions, for example, Leonardo da Vinci, the received opinion in Steno’s age was that they were produced on the spot by the playful forces of nature or a local “vis plastica” (formative power). However, Steno by means of six “conjectures” (hypotheses) reached the quite correct conclusion that they in fact were fossil shark teeth petrified in water long ago, even if they now were found on mountaintops.

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This insight opened up whole new vistas of what we would call paleontology and stratigraphy/historical geology because Steno’s discoveries were not valid only for shark teeth but for all animal and plant parts dug out from the earth. The verification of the hypothesis called for extensive traveling, which Steno undertook in 1667–1668 in order to corroborate his intuitions, and to enrich the Grand Duke’s natural history collection. These journeys proved quite exhausting, and in 1668, when he began a slow and sinuous journey north in the firm but eventually vain hope of obtaining an academic position in Denmark, he did not at all feel that his studies were finished and ready for publication. In the dedication to the Grand Duke of the small treatise he ended up writing, he described his experience in the following way: It frequently happens for those traveling in unknown territories, hastening through rough mountainous country towards a city situated on a mountain top, that once the city comes into view it seems quite close to them, even if it the road will take yet many a turn and delay them much longer than they hope. For they see only the nearest peaks, but the things hidden by those peaks, be it high hills or deep valleys or level plains, normally far exceed their estimates because, fooling themselves, they measure the distances according to their wish. (Scherz, 1969, p. 137–138)

However, he had to deliver, and he settled for a preliminary summary of a planned much longer work, which he gave the rather cumbrous title De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus (The Prodromus to a Dissertation on Solids Naturally Contained within Solids) (published 1669; Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 181–226; Scherz, 1969, p. 134–248). The “solids naturally contained within solids” were fossils, but also rock strata and crystals, and the work ended with a six-stage sketch of the historical geology of Tuscany. Descartes had not had much to say on the formation of Earth’s crust, even if the topic is briefly dealt with in part four of his Principia Philosophiae (Adam and Tannery, 1996, v. 8, p. 218–231; Gaukroger, 2002, p. 161–169), and on fossils, he had nothing to say. For that reason, it is significant that Steno nevertheless includes a reference to Descartes on the subject of strata of fine, sedimentary rock: If all the particles in a stony stratum are observed to be of the same nature and of fine size, it cannot be reasonably denied that this stratum was produced at the time of Creation from a fluid that then covered all things; Descartes, too, accounts for the origin of the earth’s strata in this way. (Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 198; Scherz, 1969, p. 162–163; cf. Adam and Tannery, v. 8, p. 218–220)

More important than the single approving reference is the fact that Steno also in his geological works operated within a securely Cartesian world. Of course, Steno’s treatment in many ways moves beyond Descartes, as, for example, in the role he ascribes to water in the formation of sedimentary rock, but his account of the geological forces at work operates solely with

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the Cartesian categories of form, location, and movement sketched out in the second part of Descartes’ Principia philosophiae (Maar, 1910, v. 2, p. 188–191; Scherz, 1969, p. 144–149; Adam and Tannery, v. 8, p. 40–79). Furthermore, Steno’s world, like Descartes’, is a world that is the outcome of a long process in which the forces of nature have been at work according to the same mechanical laws that govern today’s physical world. The six-stage model of the creation of the Tuscan landscape that concludes De solido actually is an exemplary demonstration of this. In Descartes’ and Steno’s view, the world has surely been created by God but not in its present shape. Its elements were created, and, from that point on, they were literally only pushed around and bumped into each other in a complex sequence but according to simple natural laws until we ended up with the world we have in front of us now (Scherz, 1969, p. 202–211; Adam and Tannery, v. 11, p. 31–48). STENO AND DESCARTES IN A KUHNIAN PERSPECTIVE How better to describe Steno’s continuing loyalty to Cartesian explanatory principles, his criticism of concrete points in the Cartesian theoretical edifice, and his appreciation of the critical and heuristic value of the selfsame theories than by Thomas S. Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, especially his concepts of “paradigm,” “normal science as puzzle-solving,” and “anomaly” (Kuhn, 1996). According to Kuhn, the function of a scientific paradigm is not only to lay down basic assumptions on how things are in a certain field of knowledge but quite as much to indicate what problems are worth solving and what ways of solving them are most promising. In other words: a scientific paradigm explains a lot, but first and foremost it guides “normal research” by pointing out interesting “puzzles” and ways to solve them. Steno’s research on the Cartesian connection of heart, brain, and muscle seems to me to be an excellent example of such a puzzle, as does his way to solve it according to Cartesian “normal science”: the geometrical method based on a mechanist model of the world. Furthermore, according to Kuhn, in the process of normal science, “anomalies” (novelties) that are not accounted for by the present paradigm turn up challenging theories as well as methods, eventually giving birth to a new paradigm through a “scientific revolution.” Not every anomaly occasions a scientific revolution. Phenomena and results not immediately fitting into the accepted framework are for many reasons part of normal scientific activity. They are simply part of the “puzzle-solving.” However, repeated and persistent anomalies eventually provoke a “crisis,” where things get blurred, doubts arise, and one suddenly seems to know much less than one thought. A certain disorientation then sets in. Steno’s lecture on the anatomy of the brain, so deconstructive of hitherto accepted truths, as well as his geological works, so pregnant with insights into geological time and the formation of Earth’s crust, could be interpreted as parts of such crises leading up to the formulation of new paradigms.

CONCLUSION Steno was early an admirer of René Descartes and was fascinated by his method as it was described and demonstrated in the Discours de la Méthode (1637). Central parts of Steno’s anatomical research are related to Descartes’ teaching on the heart, the brain, and the movement of muscles. Even if Steno gradually became more and more critical of Descartes’ theory of the human body because it clashed with the results of his dissections, he shared Descartes’ mathematical ideal of science as well as his mechanist world view. This is evident not only in his “geometrical” description of muscles Elementorum myologiae specimen (1667) but also in his main geological work De solido (1669), which operated within a totally Cartesian universe consisting only of matter in motion. Steno explicitly appreciated the critical and heuristic potential of Descartes’ theories even when they were empirically wrong. This raises the interesting question of whether Steno actually was a Popperian avant la lettre, since he relied on general statements that he confronted with empirical findings in a way suggestive of Karl Popper’s deductive method of testing. However, an equivalent to the central Popperian concept of falsification is missing among Steno’s theoretical statements. In order better to understand Steno’s relationship to Descartes, Thomas S. Kuhn’s concepts of scientific paradigms, normal science, and anomaly seem helpful because they do not presuppose strict adherence to certain rules and theories but emphasize the guiding role of a scientific “paradigm” that indicates interesting “puzzles” and ways to solve them. In other words: Steno was neither a dogmatic Cartesian nor simply an anti-Cartesian empiricist but a heuristic Cartesian who worked within a mechanist scientific paradigm that found its most stringent expression in the work of Descartes. This holds even if his discoveries included “anomalies” that were part of the crisis of Cartesianism as a scientific paradigm, because that is, according to Kuhn, the way all normal science works in the long run. A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS Apart from the quotations from Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode, where I have followed Maclean’s new and excellent translation, all quotations from the Latin, French, and Italian sources are my own or revised for reasons of clarity and accuracy by me on the basis of the original texts. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank professors Helge S. Kragh (University of Aarhus), Gary Rosenberg (Indiana University–Purdue University), and Elsebeth Thomsen (University of Tromsø) for useful comments. REFERENCES CITED Adam, C., and Tannery, P., eds., 1996, Oeuvres de Descartes, Volumes 1–11: Paris, Ministère de l’Instruction publique 1897–1910, reprint: Paris, Vrin.

A Cartesian perspective on Steno’s scientific development Arndt, H.W., 1971, Methodo scientifica pertractatum: Mos geometricus und Kalkülbegriff in der philosophischen Theorienbildung des 17 und 18 Jahrhunderts (Quellen und Studien zur Philosophie, v. 4): Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 170 p. Cutler, A., 2003, The Seashell on the Mountaintop: New York, Dutton, 228 p. Faller, A., 1958, Niels Stensen und der Cartesianismus, in Scherz, G., ed., Nicolaus Steno and his Indice (Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 15): Copenhagen, Munksgaard, p. 140–166. Gaukroger, S., 2002, Descartes’ System of Natural Philosophy: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 258 p. Kardel, T., ed., 1986, A specimen of observations upon the muscles: Taken from that noble anatomist Nicholas Steno, in Poulsen, J.E., and Snorrason, E., eds., Nicolaus Steno 1638–1686: A Re-Consideration by Danish Scientists: Copenhagen, Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, p. 97–134. Kardel, T., ed., 1994a, Steno on muscles: Introduction, texts, and translations: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, v. 84, part 1, 252 p. Kardel, T., 1994b, Steno: Life, Science, Philosophy (Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 42): Copenhagen, The Danish National Library of Science and Medicine, 159 p. Kragh, H.S., and Sørensen, H.K., 2007, An Odd Couple: Descartes and Longomontanus: Ideas in History, Volume 2, Number 1: Oslo, The Nordic Society for the History of Ideas, p. 9–35. Kuhn, T.S., 1996, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd edition): Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 212 p. Maar, V., ed., 1910, Nicolai Stenonis Opera Philosophica: Copenhagen, Vilhelm Tryde, v. 1, 264 p., and v. 2, 367 p. Maar, V., 1931, Lidt om Descartes og Danmark: Copenhagen, H.H. Thieles Bogtrykkeri, 81 p. Maclean, I., translator, 2006, René Descartes: A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences: Oxford, Oxford University Press, LXXV, 84 p. Moe, H., 1986, When Steno Brought New Esteem to Glands, in Poulsen, J.E., and Snorrason, E., eds., Nicolaus Steno 1638–1686: A Re-Consideration by Danish Scientists: Copenhagen, Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, p. 51–96. Popper, K.R., 1968, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (2nd edition): London, Hutchinson, 480 p. Rafaelsen, O.J., 1986, Steno’s lecture on the anatomy of the brain, in Poulsen, J.E., and Snorrason, E., eds., Nicolaus Steno 1638–1686: A Re-

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Consideration by Danish Scientists: Copenhagen, Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, p. 135–152. Rothschuh, K.E., 1968, Descartes, Stensen und der Discours sur l’anatomie du cerveau (1665), in Scherz, G., ed., Steno and Brain Research in the Seventeenth Century (Analecta Medico-Historica, v. 3): Oxford, Pergamon Press, p. 49–57. Scherz, G., ed., 1952, Nicolai Stenonis epistolae et epistolae ad eum datae, Volumes 1–2: Copenhagen, Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1027 p. Scherz, G., ed., 1965, Nicolaus Steno’s Lecture on the Anatomy of the Brain: Copenhagen, Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, 208 p. (Facsimile of the original French edition with introduction and English and German translations.) Scherz, G., ed., 1969, Steno—Geological Papers (trans. Alex J. Pollock) (Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 20): Odense, Odense University Press, 370 p. Scherz, G., ed., 1971, Dissertations on Steno as a Geologist (Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 23): Odense, Odense University Press, 319 p. Scherz, G., 1987–1988, Niels Stensen. Eine Biographie: Leipzig, St. BennoVerlag, v. 1, 376 p., v. 2, 318 p. Schiller, J., and Théodoridès, J., 1968, Sténon et les millieux scientifiques parisiens, in Scherz, G., ed., Steno and Brain Research in the Seventeenth Century (Analecta Medico-Historica, v. 3): Oxford, Pergamon Press, p. 155–170. Totaro, P., 2000, Documenti su Spinoza nell’Archivio del Sant’Uffizio dell’Inquisizione: Prismi, Napoli, Italie, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, p. 95–120. Yamada, T., 2006, Kircher and Steno on the “geocosm” with a reassessment of the role of Gassendi’s works, in Vai, G.B., and Caldwell, W.G.E., eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 65–80, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(05). Ziggelaar, A., ed., 1997, Chaos. Niels Stensen’s Chaos-manuscript Copenhagen, 1959 (Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 44): Copenhagen, The Danish National Library of Science and Medicine, 520 p. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

On the origin of natural history: Steno’s modern, but forgotten philosophy of science Jens Morten Hansen† Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Øster Voldgade 10, DK-1350 Copenhagen K, Denmark

ABSTRACT Nicolaus Steno (Niels Stensen, 1638–1686) is considered to be the founder of geology as a discipline of modern science, as well as of scientific conceptions of the human glands, muscles, heart, and brain. With respect to his anatomical results, the judgment of posterity has always considered Steno to be one of the founders of modern anatomy, whereas Steno’s paternity to the methods known today of all students of geology was almost forgotten during the 130 yr from 1700 to 1830. Besides geology and anatomy, there are other important sides of Steno’s scientific contributions to be rediscovered. Steno’s general philosophy of science is one of the clearest formulated philosophies of modern science as it appeared during the seventeenth century. It includes (1) separation of scientific methods from religious arguments; (2) a principle of how to seek “demonstrative certainty” by demanding considerations from both reductionist and holist perspectives; (3) a series of purely structural (semiotic) principles developing a stringent basis for the pragmatic, historic (diachronous) sciences as opposed to the categorical, timeless (achronous) sciences; and (4) “Steno’s ladder of knowledge,” by which he formulated the leading principle of modern science, i.e., how true knowledge about deeper, hidden causes (“what we are ignorant about”) can be approached by combining analogue experiences with logic reasoning. However, Steno’s ideas and influence on the general principles of modern science are still quite unknown outside Scandinavia, Italy, France, and Germany. This unfortunate situation may be explained by the fact that most of his philosophical statements had not been translated to English until recent decades. Several Latin philologists state that Steno’s Latin language is of great beauty and poetic value, and that translations to other languages cannot give justice to Steno’s texts. Thus, translations may have seemed too difficult. Steno’s ideas on the philosophy of science appear in both his many anatomical and in his fewer geological papers, all of which, with one exception (in French), were written in Latin. A concentration of his philosophy of science was presented in his last scientific lecture “Prooemium” (1673), which was not translated from Latin to English before 1994. Therefore, after the decline of Latin as a scientific language, Steno’s philosophy of science and ideas on scientific reasoning remained quite unknown, although his ideas should be considered extremely modern and path-finding for the scientific †

E-mail: [email protected].

Hansen, J.M., 2009, On the origin of natural history: Steno’s modern, but forgotten philosophy of science, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 159–178, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(12). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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Hansen revolution of the bio- and geosciences. Moreover, Steno’s philosophy of science is comparable to Immanuel Kant’s 80 yr younger theory on perception, Charles S. Peirce’s 230 yr younger theory on abduction, and—especially—Karl R. Popper’s 300 yr younger theory on scientific discovery by conjecture and refutation. The general outset of Steno’s philosophy of science constitutes an important step from the medieval and the Renaissance way of thinking into the seventeenth-century appearance of modern sciences and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The eighteenth-century to present-day dichotomy of science into the traditional creationistic and the new historical interpretations to some extent can be traced back to Steno and his methods. Keywords: Steno, philosophy of science, natural history, principles of geology, diachronous science, Enlightenment.

INTRODUCTION As indicated by Nicolaus Steno’s (Niels Stensen, 1638–1686; Fig. 1) foundation of methods for reconstruction of past events and by his description of Tuscany’s geological history as a succession of developments, Steno may be named a forerunner of a pragmatic gradualistic-evolutionary tradition. Following Steno’s historical understanding of the chaotic development of Earth, a series of important scientists—such as Leibniz, Buffon, Hutton, Lamarck, Halley, Lyell, Darwin, Boltzmann, Gilbert, Wegener, and Bohr—became “Stenonian” representatives of a historical and pragmatic understanding of nature. However, in opposition to Steno’s new way of thinking, which later dominated geology and natural history, the traditional creationistic or categorical thinking dominated physics and systematic biology. Great names—such as John Ray, Newton, Cuvier, Linnaeus, Laplace, Kelvin, Einstein, Hawking, and many other influential scientists of the Enlightenment and modernity—quite successfully tried to maintain a cosmology of divine order and predictability determined at the Creation (or, in our days, at the “Big Bang”). Especially after Darwin, these opposing viewpoints not only led to severe conflicts between science and religion, but they also led to unresolved conflicts between the diachronous biogeosciences, where time is an irreversible circumstance tying all natural forces and events to each other, and—on the other hand—the achronous sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry (except for thermodynamics), and molecular biology (except for genetics), where time in all notions and formulas is nothing but a reversible measuring parameter. For his time, Steno’s ideas on scientific recovery represent an extraordinarily stringent methodology allowing cool science and religious feelings to exist side by side, provided science is considered to be “Man’s highest praise to God.” This idea led Steno to—for his time—a highly unusual humble and pragmatic attitude to “the search for truth.” The breaking points of Steno’s philosophical ideas—and his eventual importance for the development of the historical or diachronous sciences and their conflicts with some religions as well as with the creationistic or achronous tradition of most disciplines of physics and chemistry—can briefly be summarized as follows:

Religious arguments are invalid in scientific reasoning. Although God has created nature, this divine cause is not meant to show how to understand nature scientifically. On the contrary, true scientific understanding should enlighten the Scripture and is Man’s highest praise to God. As shown by Descartes a few decades previously, Steno agreed that it was necessary to reduce all problems, observations, and understandings to a number of simple, separate situations (reductionism). However, after having reduced all problems as much as possible, a scientist must also observe, describe, analyze, and understand these reduced problems in coherence as complex, interacting systems (i.e., yield a systemic or “holistic” understanding). Especially through his methods of “consequent induction” (recognition, conjecture, refutation, and generalization) and through his deductive and forensic methods for chronological reconstruction (“backstripping”), Steno showed how to integrate such reduced situations to systemic and historic coherent understandings. On their own premises empirical and analytical methods are scientifically fruitful. However, the highest level of scientific understanding can only be approached by iterative interaction of both methods, as illustrated in Figure 2. As seen from the present-day viewpoint, these ideas may appear to be both modern and elementary, but that was not the case during Steno’s time. Arguments taken from the Bible were generally considered superior to any other argument. Moreover, analytical reasoning was by most of Steno’s contemporaneous philosophers held to be superior to empirical observations. Many philosophers even thought that empirical observations could be directly misleading (e.g., Descartes and also Steno’s friend in Rome, the renowned Athanasius Kircher). At that time, Descartes’ newly established methodology of reductionism was about to rule science, whereas “holistic” or systemic putting things together was still ruled by speculations on divine forces and powers. The tradition of reductionism founded by Descartes was followed by Isaac Newton. He also fought against his mathematical peer and competitor, G.W. Leibniz, who was a great admirer of Steno. Newton became President of the Royal

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would eventually be recognized when his philosophical ideas had proven fruitful in practical science. Finally, in 1915, Alfred Wegener’s way of forming his paradigmatic new theory on continental drift (“Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane”) in all important aspects built on Steno’s geological as well as philosophical principles (Hansen, 2007a, 2007b; cf. Krause and Thiede, 2005). However, the period of 60 yr that it took from 1915 to1975 for Wegener’s theory to be generally accepted also shows how difficult it had become not only to “dissect the machine” and describe its individual parts (reductionism), but merely to put the separate parts together and understand them “in coherence,” as Steno had already stated 250 yr earlier (see quotation herein, p. 151). Uniting Steno’s Philosophical Ideas from Anatomy and Geology

Figure 1. Portrait of Steno when he was approximately 30 yr old, probably painted by the Dutch artist Justus Sustermans, who was a member of Grand Duke Ferdinand II’s court. The original painting is found in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Society in London, and from this position, he suppressed any opposition. For nearly two centuries, the Newtonian “program” also ruled European science, and, consequently, the Stenonian way of thinking had large difficulties in the English-speaking countries. Most influential physicists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, e.g., Lord Kelvin, discredited opponents representing modern life and earth science, e.g., Darwin and Huxley (cf. Lakatos, 1971; Hallam, 1988). In this nearly “monoprogrammatic” philosophical environment of European science during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Steno’s thoughts may have seemed radical and sometimes made Steno a highly controversial figure. In 1903, Rutherford’s invention of radioactive dating finally broke Lord Kelvin’s condemnation of geology, paleontology, and evolution theories. The Darwinian—and before Darwin, the Stenonian, Huttonian, and Lyellinian—way of making systemic and pragmatic science by conjecture, empiric evidence, and refutation became more acceptable among physicists. The value of pursuing science in Steno’s way had been ripened and

With a few exceptions, modern historians of science do not connect Steno’s many anatomical papers with his no less important geological and paleontological works or with his first scientific thesis on the nature of heat (“De Solido” 1669; “Canis Carchariae” 1667; “De Thermis” 1660). For obvious reasons, most historians of science to some extent are limited by their primary interest in a certain branch of science. Consequently, important complementary developments from other disciplines of science may remain undiscussed. Moreover, some of Steno’s more important papers containing philosophical viewpoints—especially the lecture in Paris on the brain (1665) and his “Prooemium” lecture in Copenhagen (1673)—have not been translated into English before the late twentieth century. Exceptions are the physiologist and Nobel laureate August Krogh (1874–1949), who, together with the medical doctor Vilhelm Maar, translated Steno’s geological paper “De Solido” from Latin to Danish and provided the first deeper comment on Steno’s philosophy of science (Krogh and Maar, 1902). More recent exceptions from a unidisciplinary approach to Steno’s philosophy of science have been given by Gustav Scherz (1969), who, together with Alex Pollock, translated Steno’s geological papers and his work on heat from Latin to English and published the translations and Scherz’ comments on Steno’s theories. Likewise, August Ziggelaar (1997) translated and—from a multidisciplinary approach—commented on Steno’s Chaos, i.e., Steno’s student manuscript containing many of his early thoughts and theories on science. The work most directly connecting Steno’s anatomical, geological, and physical ideas are found in notes by three medical doctors, Egill Snorrason’s reconsideration (1986), Harald Moe’s biography (1988, 1994 in English), and Troels Kardel’s work from the 1980s and onward. Similar multidisciplinary approaches are seen in the posthumous book (1995) on religion and science by the professor of physics and of science history, Olaf Pedersen, in the geologist Gary Rosenberg’s work on Steno as illustrator (2006), and in the geologist Toshiro Yamada’s works on the relations between Steno, Gassendi, Kircher, Leibniz, and Spinoza

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Figure 2. Steno’s works before 1665 were purely empirical and included many anatomical discoveries. Here, we see Steno’s accurate and beautiful drawing of a dissected calf’s head (from Steno’s paper De Glandulis Oris, 1661). Most of Steno’s earliest scientific studies were concerned with the lymph system and the glands. In particular, the function of the glands was not understood in Steno’s time. Among other discoveries related to the glands, Steno showed that the saliva of the mouth is derived from the parotid gland through a duct (now named ductus stenonianus after Steno) ending in the oral cavity. The drawing shows a metal rod pushed from the oral cavity into the duct from the parotid gland. Steno first made this observation in a sheep’s head, when he pushed a metal rod from the gland into the duct and then heard a “click,” when the rod surprisingly hit the sheep’s teeth without having penetrated any tissues: The glands produce saliva!

(2003, 2006). In more popular terms, Steno’s ideas have been described recently by Cutler (2003) and Kermit (1998, 2003). My own contributions (Hansen, 1997, 2000a, 2000b, 2005) include Steno’s philosophy of science, as expressed in both his anatomical and geological works, and deal mainly with Steno’s and subsequent naturalists’ ideas on geological, paleontological, and physical thinking and the major differences between the achronous physical sciences and the diachronous historical sciences, such as geology and paleontology. STENO’S SEPARATION OF SCIENCE FROM RELIGION At the time of Steno, nearly nobody doubted that the world had been created by God. Extremely few medieval and Renaissance scientists and philosophers felt the need to describe the world from any other viewpoint. Giordano Bruno is one of them, and his execution in 1600 may have discouraged others from following this path. However, in Steno’s time, the true existence of God was as real to everybody as the true existence of “hidden forces” such as gravity, electricity, and magnetism is today. After Galileo, the general viewpoint was that the truth about the Creation could be read in two places, in the Holy Scripture and in nature.

Most of those days’ important contributions to the establishment of modern science to some extent argued that the Creation and our understanding of it should explain God’s will. References to or arguments directly from the Bible could be taken granted. This applies for the greatest scientists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, e.g., Brahe, Kepler, Descartes, and, in most respects, Galileo as well, while other slightly younger scientists—first and foremost Isaac Newton—more speculatively tried to find a connection between the first cause (God) and the laws of nature. Thus, Newton came to the conclusion that causal explanations are irrelevant. All causality is from the very beginning already contained in the mathematical laws of nature (Koyré, posthumous 1973). Despite his strong Christian faith, Steno took a completely different position when he founded paleontology by conjecture and refutation (1667) and, particularly, when he founded geology as a discipline of modern science (1669). Deeply religious as Steno was, it seems that he was fully aware of the weaknesses such an inclination might induce on his scientific work. Steno observed that religious arguments had undermined the scientific value of the work of many of his contemporaries, e.g., Athanasius Kircher and Descartes. Moreover, Steno’s religious speculations and final conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism had taught him that interpretations of the Bible may differ

On the origin of natural history: Steno’s modern, but forgotten philosophy of science from time to time and from region to region. Maybe therefore, Steno quite early proclaimed that an important role of science is to rule out uncertainties, errors, and misinterpretations. Early in his scientific career, he came to the viewpoint that a true perception is not given once and for all. The truth must be sought, and the truth will only be partly understood. The approach to and knowledge about the truth is as pragmatic and incomplete as our sensing and reasoning capacities. Therefore, we must begin with findings, which we—without reasonable doubt—can be certain about: In order to defend the study of reality, conscious of the risks of error and in order to avoid the errors of others, I will not seek the truth by arguments alone [pure reasoning] or by experiments alone [empirical investigations and sensing], but by such a mixture of both, so that most, if not all results, after everybody’s calculations will be of demonstrative certainty. (Steno, 1665; my translation and explanations in brackets)1

Steno believed that the use of scientific methods can make many ideas certain—i.e., without reasonable doubt—although there always will be a few people who will contradict what is of demonstrative certainty after “everybody’s calculations.” Steno also realized quite early that Descartes’ new reductionistic method was incomplete, although necessary. Things must be understood both as individual things and in coherence. In his work on the brain, where he contradicts Descartes machinemechanistic conception of the brain, Steno claims: There are two ways to understand complicated things as a complicated machine. Either can the master, who has built the machine, show you what he has done and how the machine works. Or you can investigate every single part and—to begin with—understand them individually. Thereafter, you must also put all the individual parts together in order to understand how they work in coherence. (Steno, 1665; my interpretative translation)2

In Steno’s conception, the overall understanding of a complicated system cannot be considered just to be the sum of the understandings of the individual parts of the system. The overall understanding of a complicated system also should include how the understanding of the individual parts shall be understood in coherence. In other words, the understanding of a system is more than the sum of separate understandings. Steno is both a Cartesian reductionist and a scientifically stringent “holist.” Steno elsewhere compares the “master way” of understanding with divine inspiration, where God may lead the anatomist’s hand during dissections and lead the anatomist’s eyes to the interesting and telling parts of the body. However, the great master does not tell the anatomist how to understand what he sees. God 1

Steno’s original text may be found in Kardel (1994a, p. 126) together with M.E. Collins and P. Maquet’s slightly different translation from Latin to English. 2 Steno’s original text may be found in French in Maar (1910). Find also original text and translation to Italian, Latin, English, Danish, and German in Rafaelsen (1986, p. 67), also translated to Danish in Kardel and Møllgaard (1997, p. 32).

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only leads our attention to what we need to see in order to understand. What we really see is a matter of the senses’ reflection of the real things, and of the signals “transmitted” from the senses to the brain. What the brain perceives about the things in question differs from the things as they are “by themselves.” The senses only show those aspects of the real things that are needed for man’s understanding. In “Prooemium,” Steno explains this early and almost Kantian theory of perception in this way: It is not the function of the senses to show or to judge things as they are by themselves [res ut sunt], but to transmit those circumstances by the observed things to the reasoning, so that it will be sufficient for Man to obtain the perceptions of things [notitiam rerum] appropriate to Man’s purpose. (Steno, 1673; my interpretative translation)3

However, the real scientific problem—and the beauty of human understanding—is that we, due to our incomplete capacities, will remain ignorant about the first cause, God’s will. Unlike Newton’s categorical ideas a few years later—namely, that all causality is contained in the laws of nature—Steno came to the pragmatic and nearly opposite conclusion, that we can only obtain incomplete or vague ideas about the deeper causes through a mixture of observation and reasoning. This idea may also be seen as a forerunner of David Hume (1711–1776) and his philosophy on how deeper causes gradually disappear to our perception with depth of time. This thought inspired Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) to his ideas on human perception. Thus, Kant distinguished between things as they are in themselves (“das Ding an sich”) and as we perceive things (“das Ding für uns”), while approximately 80 yr earlier, Steno made a similar distinction between things as they are (“res ut sunt”) and as we perceive them (“notitiam rerum”). In “Prooemium,” Steno expresses the consequences of this viewpoint in a famous maxim, which in my opinion has been misunderstood by some believers who wish to see Steno’s shift from a scientific to a clerical career as a condemnation of his geological ideas. Steno’s famous maxim says: Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Far most beautiful is what we are ignorant about. (Steno, 1673; my translation)4

However, Steno’s three levels of scientific understanding do not describe a ladder from secular to religious understanding. When Steno as newly appointed anatomicus regius (royal anatomist) was about to begin a public dissection of a young female body in the anatomical theater of Copenhagen University, he explained what he meant: 3 Steno’s original text may be found in Kardel (1994a, p. 120] together with M.E. Collins and P. Maquet’s translation to English (p. 121), also translated by Larsen (1933) and Kragelund (1976) to Danish. 4 Steno’s original text may be found in Kardel (1994a, p. 120) together with translation to English. Find a slightly different translation by myself in Hansen (2005, p. 233), where “quae ignorantur” is translated to “that about which we are insensible,” whereas the translation in Kardel is “what we do not know.”

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Beautiful is what directly is revealed to the senses without dissection. More beautiful is what the dissection draws forth from the hidden interior parts. But far most beautiful—although escaping the senses—is what [nevertheless] can be approached through reasoning about what the senses have already [or elsewhere] perceived. (Steno, 1673; my translation [and interpretation])5

Thus, the ladder of Steno’s philosophy of science does not go from secular to divine understanding, but—in the search for the deeper causes—from sensing (“beautiful” [pulchra]) to empiric investigations and reasoning (“more beautiful” [pulchriora]) to iterative combination of sensing and reasonable analogies with logic reasoning and what already has been perceived (“far most beautiful” [longe pulcherrima]). Olaf Pedersen (1996) noted that Steno’s way of reasoning differs fundamentally from his contemporaries by seeking causes, not by explaining nature by causes already given, e.g., in the Bible or in mathematical notions. Especially with respect to fossils, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious ideas on causes were widely used in order to explain nature. As documented by Pedersen (1996), that was also the project of, for example, the seventeenth-century scientists John Ray and Kircher, and even later the project of Sedwick and several other nineteenth-century scientists, whereas the controversial eighteenth-century French scientist Buffon was more in line with Steno. In Steno’s thinking, the role of science is not to explain effects by means of a priori given causes. That is merely the role of religion—and in our time, may I say, the role of forecasting, prospecting, and mathematic modeling. In Steno’s thinking, the role of science is to study the visible things in nature and man (the effects) and, thereafter—e.g., by assuming that the forces now in action also have been active in the past—to “back-strip” and reconstruct, and thereby understand, what the causes may have been to the observed effects. Compared to the majority of his contemporaneous philosophers, Steno came to another—and scientifically much more fruitful—way of understanding the relation between nature and God (the first cause). In Steno’s opinion, there are two ways to approach the truth: science and the Holy Scripture. His entire scientific and theological work shows—in particular, Steno’s letter to Spinoza (in Latin, 1671; text translated to German in Scherz [1963, p. 279–287], and to Danish in Larsen [1933, p. 114–125])—Steno’s modern position: Scientific and religious arguments must be kept separate. Scientific methods should rule reasoning. Religious belief should rule actions. True science on its own premises is man’s highest praise to God. If science is contradicting the Holy Scripture, or vice versa, there are things we have still not understood (we are “ignorant” about the “far most beautiful”), although our understanding of the deeper causes may be approached by a combination of analogies and what we already know with logic rea5 Steno’s original text may be found in Kardel (1994a, p. 118) together with M.E. Collins and P. Maquet’s translation to English (p. 119). Their translation of the late phrase reads “yet by far the most beautiful is what, escaping the senses, is revealed by reasoning helped by what the senses perceive.”

soning. Steno seems never to have doubted that contradictions between science and the Holy Scripture would only be a question of becoming better at reading the causes and effects laid down in, e.g., the structure of nature’s “solid bodies” as well as the Bible. STENO’S REJECTION OF RELIGIOUS ARGUMENTS AND SCIENTIFIC ARROGANCE Steno’s path to his—de facto materialistic—philosophy of science originated from his anatomical studies. In the beginning, he was inspired from Descartes’ and Galileo’s work. He wished to describe biological phenomena mathematically (Fig. 3). Consequently, Steno constructed a geometric explanation for the function of the individual muscle fibers and the pennate bundles of muscle fibers and showed the geometric relations between relaxed and contracted muscles (contraction by shortening and thickening of the individual fibers). Thus, Steno, on a purely geometric basis, showed that the volume of a contracted and a relaxed muscle is the same. Steno’s student friend, Jan Schwammerdam, undertook experiments confirming Steno’s theory (but first published 70 yr later), whereas the conception of their time and many years ahead was that muscles contract by thickening to a larger volume as a result of inflation by blood. Although Steno’s correct idea on how muscles work for a long time was considered to be “perhaps the weakest” of his entire production (cf. Kardel, 2000), and consequently was erroneously rejected by most contemporaneous anatomists, and even during the two following centuries, Steno was convinced that he was right. We now know he was right (Kardel, 1994b)! A similar mathematic approach is also seen in Steno’s measurements of the angles of crystals, which led to “Steno’s law” about crystal’s constant angles. However, in all other respects where he tried a mathematic-geometric description of biological and geological phenomena, he realized that nature is more complex. Steno’s purely materialistic understanding of the muscles also led him to dissections of the human heart, which in his time was believed by most scientists to be the seat of the soul and the throne of our spirit. However, Steno concluded in a letter to Thomas Bartholin (1663, published 1664 by Bartholin): I say, you will find nothing in the heart, which is not also found in every muscle, and in every muscle, you will find nothing, which is not also found in the heart. The heart is a muscle! (my interpretative translation)6

Thomas Bartholin felt that this conclusion was too radical (Pedersen, 1986, p. 20), while others concluded that Steno was to become a great scientist. It should be remembered that Steno’s conclusion on the function of the heart neither reduces man to a machine nor rejects the existence of God nor the soul. Steno’s statement simply rejects religious explanations on the function 6 Bartholin’s quotation of Steno’s letter may be found in Kardel (1986, p. 115), together with Kardel’s translation to English. Kardel’s interpretation of Steno’s statement is also found in Kardel (1994a, p. 29–30).

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Figure 3. As a Cartesian, Steno wished to give “mathematical” explanations for biological and geological phenomena. However, with the exception of muscles (and later crystals), he soon realized that this project was not fruitful when dealing with more complex structures. Here, some of Steno’s drawings show the function of muscle fibers and muscles from his paper Elementorum Myologiae Specimen from 1669. Already in 1663, in a letter to Thomas Bartholin, Steno had provided a sketch of the muscle’s pennate structure and claimed that the heart is a muscle. The upper part of the figure shows his geometrical explanation for the function of a muscle fiber, and the lower part shows how single fibers, bundles of fibers, i.e., muscles (“Tabula I and II”) and bundles of muscles (“Tabula III”), work and work in coherence. The little figure at the top left shows the contemporary idea on how muscles work, which Steno was opposed to, namely, that muscles contract as a result of inflation by blood, i.e., that contracted muscles have a larger volume than relaxed muscles. Steno’s geometrical explanation shows that the volume is constant. Inspired from Steno’s studies, his friend Jan Schwammerdam undertook experiments showing that Steno was right. Nevertheless, Steno’s muscle theory was generally rejected until centuries later.

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and role of the heart. He simply explains what the heart’s anatomical function is when it is described solely by means of scientific methods. As a side-effect, he noted, the first scientist to do so, that the human heart is asymmetric—an observation that also reduced the heart’s divine status. He was very fond of this observation, and in his ex libris and episcopal sigilum, he included a symbolic asymmetric heart from which a cross arises.7 A similar approach is seen in Steno’s lecture in Paris (1665) on the anatomy and function of the brain. Steno criticized Descartes and other contemporaneous celebrities for neglecting careful dissection and observation of the brain in order to make their anatomical speculations coincide with their speculations on the soul and how God and/or the soul rules man. Steno said: These people, who think they know about everything, will give you a description of the brain and the positions of all its functions as if they, themselves, had been present at the creation of this “wonderful machine” and had penetrated the deepest thoughts of its master. (my translation, the quotation marks indicate my interpretation of Steno’s irony on Descartes’ machine-mechanistic conception of the brain)8

In particular, Descartes speculations on the divine role of the pineal gland in the brain’s center, as well as Descartes’ sloppy dissections and description of the brain, had forced Steno to argue against Descartes and once again to reject religious arguments as valid in scientific reasoning. In order to find a connection among God’s will, the soul, and the human body, Descartes had figured out that the pineal gland was acting by “vibrations” and “rotations” induced by the soul and that these postulated movements of the pineal gland in the center of the brain would make the gland touch various parts of the brain’s inner surfaces and thereby induce impulses from the brain to the muscles and other organs. By this conception, Descartes so to speak reduced man to a “wonderful machine” ruled by the soul and God’s unforeseeable and interfering will (Fig. 4). Steno rejected this conception and showed that the pineal gland is delicately, but firmly connected to the brain, and that the carefully dissected human brain is very different from the explanations given by Descartes and Willis. In “De Solido” four years later, Steno had come even farther from Descartes’ Platonic view, where the soul or an idea rules matter. Steno’s viewpoint now approached an Aristotelian or even an Epicurean conception of “the will,” where the description and understanding of observed natural changes should be independent, whatever the scientist may believe that the “moving force” is, be it Plato’s “ideas,” Descartes’ “soul,” or otherwise an expression of God’s unforeseeable will and eventual interference. Steno thought natural changes or man’s changes of nature’s 7 This symbol, but with a symmetric heart, had already been in use in his family in Scania (Elsebeth Thomsen, 2008, personal commun.), and in 2006, I observed the same symbol in use on several fishing boats in southern Ireland. 8 Steno’s original text may be found in French in Maar (1910). Find also original text and translations to Italian, Latin, English, Danish, and German in Rafaelsen (1986, p. 39), and translated to Danish in Kardel and Møllgaard (1997, p. 9).

forms should not be studied as if they have been induced by various divine powers; scientific studies should be independent of desired results. This viewpoint is described several places in Steno’s anatomical and geological works e.g., with an allegory in the very first paragraph of “De Solido”: While travellers in unknown territories hasten over rough mountain tracks towards a city on a mountain top, it often happens that they judge the city, at first sight, to be close to them; constantly, numerous twists and turnings along the route delay their hope of arrival to the point of weariness, for they see only the nearest peaks; in fact those things hidden by the said peaks, the heights of hills, the depths of valleys, or the levels of plains, whatever they may be, far exceed their conjectures, and they, deceiving themselves, estimate the intervening distances from their own desires. (translation by A.J. Pollock in Scherz [1969, p. 137])9

Therefore, the study of nature should be independent of the scientist’s conjectures and desires, including the scientist’s thoughts on God’s will. Certainly, Steno believed in God as the creator and maintainer of the world, but he also believed our understanding of natural changes and man’s actions should not anticipate an idea where God’s will and interference is the direct cause of all change (motion). However, before coming to this scientific point, Steno assures the readers about his belief in God’s omnipotence: Certainly to deny this cause of power of producing results contrary to the usual course of nature is the same as denying man the power to change course of rivers, of struggling with sails against the winds, of kindling fire in places where without him fire would never be kindled, of extinguishing fire which would not otherwise vanish unless its fuel supply ceased, of grafting the shoot of one plant on the branch of another, of serving up summer fruits in mid-winter, of producing ice in the very heat of summer, and thousand other things of this kind opposed to the usual laws of Nature. For if we ourselves, who are ignorant of the structure of both our own bodies and the bodies of others, alter the determination of natural motions each day, why should not He be able to alter their determination who not only knows the whole of our structure and that of all things, but also brought them into being. (translation by A.J. Pollock in Scherz [1969, p. 147])10

Immediately after this assurance about God’s omnipotence and man’s capability to induce seemingly unnatural phenomena, Steno turns to our imperfect knowledge and capability of understanding, including our imperfect understanding of ourselves: However, in those things that Man has produced, and in those things that have been produced by Nature, to admire the genius of the freely acting Man, and to deny a free mover to things produced of Nature, appears to me to be both subtle and naïve, since Man—even when he produces the most ingenious and admirable things—only through a fog is seeing, what he has done, which organs he has been using, and what has been the moving forces of these organs. (my translation)11 9

Steno’s original Latin text may be found in Scherz (1969, p. 136). Steno’s original Latin text may be found in Scherz (1969, p. 146). 11 Steno’s original text may be found in Scherz (1969, p. 146) and also A.J. Pollock’s slightly different translation to English (p. 147). 10

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Figure 4. Left: Steno’s drawings of the human brain, i.e., history’s first example of a drawing almost similar to the present-day conception of the human brain (from Steno’s paper Discours sur l’Anatomie du Cerveau, published in 1669). Right: Descartes’ model on the function of the brain (criticized by Steno in Paris in 1665). According to Descartes, the soul would make the pineal gland (in the center of the figure) vibrate and rotate and thereby touch various parts of the inner surface of the brain. This would activate various nerves and muscles and cause the actions of man. Steno criticized Descartes’ model because it did not build on observations— as Descartes claimed—but merely tried to explain Descartes’ speculations on the connection between God, soul, and body.

Because of this imperfect capability of understanding, a scientist should not anticipate any specific decision on the nature of the moving force (or “first cause”) in order to produce the natural change in question. The applied scientific method should be independent of any possible result, and the necessary scientific anticipations and prerequisites should be of such reasonable or indisputable certainty that they cannot be refuted by any scientific argument. In “De Solido,” Steno concludes on his own scientific anticipations and prerequisites about the nature of matter: For what I have said about matter holds everywhere, whether matter is considered to consist of atoms, or of particles which may change in thousand ways, or of the four elements, or of as many chemical elements as are needed to meet the variety of opinions among chemists. And indeed what I have proposed about the determination of motion agrees with every mover, whether you call the mover the form, or properties emanating from the form, or the Idea, or common “subtle matter,” or special “subtle matter,” or a particular soul, or the immediate influence of God. (translation by A.J. Pollock in Scherz [1969, p. 146])12

With this statement, Steno’s conception of how to study natural change breaks with the theology of the Renaissance and Descartes, which anticipates that “God’s finger” from the beyond makes “imprints” on the worldly substances without being in it. It is reasonable to suggest a parallel in the different opinions between Descartes’ and Steno’s conceptions of “the beyond” and “the worldly” and the almost similar disagreement between Plato’s and Aristotle’s conceptions of “idea” and “form.” Plato’s 12

Steno’s original Latin text may be found in Scherz (1969, p. 147).

and Descartes’ thoughts were occupied by the existence of “ethereal” powers—and how “the idea” or “the soul” rules nature and man from the beyond. Aristotle and Steno, on the contrary, were occupied by the worldly multitude of matters and forms and how to study nature with man’s imperfect capacities. For Steno as for Aristotle—but in opposition to Descartes and Plato—nature is substance and form, i.e., that which exists in itself (per se, as Aristotle said) or in things as they are (res ut sunt, as Steno said). In Aristotle’s and Steno’s thinking, the world is constituted by matter and form, and Plato’s “idea” or Descartes’ “soul” does not rule the worldly matters and forms from “the beyond” by interference. No, every changeable thing has been created already, and the Creation already contained seedlings to all possible and unpredictable changes. By nature’s, as well as man’s, freely acting capability, all potential changes or deviations from “the normal” were already laid down in the worldly; only the unchangeable does not belong to this world. Only God is unchangeable (according to Aristotle: the quintessence, the fifth element, in opposition to the four worldly elements of earth, water, air, and fire). In Steno’s thinking, this means that we can only approach our understanding of the unchangeable by understanding the changeable nature as it is appears now, not the opposite way around by a priori knowledge of all causes: Religious arguments and thoughts on “the beyond” are invalid in science! Nature should be studied in nature, not explained by “ideas” without studies. After having come to the conclusion that even mathematical laws—which basically are metaphysical explanations—would only work sporadically in biology and geology, Steno in the first part of “De Solido” declares that the philosophical purpose of his geological project is

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to find methods, which through the study of natural solid bodies themselves will yield evidence on where and how the solid bodies have been produced [in Latin: “…in ipso corpere argumenta invenire locus et modus poductionis detergentia”]. (my translation)13

Thus, inspired from his studies of the glands, the muscles, and the brain, Steno’s “De Solido” constitutes one of history’s first consequent separations of scientific from religious and other kinds of metaphysical reasoning. STENO’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE INITIAL DICHOTOMY OF DETERMINISTIC AND STOCHASTIC SCIENCES Knowing Steno’s attitude to his student friend from Leiden, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), and Steno’s opinion on Spinoza’s “materialistic religion” as it had been described anonymously by Spinoza in Tractatus (1670), it may seem difficult to connect Steno’s de facto materialistic philosophy of science with his very critical viewpoints on Spinoza’s pantheistic ideas. Steno’s criticism was expressed in a letter to Spinoza well after Steno had begun his clerical career.14 However, in my opinion, Steno wanted to make it absolutely clear that Spinoza’s attempt to unite religion and science by inferring a foreseeable God ruling nature by eternal laws was a scientifically indefensible idea about the utmost “beautiful” knowledge, i.e., what we are far most ignorant about. Certainly, it was not Steno’s project to unite science and religion, but to seek the truth by both means, independently. However, after Spinoza’s Tractatus had become broadly known to the scientific community, the idea of the divine nature of the “eternal” mechanic laws also became central in the “Newtonian program” (Hallam, 1988). This way of thinking soon led to the philosophy of “necessity” and to the idea that “spontaneity”—or Steno’s “free mover” (see previous)—was only a result of the human feeling of mastering a free will. This idea about necessity almost completely ruled science after Newton and Laplace until Darwin—and even later Bohr in opposition to Einstein— insisted on the reality of spontaneity. First, with Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who’s philosophical ideas in many aspects are comparable to Steno’s philosophy of science, the idea about “necessity” and categorical accuracy and infinite predictability of nature’s reactions was rejected on a convincing, but—until our days—unrecognized logical basis (Peirce, 1892). In Steno’s thinking—unlike Spinoza’s and the upcoming Newtonian thinking—man’s free will and capability to act spontaneously is just as natural as man’s capability “of producing results contrary to the usual course of nature,” e.g., “of grafting the shoot of one plant on the branch of another.” Nature as well as man is not completely tied to “necessity.” There is room for freedom. However, we will not be able to understand this capability to act freely, since man “only through a fog is seeing, what he has done, 13 Steno’s original Latin expression may be found in complete context in Scherz (1969, p. 141) and also A.J. Pollock’s slightly different translation (p. 141). 14 A translation of Steno’s letter from Latin to German may be found in Scherz (1963, p. 279–287), and to Danish in Larsen (1933, p. 114–125).

which organs he has been using, and what has been the moving forces of these organs” (see quotation in context above, p. 14). For obvious reasons, Steno did not know about the upcoming great conflict between the two major branches of science— i.e., the new historic (empiric-narrative) disciplines of biology and geology and the older mathematic (analytic-deterministic) disciplines of physics and chemistry. Steno simply considered Spinoza’s ideas to be extremely arrogant by inventing a “religion of bodies” claiming a capacity to calculate everything with infinite accuracy. Although Newton’s corresponding ideas and foundation of modern mechanics first appeared a few years after Steno’s death, the disagreement between Steno and Spinoza should not only be seen as a theological discussion, but merely as a discussion marking the initial philosophical separation between the pragmatic, diachronous disciplines (e.g., biology, geology, thermodynamics, and genetics) on the one hand and the categorical, achronous disciplines (e.g., mathematics, physics, chemistry, molecular biology) on the other hand (Hansen, 2000a). Spinoza prepared the philosophical basis for such a way of deterministic thinking, and Newton’s mechanic laws, according to most eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century astronomers, physicists, and chemists, followed Spinoza’s vision. However, following Steno’s geological and biological understanding of the partly chaotic development of Earth and living creatures’ capacity to deviate from foreseeable motions, a series of important scientists may be labeled “Stenonian” representatives of a diachronous (historical) and pragmatic understanding of nature. This pragmatic lineage of thinkers would include scientists such as Leibniz, Buffon, Hutton, Lamarck, Halley, Lyell, Darwin, Boltzmann, Gilbert, Bohr, Monod, Prigogine, and Gould and philosophers such as Hume, Kant, Peirce, and Popper. On the other hand, and in opposition to Steno’s way of thinking, Spinoza’s categorical thinking may be seen as a forerunner of a very different “Cartesian” lineage of important scientists, such as Newton, Cuvier, Linnaeus, Laplace, Kelvin, Einstein, Hawking, and many other influential scientists, as well as many philosophers leading to the positivistic school such as Hegel, Marx, Compte, Mach, Russell, and Ayer. While the “Stenonian” pragmatic scientists recognize the existence of chaotic and unforeseeable developments and the sparse capacity of human understanding, the “Cartesian,” “Newtonian,” and now “Einsteinian” lineage quite successfully tried to maintain a cosmology of divine order and predictability determined at the Creation (or, in our days, at the “Big Bang”). The “Stenonian” way of thinking cannot be described as a complete departure from the Cartesian philosophy of science (cf. Olden-Jørgensen, this volume), but merely as a revision of Cartesian philosophy. Steno does not reject reductionism, which is the core of Descartes’ methodology. Steno merely considers reductionism as a necessary, but insufficient, step toward better scientific understanding. The step to follow reductionism is the understanding of ways in which the individual parts of a complex system work in coherence without interference from divine powers or by inferring a “religion of bodies.” Science and religion

On the origin of natural history: Steno’s modern, but forgotten philosophy of science must be kept separate. A philosophy of science like Spinoza’s, claiming to be able to understand everything on a purely materialistic basis, is just as unreasonable as Descartes’ understanding of the human brain and use of speculations on interference from inexplicable divine powers. I have argued that Steno’s philosophy of science marks the onset of the dichotomy of the new historic (empiric-narrative) disciplines of biology and geology from the older mathematic (analytic-deterministic) disciplines of physics and chemistry, and that the later growth of this dichotomy is basically related to the scientist’s fundamentally different field of research (Hansen, 2000a, 2000b). Scientists dealing with a single set or a coherent set of natural laws tend to be determinists, believing in complete predictability, whereas scientists working on a more complex basis tend to be stochacisists, believing in the reality of spontaneity and unforeseeable developments when systems of different origin and history interfere with each other. In terms of geology, this will also explain the historic dichotomy between “hard rock” and “soft rock” geologists, i.e., scientists working mainly with endogenous and exogenous processes, respectively. In philosophical terms, the problem is related to the problem of predictability, i.e., if there is a complete correspondence between the “endogenous forces” working by physical contact over short distances (chemical forces, atomic forces, etc.) and the “exogenous forces” working without physical contact and over great distances (gravity, magnetism, etc). In terms of Earth’s history, this is basically a question of complete correspondence “from the beginning of all times” between the endogenous forces mainly defining the developments below Earth’s crust and the exogenous forces mainly defining the developments on top of and above Earth’s crust. If such a completely accurate correspondence exists, it would require completely accurate correspondence between gravity and all other natural forces. If it could be proven that such a correspondence does not exist, it would give a satisfactory explanation to the fact that Earth’s heterogeneous crust and surface appear to be partly ruled by unpredictable changes, i.e., by interference of endogenous and exogenous forces that have acted independently from “the beginning of all times.” However, according to the laws of logic, such a negative proof, on what does positively not exist, cannot be established. Consequently, the problem—if complete predictability can exist in heterogeneous systems—is comparable to the Kantian antinomies on the impossibility to prove the existence of man’s free will and the existence of God! WHY WAS THE PHILOSOPHER AND GEOLOGIST, BUT NOT THE ANATOMIST, STENO ALMOST FORGOTTEN UNTIL 1830? On the continent, Steno’s anatomical achievements had brought his name to fame already before he was 25 yr old, whereas other results—including some of the most important anatomical studies—were erroneously rejected. For more than 250 yr, Steno’s work on muscles were considered to be among

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his less important—or even misleading—works, although anatomists of the latest part of the twentieth century have come to the opposite conclusion (Snorrason, 1986; Kardel, 1994a, 1994b). Even the medical doctor and Steno biographer Harald Moe maintained the “old-fashioned” viewpoint on Steno’s muscle theory in his large publication on Steno in 1988, but he changed it 6 yr later in the English translation from 1994. According to Kardel, Steno’s understanding of the anatomy and function of muscle fibers, muscle fiber bundles, and muscle bundles was simply not understood before modern computer technology and modeling of the human apparatus of motion had been applied in training of athletes. Nevertheless, Steno’s work on the human heart had made him famous already before he went to Paris in 1665, where he argued against Descartes’ and Willis’ conception of the human brain. Here, invited by Melchisédec Thévenot and his learned society—a forerunner of l’Academie Royale des Sciences—the young Steno completely peeled the glamour off the renowned celebrities’ (Descartes and Willis) understanding of the brain’s anatomy and functions. This took place in a lecture, which now is considered to be history’s first realistic description of the brain (Kardel and Møllgaard, 1997)—a lecture that was also referred to with great admiration by some of the listeners, and that made Steno’s name known to the head of the Medici’s court, Grand Duke Ferdinand II. Also, Steno’s geological dissertation “De Solido,” in which he described the geological principles now known by all students of geology, was recognized and admired by most important contemporaneous naturalists. One year after “De Solido” had been published in Latin in Florence, it was translated to English by Royal Society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, and published in London in 1670. Thus, although Robert Hooke had falsely accused Steno of having stolen some of his discoveries (Yamada, 2003), Steno was known for his honesty and was highly recognized by many contemporaneous scientists. For decades and to his death, Leibniz was one of Steno’s great admirers as well as his personal friend (see, e.g., Vad, 2000). Reasonably, one could ask why Steno’s philosophical ideas did not become better recognized and referred to during the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century (when many scientists had begun working according to Steno’s geological principles and philosophy of science, but mostly without referring to where the ideas came from)? Krogh and Maar (1902), Garboe (1948), Rodolico (1971), Vai and Cavazza (2006), and Morello (2006) all emphasize the influence Steno had on his contemporaries and the powerful but only indirect effect Steno had on philosophy and geology after his death. After Steno’s shift to a clerical career, his friends Ole Borch, Thomas Bartholin, and Vincenzo Vivianni tried to bring him back to science, and especially Leibniz, in numerous letters and otherwise, called attention to Steno’s work (Vad, 2000). Thus, one could wonder why many of the most renowned geologists of the eighteenth century were applying Steno’s geological principles, but without connecting these principles with Steno’s name.

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In Germany, this situation applies to Georg Christian Füchsel (1722–1773), who—building on Steno’s principles of superposition and recognition of fossils—made history’s first scientific geological map as well as a stratigraphy of Thuringia (see Bert Hansen, 1972). This also applies to Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1839), who educated several of the great names of the coming Romantic era, e.g., Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, and the Dane Henrik Steffens. In France, the controversial “plutonist” Georges-Louis Buffon (1707–1788) emphasized the role of volcanism, but was nevertheless an admirer of Steno’s “neptunistic” ideas emphasizing the role of water, whereas Steno, to my knowledge, was not mentioned by Jean Babtiste de Lamarck (1744–1829) and George de Cuvier (1769–1832), who was afraid of troubles with the church. In England and Scotland, Steno’s geological works became known very early because of Henry Oldenburg’s translation of “De Solido” to English, and Steno’s geological ideas were known to John Ray, William Harvey, Martin Lister, Robert Hooke, William Smith, and James Hutton, whereas Steno’s anatomical work and those parts of his philosophy of science that were expressed in these works, appear to have been less known or unrecognized on the British Isles, although several of his anatomical works were translated to English during the eighteenth century. As an important curiosity, it should be mentioned that the famous author Conan Doyle (1859–1930), through his geology teacher, Wyville Thomson (1830–1882), at Edinburgh University, had become familiar with Steno’s scientific principles and used this basis of forensic science intensively in his novels about “Sherlock Holmes” and in his work on “The Lost World” (Hansen, 2000a). Thus, during his own lifetime, Steno’s geological and most of his anatomical achievements were recognized or known in Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and on the British Isles. This applies to his studies of the human glands, muscles, and brain, and his geological studies, whereas Steno’s name and achievements after his death and especially during the eighteenth century and until the 1830s appear to have been nearly forgotten, although his methods and ideas were broadly applied—except for his extremely modern but controversial theory on muscles. One reason for the modest recognition of Steno’s philosophy of science could be that his viewpoints to begin with were published fragmentarily; mostly in the introductions to both his anatomical and geological papers. A more comprehensive understanding of Steno’s philosophy of science therefore would require scientific interest and knowledge in both anatomy and geology. Steno himself was one of history’s last successful polymaths, but such a broad interest and knowledge had become rare or absent among most of his contemporaries. In his final scientifically published lecture “Prooemium” (1673), when he was about to shift from a scientific to clerical career, Steno provided a comprehensive and coherent explanation to his philosophy of science. At that time, it was well known that Steno had converted from Protestantism to Catholicism. Consequently, several of his most important views were erroneously in-

terpreted as results of his religious engagement. Moreover, during the seventeenth century’s attempts at counterreformations and the eighteenth century’s pietism in northern and central Europe, it was unfavorable or even dangerous to be connected with his name. Parallel to this religious reservation, another reason for the modest recognition of Steno’s philosophy of science could be that Steno’s previous Protestant belief and new status as a converted, but controversial, Catholic bishop had made his name and ideas difficult to handle in southern Europe. Although Steno’s distinction between science and religion is easy to understand in our days, his letter to Spinoza may illustrate how difficult it must have been to understand and explain his sharp distinctions and inclination to both religion and “godless” science during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries (Hansen, 2007a). Therefore, it is most likely that Steno’s strictly scientific philosophy of perception and reasoning was simply not understood by most of his contemporaries, maybe even deliberately misinterpreted, as a consequence of his subsequent religious career as a Roman Catholic priest and bishop. Steno’s Philosophy of Science Expressed through His Geological Ideas During the seventeenth century’s scientific revolution, the foundation of geology as a discipline of science is attributed to Steno and two of his dissertations: “Canis Carchariae Dissectum Caput” (Dissection of a Shark’s Head) from 1667 and “De Solido intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento Dissertationis Prodromus” (On Solids Naturally Enclosed in Other Solids) from 1669. On top of that, Steno wrote a comprehensive manuscript on geology in the years after 1669. This manuscript was handed over to his pupil, Holger Jacobæus, Copenhagen University’s first professor of geography, but it was never printed. It disappeared, probably during one of Copenhagen’s devastating fires (Garboe, 1948, 1960). From their time together in Hanover, Leibniz knew of the existence of this comprehensive manuscript, and after Steno’s death, he wrote to several people who might have known where it had gone, but without any luck. However, despite the two printed and very important dissertations, Steno’s name was almost forgotten among geologists from 1700 to 1830. His geological fame was first revived in the beginning of the nineteenth century by Alexander von Humboldt, who rediscovered “De Solido” in 1823 and brought it to the attention of Charles Lyell and Elie de Beaumont—the founder of the first geological survey of France. Thus, at the Second International Geological Congress held in 1881 in Bologna, Steno was celebrated as a founder of geology (Vai, 2004). A century later, in 1953, Steno’s body was placed in a marble sarcophagus in a chapel of the San Lorenzo Cathedral in Florence. After studies in Copenhagen, where he was born and grew up, Steno’s short but highly productive scientific career began in Amsterdam with a thesis on the nature of heat (“De Thermis,” 1660) and, soon after, doctoral theses on anatomy in Leiden. Busy as always, he did not take time to wait for his doctoral celebration

On the origin of natural history: Steno’s modern, but forgotten philosophy of science but went directly to Paris and Montpellier. Soon, Steno’s studies of the glands, the lymphatic system, the brain, and the muscles brought his reputation to the highest level before he reached the age of 25 yr. On the recommendation of M. Thevenót, who had invited Steno to Paris to give a lecture on the brain, Steno’s name also became known to the head of the Medici court in Tuscany, Grand Duke Ferdinand II. He invited Steno to Florence, where the grand duke’s brother, Cardinal Leopoldo, invited Steno to become a member of Accademia del Cimento. THE ONSET OF MODERN GEOLOGICAL THINKING Shortly after Steno came to Florence, a giant shark was caught off the west coast of northern Italy and brought to Livorno. There, the giant shark caused great public attention and came to the grand duke’s knowledge. Inspired from Steno’s anatomical studies, Ferdinand II asked Steno to dissect the shark. During the dissections, Steno noticed the resemblance between the shark’s teeth and “glossopetrae” (tongue stones), i.e., solids resembling teeth from sharks, but often found in rocks far above or far away from the sea (Fig. 5). This seeming discrepancy between the anatomy of “glossopetrae” and their occurrence in rocks had made many scholars believe that what we now call “fossils” actually grew in the rocks. However, Steno’s combined studies of “glossopetrae” and his dissection of a giant shark’s head gave him a better explanation:

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Solids that in all visible aspects look like parts of living animals but are found enclosed in rocks, even far above or far away from the sea, nevertheless should be regarded as remnants of former life on Earth. In order to come to this actualistic viewpoint, Steno formulated six “conjecturae” based on refutations (Steno, 1667). As discovered by Kardel (1994a) and as discussed in Hansen (1997, 2000a, 2005), this way of reasoning is very similar to the twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper’s more general arguments for a revision of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s positivistic philosophy of science. Popper (1963) proposed a revision to what has now become our time’s most prominent philosophy of scientific reasoning, and what is now known as refutation positivism. Kardel (1994a) has pinpointed several identical expressions and rare words in both Steno’s and Popper’s philosophy of science. Steno’s prerequisite to his “conjecture and refutation” arguments—which is most clearly expressed in his next geological dissertation—can be formulated in this way: Similar things are produced in similar ways and in similar surrounding. The laws of nature are unequivocal and unambiguous. The laws of nature ruling the present have also ruled the past. However, natural processes can obliterate as well as preserve evidence. Consequently, we must to some extent build scientific reasoning on conjectures and refutations by evidence. Therefore, since “glossopetrae” in all perceivable aspects are similar to living sharks’ teeth, it is a reasonable conjecture, until it may be refuted by evidence, that they were produced as shark

Figure 5. Drawings from Steno’s Canis Carchariae Dissectum Caput (1667), where he—on the basis of the complete similarity between the teeth in the mouth of a newly caught giant shark (left) and “glossopetrae,” i.e., “tongue stones,” found in rocks far from and far above the sea (right)—postulated that such fossils are not “growing in the rocks” but are remnants from former life in the sea. This new conception of “glossopetrae” and other marine fossils found in the mountains would anticipate that Earth had undergone huge changes since the fossils had been deposited on the sea bottom.

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teeth, i.e., in sharks living in the sea, and not by growing in the rocks. Moreover, since things produced in the sea may now be found far above and far from the sea, it is a reasonable conjecture that huge changes of Earth have taken place after the Creation. STENO’S COGNITION CRITERIA In order to come from his theory of “conjecture and refutation” as expressed in “Canis Carchariae” to the more demanding philosophical prerequisites in “De Solido,” Steno realized, that his findings about the huge historical changes that the landscape of Tuscany had undergone since the Creation would not be believed unless he built them on indisputable cognition criteria. In order to convince others, these criteria would also need to create a logical basis for the geological principles on which his findings were based. I have proposed that this basis for Steno’s philosophy of science and geological principles should be named “Steno’s three cognition criteria” (Hansen, 2000a, 2000b). Steno’s cognition criteria include: (1) the chronology criterion, (2) the recognition criterion, and (3) the preservation criterion. Chronology Criterion The chronology criterion claims that the structural relation of two solid bodies in firm and generative contact will always reveal which body has been formed first and which body has been formed last. This criterion is in practice identical with Steno’s geological principles of superposition (see following), by means of which it is possible to establish the chronological order of a series of geological and any other structural events. In “De Solido,” the chronology criterion leads to two principles: The principle of shaping (molding) and—although not explicitly formulated—the principle of intersection. The two principles can be formulated in one sentence: When a solid structure is in generative contact with another solid structure, it is the youngest structure that takes form from the other, or which intersects the other.

Here, it should be mentioned that Steno does not explicitly apply the word “intersection”—and thus he cannot be considered to founder of the Huttonian principle of intersection. However, Steno clearly applies the principle, for example, in the reconstruction of Tuscany’s geological history. The term “fault” had not yet been invented, and Steno applies the term “broken strata” (“ruptorum stratum”) when he speaks, for example, about the origin of mountains (see Scherz, 1969, p. 167). The chronology criterion is not only valid in geology, but it is omnivalid for any structural generation or change of solid material, and it implies that only two possible types of generative contact relations can exist in solid material: 1. conformity, where already existing structures shape younger structures in contact with the older structures; and

2. disconformity, where already existing structures are modified by forces creating younger structures. These two criteria are axiomatic principles known and used by all students of geology. However, the meaning of structural conformity and disconformity is much deeper philosophically speaking. The conformity criterion is practically a criterion on how to identify growth (see the principle of growth later herein), but, philosophically speaking, the criterion is merely an axiom saying that it is always possible to identify domainal change, i.e., effects of intrinsic forces acting in the revealed domain of structures itself (Hansen, 2000a, 2000b). The disconformity criterion on the other hand is practically a criterion on how to identify reduction and modification, but, philosophically speaking, the criterion is merely an axiom saying that it is always possible to identify extradomainal change, i.e., effects of external forces acting outside the revealed domain of structures (Hansen, 2000a, 2000b). However, the philosophical importance of the chronology criterion is first and foremost that it allows the observer to distinguish between effects and possible causes. Since causes always precede effects, the chronology criterion—and, in practice, the principles of superposition—forms a purely logical basis from which to state that it is possible on a purely structural basis to distinguish possible from impossible causal explanations. No empirical observation has ever contradicted Steno’s chronology criterion. Recognition Criterion Steno’s recognition criterion claims that similar things are produced in similar ways and in similar surroundings. While Steno’s viewpoint on “glossopetrae” in “Canis Carchariae” was an inductive principle of generalization calling for evidence by conjecture and refutation, he comes to a much deeper viewpoint on induction in “De Solido.” His way of thinking is simply to pose the question, how should a scientist argue when he is confronted with something he cannot explain without inferring a thoroughly hypothetical theory? In such cases, induction by generalization gives no meaning. Therefore, the scientist must begin with finding something in the inexplicable that is similar to something he knows. He must recognize before it becomes meaningful to induce a hypothesis. Steno understands that induction consists of two separate cognitive forms, recognition and generalization, and that recognition is a necessary prerequisite to generalization. What is recognition? Steno does not explain this in a perceptive sense in “De Solido,” although he four years later in “Prooemium,” he comes to a nearly Kantian theory on perception, where he distinguishes between things by themselves, sensing of things, and perception of things. Instead, Steno takes another route of argument, namely, that nature everywhere and to all times must be ruled by the same laws. Although more or less unknown, the laws of nature are—per se—unequivocal and unambiguous,

On the origin of natural history: Steno’s modern, but forgotten philosophy of science and the laws now in action have also been in action in the past. Consequently, similar things are produced in similar ways and in similar surroundings. Steno concludes in “De Solido” in this way: If a solid body completely resembles another solid body, not only with respect to its surface, but also with respect to the arrangement of its inner parts and particles, the two bodies will also resemble each other with respect to their way of production and place of origin… (my translation)15

I have called this axiomatic statement Steno’s recognition criterion because it is not only relevant to fossils and other geological phenomena, but it was meant by Steno as an omnivalid criterion that could be used to understand how nature basically works. Gould (1981) stated that this marked the beginning of generative classification. It means that similar things are produced in similar ways, and different things in are produced in different ways. In philosophical and cognitive terms, the criterion is also an axiomatic statement defining the basic relation between recognition and generalization, i.e., the fundamental criterion of induction (Hansen, 2000a). A strikingly similar idea on “analogic proportion” was expressed approximately 200 yr later by Gilbert in 1886 (p. 287), apparently independent of Steno’s “De Solido.” Baker (1996) discussed Gilbert’s statement in the context of modern pragmatism and thus linked this basic geological principle to Peirce’s semiotic philosophy of science. Preservation Criterion What I have called Steno’s preservation criterion was not explicitly described by Steno in “De Solido” but was presented more philosophically in “Prooemium” (Hansen, 2000a). However, all of Steno’s writings in “De Solido,” especially, his backstripping of Tuscany’s geological history including periods of erosion, clearly indicate that Steno from his geological studies was fully aware that not only is the geological record incomplete, but so is the human capacity to perceive the world. However, despite this deficit, the human mind is often able to perceive if something is missing—not exactly what is missing, but that something is missing. I have argued that Steno’s way of thinking builds on the fact that information can only be preserved as solid structures in solid material, whatever the material containing the structures is, e.g., crystalline, sedimentary, biological, or in the arts and humanities, for example, music preserved in the orientation of magnetic crystals in the tape recorder, or historical information preserved in the structure of ink on paper, etc. Information will be lost for any certain cognition when the solid material containing the solid structure is dissolved, dispersed, eroded away, disintegrated, or burnt, i.e., is transformed from a solid to any other state. 15 Steno’s original text may be found in Scherz (1969, p. 150) and also A.J. Pollock’s slightly different translation to English (p. 151).

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The reason for this problem of preservation and imperfect possibility to know all about the past is—accordingly to Steno—that “the smallest parts” of all matter are in “inner revolt,” when the matter is not in a solid state. In other words, and more fragmentarily, Steno explains that the “smallest parts” of solid bodies may not be completely calm because of the heat, they cannot change position, or, if they change position, they will immediately be substituted by other parts, so that the structure is preserved, but when a solid body melts, burns, etc., all “the smallest parts” come in “inner revolt” and will constantly change positions. Consequently, solid structures—i.e., informative signs—can only exist “untouched” by later movements in solid material. Because of this partly perfect and partly imperfect state of nature’s storytelling, we cannot argue in the same way when we deal with preserved strata and structures as when we deal with unpreserved parts. Therefore, we have to reason (speculate, conjecture) on lost information. However, our understanding is not completely naked and speculative when the direct information is gone. Other (always disconformable) structures show if relevant parts are missing of a more complete record. For instance, Steno’s geological principle of lateral continuity (see following discussion) shows that pure speculation on missing parts is not allowed. Not all speculations are relevant. This way of thinking is also the basis for Steno’s conception of what is “far most beautiful” (see previous discussion). In “Prooemium,” four years after “De Solido,” Steno finally comes to an understanding on how to approach the truth when the information “escape[s] the senses,” i.e., is lost or is unperceivable. I repeat: “Far most beautiful—although escaping the senses—is what [nevertheless] can be approached through reasoning about what the senses have already [or elsewhere] perceived” (for context and references, see previous discussion). STENO’S PRINCIPLES OF UNDERSTANDING NATURAL CHANGE—AND THE GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF EARTH In “De Solido,” Steno formulates a series of basic criteria for geological reasoning, now used by all students of geology. Here, he goes much deeper and farther than in his first geological dissertation, “Canis Carchariae.” Hence, in 1669, he realizes that his studies of Tuscany have revealed that Earth has a complex, partly readable and partly unreadable history. Especially, the time-question is unsolved. Although he speculates on the seemingly very short time available between the ancient, pre-Roman Etruscan cultural artifacts found on top of the deposits of Volterra, which again superpose all the even older strata of Tuscany, he retreats from further speculation on the age of Earth. Nature shows the chronology of changes, but about the time-question, “nature is silent,” and “only the Scripture speaks.” Steno also realizes that he might be misunderstood by others to be contradicting Genesis in the Holy Scripture, and

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that most likely nobody is going to believe him unless his findings are based on uncontradictable logic reasoning and evident empirical findings. In his path to the fundamental criteria of cognition, Steno lines up his basic ideas on how nature works. Besides the idea of nature speaking with one voice—what Lyell approximately 150 yr later called the actualistic principle—these ideas can be summarized in two general principles for natural change: the principle of motion and the principle of growth. The Principle of Motion All kinds of natural motion take place by

ing fluid that directs material to the solid on all sides, as is the case of incrustations, or only to certain parts of the solid, as is the case of those bodies that show tread-like forms, branches, and angular bodies [crystals]” (translation by Pollock in Scherz [1969, p. 153]; my explanation in brackets). The third statement is also remarkable. In a geological dissertation, Steno makes a series of anatomical statements inspired from his geological findings. First, Steno explains his new finding on the threefold compartment of the living body’s liquids: (1) liquids in “outer” rooms, such as the digestive system, (2) liquids in vessels, such as the veins and the lymphatic system, and (3) interstitial liquids. On the basis of this anatomical knowledge, Steno explains about the nature of growth: that many parts

1. movement (location or dislocation, as when a ship sails or an animal runs), 2. liquid (or gaseous) flow (as when the water runs in a river), and/or 3. diffusion, the “hitherto unknown cause of motion.” (my contraction of [and explanations to] Steno’s original text in “De Solido”)16 Here, it should be noted that Steno in his thesis De Thermis (Fig. 6)—which had disappeared and the content of which was therefore unknown to the scientific community until it was found in 1959 in Philadelphia by Gustav Scherz—had concluded that “Heat originates from motion. Yes, certainly heat originates from motion!” (see Scherz, 1960). This very early understanding of the nature of heat, in combination with Steno’s description of the locked motion of the “the smallest parts” in solids, shows that “the third and hitherto unknown kind of motion” is what we now call diffusion. Steno’s very early conception of heat also shows that he used reasoning at all spatial scales (Rosenberg, 2006). What could not be observed directly, or by “dissection,” had to be understood by a combination of reasoning and what elsewhere could be observed by analogy.17 The Principle of Growth All kinds of growth take place by superposition or increment of particles on a solid surface from a liquid (or gaseous) phase, whatever the growth concerns, e.g., sediments, crystals, or living organs (my contraction of Steno’s original text in “De Solido”).18 Introducing the principle of growth, Steno explains: “Additions made directly to a solid from external fluid sometimes fall to the bottom because of their own weight, as is the case with sediments; sometimes the additions are made from a penetrat16 Original expressions in the relevant contexts may be found in Scherz (1969, p. 152–159). 17 Cf. the expression “But far most beautiful—although escaping the senses— is what can be approached through reasoning about what the senses have already perceived”; see previous references and discussion. 18 Original expressions in relevant contexts may be found in Scherz (1969, p. 152–159 and 172–181).

Figure 6. Front page of Steno’s first—and least known—dissertation, De Thermis (a student work from 1660). The dissertation had disappeared, and its content was therefore unknown to the scientific community until it was rediscovered in 1959 in Philadelphia, USA, by Gustav Scherz. In De Thermis, Steno concluded, that “Heat originates from motion. Yes, certainly heat originates from motion!” This, in my opinion, clearly relates to Steno’s new fundamental ideas on motion as expressed in De Solido nine years later: Heat is the “third and hitherto unknown cause of motion” and may result in what we now would call diffusion.

On the origin of natural history: Steno’s modern, but forgotten philosophy of science of the human body—which may appear to be “inner” or even the “innermost” parts of the living body—in reality consist of “outer surfaces,” which are connected to the outer world directly or through “filters.” This applies, for example, to the digestive system, the lungs, the glands, the kidneys, the blood vessels, and the lymph system. Therefore, even growth of the “innermost” parts at the very end is caused by addition of originally external substances to a pre-existing surface.

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larly clear in his formulation and application of the principle of reconstruction (see following). 5. The principle of reconstruction (or back-stripping) (Fig. 7): Nature’s geological history can be described by stripping off the youngest strata and events and thereby reconstructing the original state of the next youngest geological strata and events. Having reconstructed the next youngest strata and events, the original state of the third youngest strata and events can be

Five Principles for Geological Interpretation Having explained these general and breathtakingly clear prerequisites for a natural conception of biological and geological change, Steno has finally formulated the geological principles known and applied by any later student of geology. Steno’s five principles for geological interpretation are all purely structural. They explain how to interpret the structural “signs” laid down by natural processes in solid material (crystals, rocks, strata, sequences of strata, landscapes, mountains, etc.), where these “signs” on contemporaneous processes or later changes have been preserved. Thus, Steno’s geological principles may be considered to be history’s first stringent contribution to structural interpretation at all scales or a general “geo-semiology.” Steno’s geological principles consist of five general statements forming his basis for geological reasoning. These five principles can be described in this way: 1. The principle of horizontal layering: Geological strata were originally deposited horizontally or nearly horizontally. Strata in other positions have been tilted or otherwise deformed by later events. 2. The principle of lateral continuity: Similar geological strata on either side of a valley, or another disrupting structure, were originally coherent and continuous. 3. The principle of superposition: In a series of strata, the lowermost strata are the oldest, and the uppermost strata are the youngest. a. The principle of shaping (or molding): A geological body shaping another body is older than the body it shapes. A geological body that takes shape from another body is younger than the body it takes shape from. b. The principle of stratigraphical up and down: When strata are inclined, vertical, or folded, the original order of deposition can be found by the help of the principle of intersection (see following). 4. Application of the (later) Huttonian principle of intersection: Any geological structure cutting through another geological structure is younger than the structure it is cutting through. Any geological change or changing agent is younger than what has been changed. Steno does not formulate this principle explicitly. However, the principle—as well as the principle of stratigraphical up and down—follows implicitly from the principle of shaping if we, e.g., consider that a fault or any other penetrating geological structure actually shapes preexisting strata and structures. Steno’s application of a principle of intersection is particu-

Figure 7. Steno’s drawings from De Solido (1669), where in the upper part of the figure he illustrates the angular constancy of quartz and hematite crystals as well as growth lines in crystals (no. 7 and 13). In the lower part of the figure, Steno illustrates his principle of reconstruction by “back-stripping” (no. 20–25). The present stage is represented by no. 20. By use of the geological principles he had just described and by careful studies of the actual structural relations, one can identify the youngest event that has led to the present stage. By stripping the youngest event off, one can reconstruct the next youngest situation (no. 21). By continuing this procedure, one can peel off still older events (no. 22–24) and reconstruct the original situation (no. 25). Having done all this by careful structural studies of the present situation, one can reconstruct the history, beginning with the oldest known stage (no. 25), continuing through all the younger known stages (no. 24–21), and ending with a historic understanding of the present (no. 20).

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reconstructed. By such continuous “back-stripping,” the original state of the oldest strata can be reconstructed. Now, by knowing the original states of an area’s strata, the area’s geological history can be reconstructed in chronological order of cause and effect. Besides these general principles for geological reasoning, Steno’s drawings show the law of angular constancy of crystals (known as Steno’s law). This law—which in my opinion merely should be understood as a principle of crystal growth (see previous)—to some extent may have been inspired by Erasmus Bartholin’s (father to the anatomist Thomas Bartholin) work on double refraction in Icelandic calcite and Kepler’s little paper on hexagonal snow flakes. However, Steno understands, in opposition to Erasmus Bartholin and Kepler, that “the smallest undividable parts”—the atoms—may belong to many different kinds with respect to size or shape or forces of attraction (cf. Schneer, 1971), since crystals are not only hexagonal, trigonal, or cubic, as they should be if crystals were formed only by identical atoms. Steno’s drawing shows that crystals also can be less symmetric, i.e., rhombic, monoclinic, and triclinic, which should only be possible if atoms consisted of several different categories. CONCLUSION: OBLIVION, REVIVAL, AND MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF STENO’S PHILOSOPHY AND GEOLOGY Steno’s modern philosophy of science—often most elegantly described in his anatomical works—is an important basis for his geological achievements. His philosophy of science should be considered to be among the earliest, clearest, and most stringent contributions to the onset of the rationalistic, historic, and perceptionalistic way of thinking as it contemporaneously evolved from Steno’s friend and admirer, G.W. Leibniz, as it evolved 80 yr later from Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, and some 200 yr later from Charles S. Peirce in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and 250 yr later from Karl Popper in the twentieth century. However, in most modern literature on the history of geology and on the philosophy of science, Steno’s name and importance is hardly mentioned nor recognized. Some of this oblivion may be explained with Steno’s nationality, as he was born in a declining and small country (Denmark-Norway) and by his career in ascending and more important countries (the Netherlands, France, and above all Italy). This contrast between nationality and career did not make his name useful in the scientific competition between the new upcoming nation states of Europe during the coming two centuries. Moreover, all of Steno’s scientific writings are—with one exception—in Latin, which was already losing power less than 50 yr after Steno’s time. Larsen (1933) and Kragelund (1976) mentioned that Steno’s Latin language is of great beauty and poetic value, and that translations to other languages cannot give justice to Steno’s texts. Translations, therefore, may have seemed too difficult to most Latin philologists. Whatever the reasons

were, only a few of Steno’s scientific works were translated to “modern” languages before during the twentieth century, when Latin had become unreadable to most scientists. Thus, one might say, that there is a “hiatus” of up to 200 yr where Steno’s writings were inaccessible to most scientists, and especially to students of natural history. In England, on the other hand, Steno’s “De Solido” was translated immediately from Latin to English by Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the newly created Royal Society. However, Oldenburg was falsely accused by Robert Hooke to have stolen Hooke’s geological ideas and given Steno the credit. This absurd conflict to some extent has given rise to some unreasonable doubt on Steno’s merits in the English-speaking world. Consequently, the national pride that has brought many names of less brilliant scientists to greater fame did not apply to Steno. Nevertheless, Steno’s geology, methodology, and philosophy of science were broadly applied in Italy, England, France, and Germany, and his geological principles are in daily use by all present-day students of geology. However, contemporary and younger scientists did not know, refer to, or dare to mention where their geological methods came from until Humboldt, Lyell, and Elie de Beaumont drew attention to Steno’s name in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Soon after, Steno was celebrated as the founder of geology at the Second International Geological Congress in Italy. However, the most important reason for the oblivion of Steno’s geology until 130 yr after his death could be his religious conversion, as may also be the case for his philosophy of science. During the counterreformations of the seventeenth century, Steno’s conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism could even endanger or discredit users of his geology and philosophy of science just by referring to his name in northern Europe—certainly in Protestant-controlled parts of Germany and in Denmark-Norway, and in Italy, France, and Catholic parts of Germany, Steno’s conversion to Catholicism and status as a former Protestant also made his name somewhat dubious. Thus, it should be understood that some fear of religious consequences may have been related to the use of Steno’s name in Protestant as well as in Catholic parts of Europe. This certainly applies to Steno’s short scientific career in Denmark, where he, for formal religious reasons, could not become a professor at the university, and where the king instead appointed Steno as “royal anatomist” (anatomicus regius) from 1673 until Steno definitively left science two years later. Since Steno in 1675 became a Catholic priest and, in 1677, titular bishop of the no longer existing city of Titiopolis of the fallen East Roman Empire, many contemporary and younger scientists have misinterpreted Steno’s departure from a scientific career as a rejection of science. That is a widespread misunderstanding. To his death, Steno considered scientific knowledge to be the highest praise to God, and he claimed that religious speculations should not have authority above scientific arguments. Leibniz deeply regretted Steno’s change of career and urged him several times without luck to reconsider his decision. Leibniz wrote many letters to influential persons in order to make

On the origin of natural history: Steno’s modern, but forgotten philosophy of science them convince Steno that he should return to science. However, among scientists of the eighteenth century this interference from Leibniz, and Steno’s insistence on his new religious career, may also have contributed to the misunderstanding that Steno had rejected science. Finally, it should be mentioned that two of Steno’s most learned biographers, the Protestant priest and historian of Danish geology, Axel Garboe, and the philologist Knud Larsen, nevertheless interpreted Steno’s most cited expression on the threefold levels of knowledge (“Beautiful is what we see” etc.) as a ladder from scientific to religious understanding. Steno’s own explanation of this famous maxim was given by himself in 1673 and clearly separates his modern philosophy of science from religious arguments. The misleading viewpoint on Steno’s ladder of knowledge may also be caused by misunderstanding of the Danish philosopher, Anthon Thomsen (1877–1915). Thomsen (1910) saw a parallel personal development in Steno’s change of curriculum with another famous Dane, the psychology- and moralphilosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). Through their lives, they both became more and more inclined to a religiousexistential way of living, and they both died before the age of 50 after they both had reached outstanding scientific results. However, a juxtaposition of Steno’s and Kierkegaard’s ladders is unreasonable and misleading. The two ladders do not at all deal with the same matter. Steno’s ladder describes three levels of perception and scientific reasoning, whereas Kierkegaard’s ladder describes three stages in a person’s psychological development: an aesthetical, an ethical, and a religious stage. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful and indebted to Troels Kardel for leading me on the track of Steno’s philosophy of science and for many valuable inspirations to and corrections of my understanding of Steno’s anatomy. Likewise, I am grateful to my Catholic Steno friends Hans Kermit, Elsebeth Thomsen, Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen, and August Ziggelaar, who—despite my materialistic and agnostic viewpoints—have never let me down but always have been ready to answer my questions and to help with understanding Steno. Finally, I am grateful to Gary Rosenberg, David Oldroyd, and Martin Ghisler for help and encouragement to write this difficult paper. REFERENCES CITED Baker, V.R., 1996, The pragmatic roots of American Quaternary geology and geomorphology: Geomorphology, v. 16, p. 197–215, doi: 10.1016/S0169-555X (96)80001-8. Cutler, A., 2003, The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth: New York, Dutton, 228 p. Garboe, A., 1948, Niels Stensens (Stenos) Geologiske Arbejdes Skæbne. Et Fragment af Dansk Geologis Historie: København (Copenhagen), Danmarks Geologiske Undersøgelse, IV Række, Bind 3, no. 4, 34 p. Garboe, A., 1960, Niels Stensen’s (Steno’s) lost geological manuscript: Meddeleser fra Dansk Geologisk Forening, v. 14, p. 243–246.

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Gilbert, G.K., 1886, Inculcation of scientific method by example: American Journal of Science, v. 31, p. 284–299. Gould, S.J., 1981, The titular bishop of Titiopolis: Natural History, v. 90, p. 20–24. (Also printed in 1983, “Hen’s teeth and horse’s toes”: New York, Norton’s Paperback, p. 69–78.) Hallam, A., 1988, Great Geological Controversies (2nd edition): New York, Oxford Science Publications, 244 p. Hansen, B., 1972, Georg Christian Füchsel, in Gillispie, C.C., ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography: New York, American Council of Learned Societies, v. V, p. 205–206. Hansen, J.M., 1997, Geologiens fundament: Overpægningsprincippet. Om Stenos fundamentale bidrag til erkendelsen, in Agger, P., and Land, B., eds., Råstof Erfaringer: Roskilde, Universitets Forlag, p. 51–89. Hansen, J.M., 2000a, Stregen i sandet, bølgen på vandet—Stenos teori om naturens sprog og erkendelsens grænser: Copenhagen, Fremad, 440 p. Hansen, J.M., 2000b, Il giudizio di Stenone sulla metologia cartesiana, in Ascani, K., Kermit, H., and Skytte, G., eds., Nicolò Stenone (1638–1686): Anatomista, Geologo, Vescovo: Rome, L’Erma di Bretschneider, p. 49– 58. (Excerpts from the above title translated to Italian.) Hansen, J.M., 2005, Steno, in Selley, R.C., Cocks, L.R.M., and Phimer, I.R., eds., Encyclopedia of Geology: Amsterdam, Elsevier, p. 226–233. Hansen, J.M., 2007a, A 17th century saint’s contribution to “godless” science: Abstract to the symposium “Godless”: Copenhagen, Faculty of the Humanities, Copenhagen University. Hansen, J.M , 2007b, Alfred Wegener, Lauge Koch og Bjørn Lomborgs arbejdsmetoder (Comparison of the scientific methods applied by Alfred Wegener, Lauge Koch and Bjørn Lomborg): Lecture at the Institute of Philosophy, Copenhagen University: Copenhagen, Copenhagen University. Kardel, T., 1986, A specimen of observation upon the muscles: Taken from that noble anatomist Nicholas Steno, in Poulsen, J.E., and Snorrason, E., eds., Nicolaus Steno 1638–1686: A Reconsideration by Danish Scientists: Gentofte, Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, p. 97–134. Kardel, T., 1994a, Steno. Life, Science, Philosophy (with Niels Stensen’s Prooemium or Preface to a Demonstration in the Copenhagen Anatomical Theater in the Year 1673, and Holger Jacobæus: Niels Stensen’s Anatomical Demonstration no. XVI, and Other Texts Translated from Latin): Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 42, 159 p. Kardel, T., 1994b, Steno on Muscles: Introduction, Texts, Translations: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, v. 84, part 1, 252 p. Kardel, T., 2000, On “Perhaps the Weakest” of Stensen’s Works: What Causes Muscular Movement, Inflation or Contraction?, in Ascani, K., Kermit, H., and Skytte, G., eds., Nicolò Stenone (1638–1686): Anatomista, Geologo, Vescovo: Rome, L’Erma di Bretschneider, p. 59–63. Kardel, T., and Møllgaard, K., eds., 1997, Foredrag om Hjernens Anatomi. Holdt i Paris i 1665 og trykt samme sted i 1669 (Danish translation of Steno’s lecture in French on the anatomy of the brain, with Møllgaard’s prologue and Kardel’s epilogue): Copenhagen, Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, 71 p. Kermit, H., 1998, Niels Stensen. Naturforsker og helgen: Ravnetrykk, University of Tromsø, Norway, 161 p. Kermit, H., 2003, Niels Stensen: The Scientist Who Was Beatified: Herefordshire, Gracewing, 179 p. (English translation of the above title.) Koyré, A., 1973, Études d’Histoire de la Pensée Scientifique (published posthumously): Paris, Éditions Gallimard. (Reprinted as Danish translation with introduction by Tom Bøgeskov, 1998, Alexandre Koyré: Tankens enhed: Filosofibiblioteket, Hans Reitzels Forlag, 152 p.) Kragelund, A., 1976, Niels Stensen, in Kragelund, A., ed., Den Humanistiske Renæssance og Antikken: Copenhagen, Berlingske Forlag, p. 226–243. (The first translation of Steno’s “Prooemium” from Latin.) Krause, R., and Thiede, J., 2005, Kontinental-Verschiebungen. Originalnotizen und Literaturauszüge (Continental Drift. The Original Notes and Quotations): Alfred Wegener: Bremerhaven, Berichte zur Polar- und Meeresforschung, v. 516, 421 p. Krogh, A., and Maar, V., 1902, Foreløbig Meddelelse til en Afhandling om Faste Legemer, der findes naturligt indlejrede i Andre Faste Legemer: Copenhagen, Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 106 p. (Translation of Steno’s “De Solido” from Latin to Danish with introduction and notes.) Lakatos, I., 1971, History of Science and Its Rational Reconstruction: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, v. 8. Larsen, K., 1933, Stenos brev til Spinoza, in Meisen, V., and Larsen, K., eds., Stenoniana: Copenhagen, Bogtrykkeriet Hafnia, v. I, p. 112–125. Maar, V., 1910, Nicolai Stenonis: Opera Philosophica: Copenhagen, Vilhelm Tryde, v. 1, 264 p., and v. 2, 367 p.

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Moe, H., 1988, Niels Stensen: En billedbiografi, Hans utrættelige søgen, Hans geni, Hans stræben efter det absolute: Copenhagen, Rhodos, 184 p. (Also published in English, see next reference.) Moe, H., 1994, Nicolaus Steno: An Illustrated Biography, His Tireless Pursuit of Knowledge, His Genius, His Quest for the Absolute: Copenhagen, Rhodos International Science and Art Publishers, 180 p. Morello, N., 2006, Steno, the fossils, the rocks, and the calendar of the Earth, in Vai, G.B., and Caldwell, W.G.E., eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 81–93, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(06). Olden-Jørgensen, S., 2009, this volume, Nicholas Steno and René Descartes: A Cartesian perspective on Steno’s scientific development, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(11). Pedersen, O., 1986, Niels Stensens Videnskabelige Liv: Aarhus, Stenomuseets Venner, 48 p. Pedersen, O., (posthumous) 1996, Naturerkendelse og Theologi i historisk beysning: Herning, Poul Christensens Forlag, 460 p. Peirce, C.S., 1892, The Doctrine of Necessity Examined: The Monist, v. II, p. 321–337. Popper, K.R., 1963, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge: London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rafaelsen, O.J., 1986, Steno in Six Languages: København (Copenhagen), Denmark, Rhodos International Publishers, 95 p. Rodolico, F., 1971, Niels Stensen, Founder of the Geology of Tuscany: Acta Historica Scientiarium Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 23, p. 237–243. Rosenberg, G., 2006, Nichoas Steno’s Chaos and the shaping of evolutionary thought in the Scientific Revolution: Geology, v. 34, no. 9, p. 793–796, doi: 10.1130/G22655.1. Scherz, G., 1960, Niels Stensen’s first dissertation (Facsimile reproduction, English translation, introduction and illustration of Steno’s “De Thermis”): Journal of History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, v. 15, no. 3, p. 247–264. Scherz, G., 1963, Pioner der Wissenschaft. Niels Stensen in seinen Schriften: Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinaium: Munksgaard, Denmark, Editi Bibliotheca Universitatis Hauniensis, v. 18, 348 p. Scherz, G., 1969, Steno—Geological Papers (trans. Alex J. Pollock): Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinaium: Denmark, Odense University Press, Editi Bibliotheca Universitatis Hauniensis, v. 20, 370 p. Schneer, C., 1971, On crystals and the corpuscular hypothesis, in Scherz, G., ed., Dissertations on Steno as Geologist: Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinaium: Denmark, Odense University Press, Editi Bibliotheca Universitatis Hauniensis, v. 23, p. 293–307. Snorrason, E., 1986, Nicolaus Steno, the illustrative expositor, in Poulsen, V., and Snorrason, E., eds., Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686): A Reconsideration by Danish Scientists: Gentofte, Nordisk Insulinlaboratorium, p. 191–209. Spinoza, B. (anonymously), 1670, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Continens Dissertationes aliquot, Quibus ostenditur Libertatem Philosophandi non tantum salva Pietata, & Reipublicae Pace posse concede: Sed eandem nisi cum Pace Reipublicae, ipsaque Pietate tolli non posse, Vol. I–IV: First edition printed in Hamburg. A modern translation from Latin to English may be found at http://www.yesselman.com/ttpelws1.htm, and the first translation to English (1862) may be found at http://books.google.dk/

books?id=gl42XSjdF6wC&dq=spinoza+tractatus&printsec=frontcover &source=bl&ots=d5NuWiqla8&sig=WER18Tswcl51bwuEZ0JyVRj1F6Q &hl=da&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result#PPP1,M1 (last accessed 27 January 2009). (Steno) Stenonis, N., 1660, Disputatio Physica de Thermis. (Find Steno’s original text and translation from Latin to English in Scherz [1960, 1969].) (Steno) Stenonis, N., 1661, De Gladulis Oris & Novis Indre Prodeuntibus Salivae Vasis (Dissertation is reprinted in V. Maar, ed., 1910, vol. I, p. 9–52). (Steno) Stenonis, N., 1665, Discours de Monsieur Stenon sur L’Anatomie du Cerveau a Messieurs de l’Assemblée, qui se fait Chez Monsieur Thevenot (held 1665 and published 1669): Paris. (Find the original publication reprinted in Maar, 1910, p. 1–36.) (Steno) Stenonis, N., 1667, Elementorum Myologiae Specimen seu “Musculi Descriptio Geometrica” cui accedunt “Canis Carchariae Dissectum Caput” et “Dissectus Piscis ex Canum Genere,” Ad Serenissimum Ferdinandum II, Magnum Etruriae Ducem: Florentiae, Ex Pypographiae sub signo Stella. MDCLXVII. (Translations from Latin to English may be found in Kardel, 1994a—all three dissertations—and of “Canis Carchariae” in Scherz, 1969.) (Steno) Stenonis, N., 1669, De Solido Intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento Dissertationis Prodromus, Ad Serenissimum Ferdinandum II, Magnum Etruriae Ducem: Florentiae, 78 p., 1 pl. (Steno’s original text and translation from Latin to English may be found in Scherz, 1969.) (Steno) Stenonis, N., 1673, Prooemium or Preface to a Demonstration in Copenhagen Anatomical Theater in the Year 1673 (translation from Latin), in Kardel, T., 1994: Steno: Life, Science, Philosophy: Acta Historica Scientarium Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 42. Thomsen, A., 1910, Niels Steensen: Kronicle in the Danish Newspaper Politiken, 5th of May, 1910, p. 5–6. Vad, A.V., 2000, Polidore and Théophile: The rationalist and the faithful observer, in Ascani, K., Kermit, H., and Skytte, G., eds., Nicolò Stenone (1638–1686): Anatomista, Geologo, Vescovo: Romae, L’Erma di Bretschneider, p. 39–48. Vai, G.B., 2004, The Second International Geological Congress, Bologna, 1881: Episodes, v. 27, no. 2, p. 13–20. Vai, G.B., and Cavazza, W., 2006, Ulisse Aldrovandi and the origin of geology and science, in Vai, G.B., and Caldwell, W.G.E., eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 43–63, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(04). Yamada, T., 2003, Stenonian revolution or Leibnizian revival? Constructing geo-history in the seventeenth century: Tokyo Historia Scientiarum, v. 13, p. 75–100. Yamada, T., 2006, Kircher and Steno on the “geocosm,” with reassessment of the role of Gassendi’s works, in Vai, G.B., and Caldwell, W.G.E., eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 65–80, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(05). Ziggelaar, A., 1997, Chaos. Niels Stensen’s Chaos-manuscript: Copenhagen, 1659: Complete Edition with Introduction, Notes and Commentary: Copenhagen, Acta Historica Scientarium Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 44, 520 p. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Nicholas Steno’s way from experience to faith: Geological evolution and the original sin of mankind Frank Sobiech† Rotheweg 99, 33102 Paderborn, Germany ABSTRACT Nicholas Steno (1638–1686) always started from his own observations, either in anatomy and geology or regarding theological truths. This was in line with Galileo Galilei’s principle that when investigating physical questions, one should not begin with biblical texts. Thus, Steno had an advantage over other theologians like Vincent de Contenson (1641–1674) who adopted old-fashioned scientific theories from classical antiquity. Though Steno’s conception, in contrast to Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680), emphasized the accidental nature of Earth’s history, it still left a place for the Creator. When observing the geological structure of Earth, Steno concluded that shifts of Earth’s surface were part of nature’s corruption by the original sin of mankind, referring to biblical Adam and Eve, Genesis 3:1–24. Therefore, Steno, who was the first to present a history of Earth before the Deluge, viewed subterranean veins as places not created by God at the beginning of time, but instead within a geological process having begun with the malediction of Earth; in other words, nature was disturbed by original sin. For him, God’s original purpose for Earth’s properties remained hidden and unknown to men, because most of them at first glance seemed to be useless for life on Earth. Both before and after Steno’s conversion, his standpoint remained fundamentally the same and supported his own geological insights. Keywords: Nicholas Steno, Vincent de Contenson, Galileo Galilei, Athanasius Kircher, antiperistasis, history of geology, Creation theology, creationism, evolutionary theory. INTRODUCTION The Danish anatomist, geologist, and bishop Nicholas Steno (1638–1686) was not only a great man of natural science, but also a master of theology and spirituality. On 23 October 1988, he was beatified in Rome by Pope John Paul II (1920–2005). In 2004, a memorial plaque in commemoration of the 32nd International Geological Congress in Florence was unveiled in the basilica of San Lorenzo where Steno’s body was transferred in 1687 after his death in Schwerin, Mecklenburg. It reads: †

E-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://www.franksobiech.de.

The geologists gathered from all parts of the world in order to celebrate the 32nd Congress in large numbers again in Italy after 123 years commemorate gratefully in the month of August in the year of our Lord 2004 Nicholas Steno, the researcher of natural things and beatified bishop, for his excellent merit that he as the first had discovered stratigraphy and crystallography in Florence. (Kresten Nielsen et al., 2004, p. 13 [color plate with the memorial plaque]; Vai, 2005, p. 22)1 1 “Nicolaum Stenonem rerum naturae investigatorem episcopum beatum pro insigni merito quod Florentiae stratigraphiam et crystallographiam primus invenit geologi ex omnibus orbis partibus ad XXXII conventum celebrandum iterum in Italia post CXXIII annos congressi grati commemorant mense Augusto A.D. MMIV.”

Sobiech, F., 2009, Nicholas Steno’s way from experience to faith: Geological evolution and the original sin of mankind, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 179–186, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(13). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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It was Fr. Gustav Scherz CSsR (1895–1971), the “father of the Steno Renaissance,” who laid the foundations for all forthcoming research about Steno’s life and work by editing nearly all of Steno’s treatises and letters from 1941 onward (Noe-Nygaard, 1971). Although Fr. Scherz and several scientists and historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, among whom Fr. August Ziggelaar S.J. stands out with his significant edition of Steno’s Chaos manuscript (Ziggelaar, 1997), have written about Steno’s achievements, no one has undertaken the effort to work out his spirituality using all edited and unedited primary source material. In the following, I will amplify some geologicaltheological findings of my Ph.D. thesis, which fills this gap (Sobiech, 2004; some findings are summarized in Sobiech, 2005). Herein, I will try to answer a very crucial question: Did Steno abandon his scientific method after his ordination as a priest? SCIENTIST AND BELIEVER After having published his “De Solido Intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento Dissertationis Prodromus” in 1669, in which he wrote what now are recognized as the founding principles of geology (Sobiech, 2004, p. 68 f), Nicholas Steno took up an insecure position as a so-called “Royal Anatomist” in Copenhagen for two years (1672–1674). This was the name given to him by benevolent friends. However, this was without any prospect as a Catholic due to royal legislation that restricted freedom to practice religion other than the Lutheran state religion. During this time, Steno made his momentous decision to become priest because he felt that the study of nature, which actually should have nurtured his life of grace, instead was leading him away from the intimate relations with God that he most desired, as he told the canonical auditor at the Papal Nunciature in Cologne, Giovanni Battista Pacichelli (ca. 1636–1695), in a letter dating back to 28 October 1674 (Gregorian calendar) (Sobiech, 2004, p. 73 f). On 5 April 1673 (Julian calendar), Steno wrote a letter from Copenhagen to the German anatomist Heinrich Meibom Jr. (1638–1700) in Helmstedt stating that every anatomist should use his talents to reveal the name of God with the help of the “light of nature” (naturae lumen), because by means of anatomy, “proofs of the Godhead” (divinitatis argumenta) are provided (Sobiech, 2004, p. 73). It cannot be determined with certainty whether Steno, by using this terminology, refers to the medieval scholastic discussion, to René Descartes’ (1596–1650) philosophy, or to the seventeenth-century Christian apologetics’ discussion about the “Lumen naturale” (Barth, 1971, p. 201–205; Ritter and Gründer, 1980, col. 549 f). Three months before, Steno had performed a dissection of a woman’s corpse in front of students in Copenhagen’s Anatomical Theater (established 1644). Preceding his dissection, he gave a lecture in which he expressed his conviction that the researching scientist is not autonomous, but owes all his achievements to God’s help. In this context, he stated: “But truly, the true anatomy...is the method by which God leads us first to the cognition of the animate body, and from here to the cognition of his being—

the anatomist playing the role of the mediating hand.”2 Never in his life, until his lonely death in Schwerin (cf. concerning his attitude toward his asceticism in relation to medical science; Sobiech, 2004, p. 323 f), did Steno regard natural science as useless or full of sins like his Calvinist friend, the scientist Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680) began to do after his captivation with Antoinette Bourignon de la Porte (1616–1680). Bourignon de la Porte, who regarded herself as the reincarnation of the Son of God, pretended the Holy Spirit would have dictated the truth in her writings (which contain great contradictions), rejected all Christian denominations, and damned, among other things, human logic and reason as a danger for faith (Sobiech, 2004, p. 143). It is important to know that Steno kept to his scientific method as geologist when he converted in 1667. However, if the study of nature was leading Steno away from the intimate relations with God, as he wrote on 28 October 1674, did Steno’s convictions or feelings about his scientific method change after he had abandoned his natural science career and become a priest in 1675? In order to answer this question, I would like to draw attention to Steno’s “Opera Philosophica,” which were republished and commented upon in two volumes by the Copenhagen historian of medicine Vilhelm Maar (1877–1940) in 1910. These volumes mainly contain Steno’s anatomical and geological works. In his harsh foreword to the volumes, Maar expresses that Steno’s ordination marked a turning point in his view of nature (Maar, 1910a, p. XII, footnote 1): “From about the time when Steno took Holy Orders his development retrograded, even as far as his way of looking at nature was concerned. In his chief geological work (De Solido Intra Solidum etc.) when touching upon the questions of rock-crystals, gems, precious and base metals, he had exclusively dealt with their formation and occurrence, but when he later on mentioned these very things in a sermon, he merely considered them from a religious point of view, dwelling on how their symbolic meaning was to be looked upon by mankind.” Maar based his conclusion on Steno’s treatise on precious stones, which I will describe soon, in which Steno also writes about the moral meaning of, e.g., the carbuncle for the reign of a secular prince (Larsen and Scherz, 1947, Sermo 40, p. 343, l. 28 f, p. 344, l. 4–8; Scherz, 1969, p. 252, l. 16 f, 26–29; Sobiech, 2004, p. 145 f). In this context, Maar could not know that already in 1672, three years before his ordination, Steno was receptive to a symbolic meditation of nature when he met by chance an illiterate laundryman in Venice at the beginning of June. This “servant of God” (servo di Dio), as Steno called him, told him that in his childhood he had separated from the other children’s play in order to meditate on the clouds in the sky: for him, the white ones would have meant the beauty of purity and the red ones the inflamed glow 2 Maar, 1910b, Proœmium demonstrationum anatomicarum in Theatro Hafniensi anni 1673, p. 255, l. 25–28: “Vere autem vera Anatome [...] methodus est, qua Deus nos primo in corporis animalis, inde in sui notitiam mediante manu Anatomici perducit.” (For the broader context, see Maar, 1910b, p. 255, l. 28–37.) Regarding scientific knowledge, arrogance, and humility, see Sobiech (2004, p. 132–135).

Nicholas Steno’s way from experience to faith of the divine love. Steno appreciated this meeting, according to his detailed report in his letter from Dresden of 21 June 1672 (Gregorian calendar) (first published in Scherz, 1952a, Epistola 79, p. 264, l. 32 to p. 265, l. 22; Sobiech, 2004, p. 159 f) to Grand Duke Cosimo III (reg. 1670–1723), the grand duke of Tuscany; perhaps he also remembered his own childhood when he was forced to stay at home due to a severe illness (Larsen and Scherz, 1944, Defensio et plenior elucidatio epistolæ de propria conversione [from 1680], p. 394, l. 15–18; Sobiech, 2004, p. 30 f). Furthermore, Maar’s statement that Steno’s scientific development had retrograded concerning his way of looking at nature is unfounded. Though this is already known from Gustav Scherz’s editions, Fr. Scherz refrained from a systematic interpretation of the vast theological and natural science material presented in his edited volumes (cf. concerning geology, Sonntag, 1988, p. 241, footnote 66). CONTINUITY IN METHOD First of all, I must explain: Both shortly before his ordination and one year after that, Steno was teacher of “natural philosophy” for the crown prince Ferdinando III (1663–1713) at the Florentine court of Cosimo III (Sobiech, 2004, p. 75). While holding this post, Steno worked on a treatise on precious stones. It was his last geological and mineralogical, yet unpublished, treatise. There are two versions, first the so-called Sermo 40 of ca. 1675. The numbering of the part of Steno’s manuscripts that had been transferred to the Florentine Biblioteca Laurenziana after his death was carried out by a later Florentine copyist, who also placed Steno’s treatise on precious stones in the category of his sermons. Maar published this “sermon” for the first time in 1910, but separate from Steno’s “Opera Philosophica,” in which he presents his harsh foreword (cf. the second edition, among Steno’s other sermons 1–39 and 41–45 [by Larsen and Scherz, 1947, p. 342–349], and with bibliographical reference to Maar in Larsen and Scherz [1947, p. 342, footnote 1]). Second, a reworked version from ca. 1675–1677 with the title Monuments, Signs, Arguments (“Monumenta, Signa, Argumenta”) was discovered by Fr. Scherz in the Florentine National Library in 19463 and published with an English translation in 1969 (Scherz, 1969, p. 249–267). Because of its profound religious implications, Fr. Scherz called Steno’s treatise on precious stones the “mineralogical parallel” to Steno’s anatomical Copenhagen lecture from 1673 (Scherz, 1969, p. 36 f; Sobiech, 2004, p. 92 f). The components of the threefold title are explained by Steno at the beginning of his treatise: “The visible decoration of every church, of every palace, and of both ecclesiastical and secular ministers proves to be (1) monuments of the curse on man3 It belongs to a still partly unedited bundle of different manuscripts of Steno’s hand, containing also, e.g., his Chaos manuscript (1659) and his Hamburg studies on the nerves (1684), with the title “Papers of Nicholas Steno” (Scritti di Niccolò Stenone), which is archived with the manuscripts of the scientists after Galileo Galilei who were not his direct pupils (Posteriori di Galileo, Accademia del Cimento, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze, Ms. Gal. 291, fol. 1–245); in Sobiech (2004, p. 10 f), footnote 50, I have roughly listed the contents of Steno’s manuscript bundle.

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kind, (2) signs of the inward condition and the decoration of the souls, and (3) arguments of becoming beatitude” (Scherz, 1969, p. 250, l. 2–4).4 This last geological treatise of Steno’s enables us to learn his late view of geology. Maar is correct when he says that Steno left the scientific community completely after his ordination. One must add however that he still undertook more biological studies on the nerves in Hamburg in 1684 (first published in Scherz, 1952b, Additamentum 24, p. 949–951; Sobiech, 2004, p. 148 f, 180), which Maar could not have known. Regardless, Maar is incorrect in his assessment of Steno’s observation of nature. Steno’s way of looking at things symbolically was associated with his lessons with the young prince. Until his death, Steno continued to draw on his own methods of observation, and on his own experiences. According to his notes in his treatise on precious stones, he did not abandon the natural science perspective at all. He even shared with the prince his own geological discoveries (Sobiech, 2004, p. 146 f). Since his days as a student, Steno was fond of studying geometry, which had a great impact on his method (Rosenberg, 2006, p. 793; Sobiech, 2004, p. 31). After Steno was ordained a bishop in 1677, he was urged several times by the court counselor and librarian Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) to continue his geological research. This took place at the court of the Catholic convert and duke Johann Friedrich of Brunswick-Lüneburg (1625–1679; reg. 1665–1679), where Steno had taken up a position as vicar apostolic of the Northern Missions. Leibniz and Steno met for the first time at the duke’s court. After getting to know him personally, Leibniz not only held Steno in high regard because of his geological “Prodromus” from 1669 (Yamada, 2003, p. 86–89), but he also regarded Steno as a wonderful person and a great friend. He hoped that Steno would continue his work in the natural sciences; in particular, he wished that Steno would prove “the beginning of the human race” according to the Bible, the “Deluge,” and “some other nice truths which would confirm what has been told to us by Holy Scripture.” He made this clear in a letter dating back to 11 March 1681 (Julian calendar) (Leibniz-Forschungsstelle der Universität Münster, 2006, p. 814, l. 23–28).5 In his geological “Prodromus,” Steno soberly tried to verify the correspondence between his discoveries and the biblical Deluge; his conviction of that correspondence was lifelong (Rosenberg, 2006, p. 794, 796; Sobiech, 2004, p. 69). Concerning the relationship between natural science and the Bible, Steno implicitly agreed with Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) on the principle that when investigating physical questions, one should not begin with biblical texts (Carroll, 2005, p. 117, 127, 131). In his geological “Prodromus,” when speaking of heavier bodies floating on a lighter fluid, he even spoke explicitly of the “most solid demonstrations of the Great Galilei” (“solidissimæ Magni Galilei demonstrations”) (Scherz, 1969, p. 184, l. 31 f). 4 “Omnis templi et palatii sacrorumque et saecularium ministrorum ornatus visibilis exhibet (1) maledictionis humanae monumenta, (2) interni status et ornatus animarum signa et (3) futurae beatitudinis argumenta.” 5 “le commencement du genre humain [...] l’inondation generale [...] quelques autres belles verités, qui confirment ce qui nous en est dit par l’écriture sainte.”

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Furthermore, Steno was the first who presented a history of Earth before the Deluge, which, in line with today’s scientific research, Scherz (1963, p. 215) identified with a Pliocene sea. His conception emphasized the accidental nature of Earth’s history, in contrast to Athanasius Kircher’s S.J. (1601–1680) rigorously creationist perspective, which did not leave space for the behavior of nature or the history of Earth (Morello, 2006, p. 89). In Steno’s geological conception, there was still a place left for the Creator, the relationship of whom with nature was merely corrected. So, Steno asked in his geological “Prodromus,” referring to the abilities of human beings to change a natural habitat: “If the activity of a living creature can bring it about that now places covered with waters are made dry by its decision, and now are covered with new waters, why should we not concede moreover to the First Mover of all things the same freedom and the same powers?” (Scherz, 1969, p. 206, l. 23–25).6 Already in his Parisian “Discours” on the anatomy of the human brain (1669), he criticized, slightly ironically, the self-confident anatomists who, without further dissection, would rashly discuss the use assigned by them to the human body’s parts, the structure of which they would be unsure about, and who would then deliver as argument for that alleged use that God and nature would do nothing in vain (Maar, 1910b, Discours Sur L’Anatomie Du Cerveau, p. 23, l. 3–14; p. 24, l. 37 to p. 25, l. 3). Also later, in his treatise on the muscles of an eagle (1673), Steno again defended the freedom of action of the “universal cause” (causa universalis), meaning God, against “today’s authors of necessity” (hodierni necessitatis authores) (Maar, 1910b, Historia Musculorum Aquilæ, p. 260, l. 31–33; p. 277, l. 23–28; Sobiech, 2004, p. 132 f). In his explanation of the changes that had occurred in Tuscany’s Earth, Steno identified the third change of strata (the fourth “facies” of Earth) with the Deluge (Scherz, 1969, p. 216, sketch 22, with its explanation in Scherz, 1969, p. 206, l. 7 to p. 208, l. 20; p. 214, l. 14) and the preceding three “facies” with the history of Earth before the Deluge (Scherz, 1969, p. 216, sketches 25, 24, 23, with their explanation in Scherz, 1969, p. 204, l. 12 to p. 206, l. 6; p. 214, l. 9–14; another reproduction of the plate with the six “facies” of the Earth may be found in Morello, 2006, p. 89, his Fig. 8). Leibniz, who deeply regretted Steno’s decision to devote himself completely to pastoral work, urged him in vain to continue his work in the natural sciences. Even after Steno’s death, nearly 30 years later, he expressed his disappointment publicly in his “Essays on the Justice of God” (“Essais de theodicée”) published in 1710 (Sobiech, 2004, p. 91, 330). ADOPTION OF SCIENCE IN THEOLOGY Should Steno have continued working in the natural sciences? With whom should we agree, Leibniz or Steno? After all, nobody forbade Steno to link pastoral care with science 6 “Si animalis motus id agere poterit, ut pro arbitrio modo aquis obruta loca sicca reddantur, modo novis aquis obruantur, quidni primo rerum omnium Motori eandem libertatem easdemque vires ultro concederemus?”

just because he was a priest. Moreover, Steno was ordained a bishop partly because in the process preceding his ordination as a bishop, he was regarded as an “expert in secular affairs” (esperto dell’affari mondani), which corresponded to the Roman preference for nominating priests knowing about natural science studies for the diplomatic service because of their powers of persuasion (Scherz, 1952b, Additamentum 17, p. 936, l. 12 f; p. 937, l. 11 f; Sobiech, 2004, p. 80). On the contrary, Vincent de Contenson (1641–1674), a young Dominican father from Lyon, who died in his thirties in 1674, gives an impression of how old-fashioned scientific theories from classical antiquity were adopted not only by natural scientists, but also by theologians in the seventeenth century. His substantial Latin-language work “Theology of the Spirit and of the Heart: or Speculation about the Universal Sacred Doctrine” (Theologia mentis et cordis: seu Speculatio universæ Sacræ Doctrinæ; Sobiech, 2004, p. 121 f), which was first published in several volumes in Lyon in 1668, was read by Steno in his later years as a suffragan bishop. In his only work, De Contenson also wrote about the salvation of mankind by Jesus Christ’s death. He put this thought in the following exclamation, which is worthwhile citing as a whole: O immortal God having died for sin! What kind of lover [i.e., Jesus] is this, what kind of love is this, which does not decrease in the midst of such great hate [i.e., by the people scourging and crucifying Jesus], but increases like an amiable antiperistasis! (de Contenson, 1687, p. 593, left column [Lib. VII, Dissert. IV, Cap. I, Spec. II, Reflexio])7

“Antiperistasis” was a widespread theory first elaborated by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.). It consisted of the supposition that the forces in a natural object could be observed to collect and concentrate to ward off an attack of opposing forces, and was supported by reports of Alpine grottos that produced ice in summer (Scherz, 1969, p. 35). In the summer of 1671, one and a half years before his Copenhagen lecture, Steno had been sent out by Cosimo III and the Florentine Cimento Academy, which rejected that theory (Scherz, 1969, p. 46 f, footnote 151), finally to refute it. During his examinations of two Alpine grottos near Lake Garda and Lake Como in Northern Italy, which were frozen over even in the summer, Steno became convinced that this theory, based on unscientific analogies, was untenable (Sobiech, 2004, p. 249 f).8 Because of his scientific background, Steno as a theologian, a priest, and bishop was not easily misled by unfounded scientific theories like his priestly 7 “O Deum immortalem, & prae amore mortuum! Qualis iste amans, qualis amor iste, qui in tanti medio odii non minuitur, sed veluti amabili antiperistasi augetur!” 8 Concerning the relationship between Steno and Kircher, one should pay attention as well to Steno’s harsh review of the title “Magnes luminaris” belonging to a work of Christian Adolf Balduin (Balduin, 1675), who was a member of the German “Academia Naturae Curiosorum” (established 1652), and of which Kircher had informed him in a letter dating back to 14 April 1676 (Gregorian calendar), as to Steno’s criticism of the use of unscientific analogies in natural science in Chaos (1659) on the advice of Ole Borch (1626–1690) (Scherz, 1952a, Epistola 112, p. 314, l. 28–30; Ziggelaar, 1997, p. 463; extensively in Sobiech, 2004, p. 291 f). Steno’s review of the title should also be considered when reading Yamada, 2006, p. 72.

Nicholas Steno’s way from experience to faith colleague de Contenson, who by means of “antiperistasis” explained the relationship between the opposite emotions of Jesus and his torturers, namely, an increase in love on Jesus’ side following an increase of hate on his torturers’ side, though it was an impressive metaphor for the reader of his handbook. EVOLUTION AND ORIGINAL SIN An example of Steno’s way of scientific thinking as priest can be found in his teachings on the formation of subterranean veins. He viewed them as places not created by God at the beginning of time but occurring instead as consequences of an “evolutionary” geological process having begun with the malediction of Earth leading to shifts of Earth’s surface, in other words, a result stemming from the way in which nature was disturbed by original sin, with regard to Adam and Eve, Genesis 3:1–24.9 This means that Steno combined evolutionary thinking with the traditional Christian exegesis of the Old Testament Creation story. In his treatise on precious stones, he wrote: Many of the things mentioned above [e.g., gold and silver of which Steno spoke before] offer still another proof of the curse, insofar as many of them originate in places not created by God, but, after the malediction of Earth, [in places] taking shape in crevices, cracks, landslides, and in subterranean caves produced in some other way, like diamonds and all precious stones whose matter certainly was created at the beginning [of time] with the other materials of the universe, and which was mixed with particles of other solids and fluid bodies until, after the corruption of Earth [i.e., caused by Adam’s and Eve’s original sin], it was secreted into old subterranean caves where it took shape to be used by human toil for mankind’s own purposes soon afterwards. (Scherz, 1969, p. 250, l. 5–28, with the citation in l. 21–28)10

In order to be able to understand the consequences of this innovative observation of Steno’s, let me shed more light on its theological background. In theological terms, Steno looks to the doctrine that says that Creation in its entirety from human beings to subterranean veins participates in and suffers from the dire situation caused by 9 He taught the doctrine of original sin also to crown prince Ferdinando III (Sobiech, 2004, p. 279, footnote 65). As the previously mentioned carbuncle with its moral meaning for the reign of a secular prince indicates, Steno regarded natural things used as exterior adornments also as signs of the interior adornments of the human soul, although he believed that the difficulties of their extraction were consequences of original sin (Sobiech, 2004, p. 146, footnote 21). 10 “Sed et praedictorum multa aliud maledictionis argumentum nobis praebent, quatenus eorum multa producta sunt in locis non a Deo creatis, sed post maledictionem terrae per fissuras, rupturas, ruinas aliosque cava subterranea producendi modos factis, ut adamantes, lapidesque pretiosi omnes, quorum materia quidem cum reliqua universi materia initio creata reliquorum solidorum fluidorumve corporum particulis intermixta fuit, donec post terrae corruptionem in cavis subterraneis antiquis secreta consistentiam assumpsit, qualem humana industria suis modo usibus adaptat.” The first version of this passage is found in Larsen and Scherz (1947, Sermo 40, p. 342, l. 12 to p. 343, l. 4, with the citation in p. 342, l. 31 to p. 343, l. 4: “Sed et predictorum multa aliud maledictionis argumentum nobis praebent, quatenus producta sunt in locis non a Deo creatis, sed post maledictionem terrae factis per fissuras, rupturas, ruinas aliosque modos producendi cava subterranea, ut sunt adamantes lapidesque pretiosi omnes, quorum materia quidem cum reliqua universi materia creata fuit, ipsa vero corpora non nisi post terrae corruptionem producta sunt”).

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the Fall of Man. A textual reference of this doctrine can be found in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians, Romans 8:19–22. The last verse of this passage is particularly significant: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Bible Society, n.d., p. 914).11 The meaning of this verse is that not only mankind, but the whole animate and inanimate world is affected by human sin until now. When looking into subterranean veins, Steno concluded that one could see that they had been formed within a process caused by faults in Earth’s surface, and this could only have occurred, he believed, after the act of Creation and the beginning of sin. Therefore, the subterranean veins tell the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. According to Steno’s belief, God’s original purpose for Earth’s properties remains hidden and unknown to men because, e.g., most of the veins at first glance seem to be useless for life on Earth: “How much gold and silver, how many precious metals and precious stones of all kinds will remain hidden in the earth’s depths from the time of the creation of the world until its end?” (Scherz, 1969, p. 256, l. 36 to p. 258, l. 2).12 Due to that seeming superfluity and the only limited and fortuitous application of natural objects for human ends, Steno concludes that these objects would have rather had an abundance of applications if Adam and Eve had remained in their innocent state in Paradise (Scherz, 1969, p. 258, l. 25–35). To learn about these possible applications, human intelligence would be too restricted, but the order within nature shows that not a grain of sand or dust would be missing or would be superfluous in the universe (Scherz, 1969, p. 258, l. 5–17). STENO’S COAT OF ARMS Finally, as proof of Steno’s devotion to both natural science and religion, Steno’s trademark is very important, namely, a coat of arms consisting of a heart and a cross, which he designed himself shortly after his conversion (Fig. 1),13 and which he used to seal his letters both when writing as a natural scientist and as a priest and bishop (Fig. 2). The coat of arms correlates the human heart—as part of Creation—and the cross of Jesus Christ by describing a spiritual “blood circulation” between the two, which begins to flow from the cross and so forms a circulation of 11

I have used the translation of the King James Version of the Holy Bible. “Quantum auri argentique et ex omni genere metallorum lapidumque pretiosorum a prima mundi creatione usque ad eius incendium terrae visceribus latebit reconditum?” (interpretation is given in Sobiech, 2004, p. 146 f). 13 It consists of a stylized, sculpturally shaped, yet anatomically informed human heart showing the two chambers and the bent “apex cordis,” that is the blunt extremity of the heart formed by the left ventricle. Furthermore, the cross is set into the “base” of the heart, which is the uppermost part of the human heart tilting slightly backward toward the spinal column. The first known use of his seal is at the end of a letter that Steno wrote in Vienna on 27 October 1669 (Scherz, 1952b, p. VIII). It is worthwhile noting that there exists a model of his seal, namely in the village church of Gryt (Schonen, Sweden), where one can find on the front of the main altar erected in 1636 a stylized, sculpturally shaped, but not anatomically informed heart with the cross on it. It is the family seal of the pastor Claus Pedersen Qviding (1577–1642), an uncle on Steno’s father’s side. Steno used his ancestor’s seal as a basis for his own, and by designing it anatomically, he conferred a new sense to it (Sobiech, 2004, p. 237). 12

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Figure 1. The first version of the seal (original: 1.4 cm height and 1.5 cm width) (cf. Scherz, 1952, Epistola 318 [24 September 1683, Gregorian calendar], p. 620, l. 22 f). Photo was taken from Sobiech (2004, figure VII).

divine grace and love; it stands for the natural and supernatural dependence of the believers and all other human beings on Jesus Christ. The fact that Steno used his heart-cross seal as both natural researcher and priest parallels his anatomical dissections of the heart, which he performed as bishop with religious intention. We know of such pastoral dissections on the occasion of a religious disputation in Celle on 7 May 1680, and Steno’s care for a renegade Franciscan priest in Hamburg in 1684 (Sobiech, 2004, p. 82, 235 f). Steno tried to convince nonbelievers, atheists, and the “political ones”14 by his observation that nobody else other than a loving God could create something so complex and magnificent as the human body. Furthermore, Steno did not leave science totally, as Leibniz had regretted—I already mentioned his biological studies on the nerves in Hamburg in 1684—but Steno was eager to make use of modern science for his own religious purposes. Unfortunately, both his manuscripts 14 The “political ones” behaved “politically” concerning religion, i.e., they were prepared to belong to whichever religion helped them to get ahead. During his dissection performed as bishop in Celle on 7 May 1680, Steno even confessed that in his youth he had been nearly seduced to “atheism” (atheismus), doubting a personal God and preferring an impersonal “fate” (fatum). After his discovery that the heart was a muscle in 1662/1663, he made some time for the study of religions and got stuck in some kind of irresolute relationship with the Christian confessions, because he was fully occupied by his natural research, until his inner conversion on 2 November 1667 (extensively in Sobiech, 2004, p. 39–68).

Figure 2. One version of the later bishop’s seal with the bishop’s hat (original: 1.6 cm height and 1.4 cm width) (cf. Scherz, 1952, Epistola 417 [3 August 1685, Gregorian calendar], p. 796, l. 20 f). Photo taken from Sobiech (2004, figure VIII).

dealing probably with physico-theological questions and written down in his last years have gone missing since he sent them to a Parisian parish priest, Jean Mercier (1618–ca. 1706) for proof-reading in 1686 (Sobiech, 2004, p. 6 f, 147 f). Furthermore, it is unknown what has happened with Steno’s anatomical and geological estate, which, at least concerning the anatomical papers, still existed in 1732 (Sobiech, 2004, p. 7). However, it is possible to reconstruct a considerable amount of Steno’s abundant spirituality dealing with the enthrallment with nature, e.g., Steno’s aphorism formed in his Copenhagen lecture from 1673, “Beautiful is that which one sees, more beautiful is that which one knows, but by far the most beautiful is that which one is ignorant of” (Maar, 1910b, Proœmium demonstrationum anatomicarum in Theatro Hafniensi anni 1673, p. 254, l. 19 f),15 the third part of which has a transcendent meaning (Sobiech, 2004, p. 154), and his “circulation of divine love” (Sobiech, 2004, p. 153–161). Steno regarded Creation as a “sign” of God’s love; in his Florentine spiritual writings put down between 1674 and 1677, he concludes: “So the perceptible beauty is a sign of the imperceptible beauty of the Creator” (Larsen and Scherz, 1947, 15 “Pulchra sunt, quae videntur, pulchriora, quae sciuntur, longe pucherrima, quae ignorantur.”

Nicholas Steno’s way from experience to faith Opera spirituale 5, p. 87, l. 30 f).16 Steno always started with his own observations, either in nature or regarding the theological truths claimed by the Roman Catholic Church and by other Christian denominations. He was convinced that the messages of the Bible concerning Creation could not contradict his own discoveries,17 particularly in light of his endeavors to refer to the original wording in his study of the Bible (Sobiech, 2004, p. 31, 38) regarding its original Hebrew and Greek text. CONCLUSIONS The commonly held idea that Steno’s life is divided into two different periods having nothing in common with each other, namely, the period as natural scientist and the time as Catholic convert and ultimately priest, is not warranted by evidence. Rather, Steno’s life forms a unity. When Steno reached the height of his secular career with the publication of his geological “Prodromus” in 1669, he had already converted to Catholicism. Both before and after Steno’s conversion and, later, his ordination as a priest, his spirituality continued to develop, but he remained fundamentally the same, in his striving for “certainty” (certitudo) both in scientific and theological matters (Sobiech, 2004, p. 275, 334 f), in his positive assessment of his own geological insights, and in his theological contemplation of the beauties of nature. His life reached its height in an entirely personal decision, which was his answer to the gifts assigned to him, as he believed, by God, for example, as he noted during his Hanover and Münster years, his mastery of some foreign languages and his detection of several errors of philosophers and anatomists, among these, the false theories of the heart (Sobiech, 2004, p. 59, 222). The gratitude with which Steno looked back as convert and priest on his own journey through life—even though he occasionally regretted the loss of precious time due to his inattentiveness and hesitation in the face of God’s call (Sobiech, 2004, p. 74, 335)—is the combining element of both of his life periods. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Gary D. Rosenberg for his invitation to speak at the Geological Society of America’s (GSA) 2006 Philadelphia annual meeting. For providing funds in support of my travel expenses, I thank the History of Geology Division, GSA, and Yildirim Dilek from the International Division, GSA. I also thank Yildirim Dilek for inviting me to participate in the business luncheon of the International Division, GSA. This essay is a modified version of the paper delivered at session no. 35 “From the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment: 16 “Così la bellezza sensibile contrassegno della bellezza insensibile dell’Autore” (interpretation is given in Sobiech, 2004, p. 101, 158). 17 Ashworth (1986, p. 146) emphasized that criticism of Steno’s adherence to the Bible misses the point, for “it is even more marvelous, and more instructive, that he was able to set down most of the principles of modern geology without departing from the traditional religious framework.” Such criticism can also be found in Abbona (2002, p. 680); concerning Abbona’s objection cf. Sonntag (1988, p. 231 f).

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Emergence of Modern Geology and Evolutionary Thought from the 16th–18th Century,” History of Geology Division, 22 October 2006. REFERENCES CITED Abbona, F., 2002, Geologia, in Tanzella-Nitti, G., and Strumia, A., eds., Dizionario Interdisciplinare di Scienza e Fede: Cultura Scientifica, Filosofia e Teologia, Volume 1: Vatican City, Urbaniana University Press, p. 675–692. Ashworth, W.B., Jr., 1986, Catholicism and early modern science, in Lindberg, D.C., and Numbers, R.L., eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science: Berkeley, University of California Press, p. 136–166. Balduin, C.A., 1675, Phosphorus Hermeticus sive Magnes Luminaris: Frankfurt on the Main, Fromannus, 10 leaves. Barth, H.-M., 1971, Atheismus und Orthodoxie: Analysen und Modelle christlicher Apologetik im 17. Jahrhundert [Th.habil. thesis]: Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Forschungen zur Systematischen und Ökumenischen Theologie, no. 26, 356 p. Bible Society, ed., n.d., The Bible: Authorized Version: Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1007 p. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze, Ms. Gal. 291, fol. 1–245 (Posteriori di Galileo, Accademia del Cimento; manuscripts mostly of Steno’s hand, partly unpublished). Carroll, W.E., 2005, Galileo Galilei and the myth of heterodoxy, in Brooke, J., and Maclean, I., eds., Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion: Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 115–144. de Contenson, V., 1687, Theologia mentis et cordis. Seu Speculationes universæ Doctrinæ sacræ [...]. Tomus primus: Cologne, Metternich, 840 p. Kresten Nielsen, Ja., Hanken, N.-M., and Kresten Nielsen, Je., 2004, Indvielse af ny mindetavle for Niels Steensen (Nicolaus Stenonis): Varv, v. 2, p. 12–14. Larsen, K., and Scherz, G., eds., 1944, Nicolai Stenonis Opera theologica cum prooemiis ac notis Germanice scriptis, Tomus prior (2nd edition): Copenhagen, Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 508 p., 11 pl. Larsen, K., and Scherz, G., eds., 1947, Nicolai Stenonis Opera theologica cum prooemiis ac notis Germanice scriptis, Tomus posterior: Copenhagen, Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 574 p., 1 pl. Leibniz-Forschungsstelle der Universität Münster, ed., 2006, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophischer Briefwechsel 1663–1685 (2nd edition): Berlin, Akademie-Verlag, Sämtliche Schriften und Werke, Zweite Reihe, Erster Band, 1025 p. Maar, V., ed., 1910a, Nicolai Stenonis Opera Philosophica, Volume I: Copenhagen, Vilhelm Tryde, 264 p., 8 pl. Maar, V., ed., 1910b, Nicolai Stenonis Opera Philosophica, Volume II: Copenhagen, Vilhelm Tryde, 365 p., 15 pl. Morello, N., 2006, Steno, the fossils, the rocks, and the calendar of the Earth, in Vai, G.B., and Caldwell, W.G.E., eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 81–93, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(06). Noe-Nygaard, A., 1971, Gustav Scherz 1895–1971, in Scherz, G., ed., Dissertations on Steno as Geologist: Odense, University Press, Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 23, p. 5f. Ritter, J., and Gründer, K., eds., 1980, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie: Completely Revised Edition of R. Eisler’s Wörterbuch der Philosophischen Begriffe: Band 5: Basles, Schwabe & Co. AG Verlag, 1448 col. Rosenberg, G.D., 2006, Nicholas Steno’s Chaos and the shaping of evolutionary thought in the Scientific Revolution: Geology, v. 34, no. 9, p. 793–796 (erratum posted online at http://www.gsajournals.org/ archive/0091-7613/34/9/pdf/i0091-7613-34-9-793.pdf). Scherz, G., ed., 1952a, 1952b, Nicolai Stenonis epistolae et epistolae ad eum datae quas cum prooemio ac notis Germanice scriptis, Tomus prior/ Tomus posterior (two separate volumes, with uninterrupted pagination): Copenhagen, Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1027 p., 14 pl. Scherz, G., ed., 1963, Pionier der Wissenschaft: Niels Stensen in seinen Schriften: Odense, Munksgaard, Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 17, 348 p., 48 pl. Scherz, G., ed., 1969, Steno—Geological Papers: Odense, Odense University Press, Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 20, 370 p., 61 pl.

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Sobiech, F., 2004, Herz, Gott, Kreuz: Die Spiritualität des Anatomen, Geologen und Bischofs Dr. Med. Niels Stensen (1638–86) [Ph.D. thesis]: Münster, Aschendorff, Westfalia Sacra, no. 13, 392 p., 14 pl. (table of contents online at http://www.franksobiech.de). Sobiech, F., 2005, Blessed Nicholas Steno (1638–1686): Natural History Research and the Science of the Cross: Australian EJournal of Theology, no. 5, August (online at http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ ejournal/aejt_5/Sobiech.htm, last accessed 1 January 2009). Sonntag, F.P., ed., 1988, Gustav Scherz: Niels Stensen, Eine Biographie, Band I (1638–1677): Leipzig, St. Benno, 376 p., 16 pl. Vai, G.B., 2005, A Tribute to Steno. Unveiling a Plaque in the Basilica di San Lorenzo by Cardinal Ennio Antonelli, August 23, 19:00–20:00, in Abbate, E., et al., eds., General Proceedings of the 32nd International Geological Congress Florence, Italy, 32th IGC Organizing Committee, 20–28 August 2004: Florence, p. 20–22 (also online at http://www.32igc.org/ GeneralProcedings/Tributetosteno.htm).

Yamada, T., 2003, Stenonian revolution or Leibnizian revival? Constructing geo-history in the seventeenth century: Historia Scientiarum, v. 13, no. 2, p. 75–100. Yamada, T., 2006, Kircher and Steno on the “geocosm,” with a reassessment of the role of Gassendi’s works, in Vai, G.B., and Caldwell, W.G.E., eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 65–80, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(05). Ziggelaar, A., translator, 1997, Chaos: Niels Stensen’s Chaos-manuscript: Copenhagen, 1659. Complete Edition with Introduction, Notes and Commentary: Copenhagen, The Danish National Library of Science and Medicine, Acta Historica Scientiarum Naturalium et Medicinalium, v. 44, 520 p., 11 pl.

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The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

The Scientific Revolution and Nicholas Steno’s twofold conversion Gian Battista Vai† Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra e Geologico–Ambientali, Università di Bologna, via Zamboni 67, I-40127 Bologna, Italy ABSTRACT Steno’s life was punctuated by two conversions: (1) from anatomy and medicine to geology, and (2) from Lutheran to Roman Catholic confession. Why was Steno (1638–1686) motivated to solve geological problems soon after he entered the Tuscan region of Italy? Was there any link between his scientific conversion and the religious one, which occurred almost simultaneously and produced a revolution in his life? The origin of marine fossils found in mountains had been debated in Italy for one and a half centuries. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) had already given a modern scientific explanation for the problem. Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) later tackled the problem with an experimental-taxonomic approach (his famous museum and studio), and it was he who coined the word “geology” in 1603. Italy provided spectacular exposures of rocky outcrops that must have impressed the Danish scientist who had lived in the forested north European lowlands. Since the time of Giotto and his successors, such as Mantegna, Pollaiolo, Leonardo, and Bellini, the imposing Italian landscape had stimulated the visualization of geology. Inevitably, science and art merged perfectly in the work of painter and paleontologist Agostino Scilla (1629–1700). Steno was methodologically skilled and intellectually curious and was thus open to the stimuli that Italy had to offer in order to unwittingly rediscover, after Leonardo, the principles of geology and to solve the problem of fossils. Steno’s inclination to detailed “anatomical” observation of natural objects and processes as well as his religious conversion were influenced by his acquaintance with the circle of Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1647) disciples who formed the Accademia del Cimento. They were firm Roman Catholic believers. To the inductive mild rationalist and open-minded Steno, this connection could not be dismissed, and it prepared him for changing his paradigms for the sake of consistency. This occurred when a Corpus Domini procession triggered a revelation and led to his religious conversion. Keywords: geology and painting, Leonardo da Vinci, Aldrovandi, geometrical perspective, Accademia del Cimento, Leibniz. INTRODUCTION Steno’s intellectual and routine life was punctuated by two markedly different, though related, conversions: (1) from the study of the anatomy of organic bodies to the geology of rocky †

E-mail: [email protected].

strata and bodies, and (2) from the Lutheran Reformed Church to the Roman Catholic confession. We may ask: why was Steno (1638–1686) so deeply motivated to solve basic geological problems soon after entering the Tuscan region and after having had the opportunity to know and enjoy many other regions of Italy? Additionally, it is tempting to enquire whether there was any link between his scientific

Vai, G.B., 2009, The Scientific Revolution and Nicholas Steno’s twofold conversion, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 187–208, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(14). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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conversion (or change of scientific target) and his religious conversion (or change of life target). The suspected link is even more striking in that both conversions occurred almost simultaneously and resulted in a literal scientific and religious revolution in his life (Naldini, 1986; Ellenberger, 1988; Angeli, 1996; Oldroyd, 1996; Ascani et al., 2002; Yamada, 2003). The aim of this paper is to investigate the reasons leading to such major changes in Steno’s works and life and, especially, to look for the context and relations, or even connection between the two conversions. FROM ORGANIC ANATOMY TO INORGANIC GEOLOGY VIA PALEONTOLOGY The first of Steno’s conversions can be explained by focusing on the following points: (1) the origin of marine fossils found in the mountains had been freely debated in Italy more than in other European countries for one and a half centuries, leading Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) to define and name the new science of geology in 1603; (2) Leonardo da Vinci (1452– 1519) (Fig. 1) had already given a modern scientific solution to the fossil problem; (3) Italy provided spectacular rocky outcrops that would have impressed the Danish scientist, who had previously lived in the forested north European lowlands during the Little Ice Age; and (4) the imposing Italian geological landscape stimulated three-dimensional (3-D) visualization of the strata, so that painting and geology went hand in hand with the assistance afforded by the discovery of the principles of geometrical perspective. When disembarking in Leghorn on 1666, the 28 yr old Steno was already well known to leading European savants as one of the most prominent anatomists (Scherz, 1958, 1971b; Kardel, 1994). He was aware that he was entering a country where medicine and anatomy had been illustrated by scientists such as Ulisse Aldrovandi (1523–1605), Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), and

Girolamo Mercuriale (1530–1606) in the late sixteenth century. The school had progressed with a degree of innovation and excellence so as to produce anatomists on the level of Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) and Francesco Redi (1626–1697), who were renowned throughout Europe. Both were soon to become good friends of Steno. It should not be forgotten that early, mostly unofficial, dissection of human bodies had been extensively performed and illustrated by Leonardo and Michelangelo in Tuscany for scientific and artistic reasons, as well as by the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), who was trained at the Padua and Bologna universities. Let me elaborate on the four points listed here. 1. Once in Italy, Steno soon became aware that the origin of marine fossils that were so commonly found in the hills and mountains and were similar to, or identical with, the shells of organisms now living in the surrounding seas had been debated in Italy for more than 150 yr, well before similar discussions in other countries. The topic had perhaps been the most deeply and widely discussed topic in scientific and cultural circles among natural philosophers, teachers, collectors, priests, abbots, chemists, herbalists, and even artists and craftsmen. It was thus a diffuse movement of cultural interest among several different groups and classes (Morello, 2003a; Vai, 2003a; Vai and Cavazza, 2006). It is evidence of pluralism, intellectual freedom, and good use of human rationality in the society of the Italian Renaissance. The debate soon spread from natural to general philosophy, and even cosmology, at a time when there was developing interest in cosmogonies and theories of Earth (Lyell, 1830, chapter 3). The tradition of considering the fossils found in the hills as remnants of marine organisms was well established in Tuscany since the time of the writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) (Brocchi, 1814), and more generally in Italy since Alessandro degli Alessandri (1461–1523). The view was shared and elaborated by, among others, Girolamo Fracastoro (1483–1553),

Figure 1. Details from Battesimo di Cristo by Verrocchio, Leonardo, and others (1470–1480) (A), showing gradual transition from in situ fractured strata below to rounded transported and cemented gravel above (B). Courtesy of Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Antonio Paolucci (photo by P. Ferrieri and G.B. Vai).

The Scientific Revolution and Nicholas Steno’s twofold conversion Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), Andrea Cesalpino (1519– 1603), Ferrante Imperato (1550–1625), and Bernard Palissy (1510–1589), the latter of which was the first person outside Italy to support this view (Morello, 1979, 1981, 2003a). All of them rejected the answer customarily given to the fossil question by the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures, who had adopted the myth of the deluge, later reinforced in the Christian Middle Ages through the biblical tale of the Noah’s Flood. Instead, they relied upon observational and experimental approaches being helped also by the resemblance between fossil shells and living beings in the Mediterranean Sea. On the other side of the discussions, Georgius Agricola (1494–1555), Andrea Mattioli (1500–1577), Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562), and others rejected an organic origin of fossils and spoke about fermentation of materia pinguis, or the influence of heavenly bodies (Michele Mercati, 1541–1593), or lusus naturae (Francesco Calzolari, 1522–1609), which supposedly produced a simulation of shells.

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An extensive review of the different explanations provided by individual theories within the two opposing groups was given by Aldrovandi in the manuscript Historia Fossilium (ca. 1580) and in Museum Metallicum (p. 818–819), published posthumously and possibly altered by his follower Bartolomeo Ambrosini (1588–1657) in 1648. Aldrovandi also added the view of the organic origin of the fossils he shared with those believing in the role of the Noachian Deluge, as had been done by authors in Greek and Roman times. At the end of his life and the sixteenth century, Aldrovandi (Fig. 2) was well aware of the scientific significance of the discussion and elaboration of the origin of the fossils in his large collections, observations, and experiments, such that he felt the need for a new discipline that he termed “geology” (Aldrovandi, 1603; see Dean, 1979; Vai, 2003a; Rudwick, 2005; Vai and Cavazza, 2006; Vai, 2009, with a comment on the origin of the name). This was a natural outgrowth of his lifelong taxonomic and comparative study of the largest collection of fossils

Figure 2. Aldrovandi’s restored museum room. Courtesy of Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Bologna, Fulvio Simoni (photo by D. Lelli).

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ever assembled before in a museum of natural history (Findlen, 1989, 1994; Vai, 2003a). Aldrovandi defined geology as the science dealing with dug and outcropping fossils (Vai, 2003a). When Steno reviewed the still-open question about the origin of fossils (at least in Europe) in the first pages of his De Solido (1669, p. 7–8), he practically duplicated the list of possible hypotheses considered many decades before by Aldrovandi in his manuscript Historia Fossilium (ca. 1580) and published by Ambrosini in 1648 in Museum Metallicum. In fact, Steno summarized the issue of marine objects abandoned in places far away from the sea, and he separated (1) bodies produced in the sea; (2) bodies produced on land based on natural forces of uncertain nature, flooding, and very lengthy periods of time; (3) bodies produced partly in the sea and partly on land; and (4) the special case of the Maltese glossopetrae (sharks’ teeth). When describing many fossil groups (e.g., p. 600, 606) and speaking more generally about opaque stony bodies, Aldrovandi distinguished (1) bodies of different nature, which, after the lapse of time are transformed into stone; and (2) shelly tests occurring in the mountains as stone, either generated in situ or transported from elsewhere (Museum Metallicum, p. 818). Aldrovandi was probably the first to compare the glossopetrae with sharks’ teeth (Morello 2003a, p. 135). He also repeatedly stated his conviction about the organic origin of many fossils (Morello, 2003a, p. 135; Vai and Cavazza, 2006, p. 54, 55, 59). Contrary views sometimes occur in the Museum Metallicum, but these were probably due to amendments made by the editor Bartolomeo Ambrosini in 1648. The way Steno treated the section of shelly tests and the Maltese glossopetrae (p. 60–61) in 1669 strongly suggests that he had good knowledge of Aldrovandi’s works. We know by exchanges of letters in late 1660 and early 1670 that Steno was a good friend of Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) (Galluzzi, 1986), a great anatomist and a fellow of the Royal Society, who was a successor to Aldrovandi at the University of Bologna (Fig. 3). Additionally, the Grand Dukes of Tuscany Ferdinando II and Cosimo III, who had called Steno to Florence and protected him throughout his remaining life, were descendants of Francesco I and Ferdinando I, both of whom were supporters of and in contact and exchange of samples with Aldrovandi (Tosi, 1989; Vai, 2003a). Therefore, Steno would almost certainly have been well acquainted with Aldrovandi’s works available in the Grand Duchy library. In the meantime, definite experimental evidence of the organic origin of fossils had been provided in 1616 by Fabio Colonna (1567–1640) in his De Glossopetris Dissertatio (Morello, 1979, 1981, 2003a, 2006b). It was long before Robert Hooke (1635–1703), in his Micrographia (1665), also expressed the view that fossils were organic remains, as many Italian savants had already done. One can thus agree with Eyles (1958, p. 179) that even in a case where Steno had some information about Hooke’s lectures and work, “one can largely discount the possibility that Hooke’s ideas had any marked influence on the development of Steno’s geological ideas.” In fact, he had found in Florence a wealth of earlier extensive Italian sources suggesting

Figure 3. Malpighi’s bust in his grave monument. Courtesy Chiesa dei Santi Gregorio e Siro, Bologna (photo by P. Ferrieri and G.B. Vai).

the same ideas. Steno’s original merit was to have discovered in the field a rational way to explain how organic shells and inorganic crystals can become embedded within sediments and the ensuing strata. In so doing, he rediscovered the general principles of the new science of geology already stated by Leonardo da Vinci (Vai, 1995). Colonna’s experiment resulted in an increase of the number of diluvianists also in Italy (except for Tuscany), as shown by the works of Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) (Vai, 2004), and later elsewhere in Europe. Called to Florence to supervise the collections of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany and improve scientific studies, Steno could have expanded his previous anatomical research in competitive cooperation with the already renowned Tuscan Francesco Redi (1626–1697). However, the momentum reached by the discussion on the origin of fossils in Italy and the new science of geology, as shortly before defined by Aldrovandi, convinced Steno (Fig. 4) that studying geology was more appealing to him and more interesting to some of his Italian colleagues and sponsors than simply continuing his studies on the anatomy and physiology of muscles. Steno succeeded in this challenge indeed, attaining in geology even more general and important results than in anatomy (Scherz, 1971b). The transition from anatomy to geology was easier because of Steno’s skill in comparative animal anatomy, including fish, similar to Georges Cuvier in the earliest nineteenth century. Both savants contributed strongly to the improvement of geology via palaeontology.

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tilting and ensuing angular unconformity (Vai, 1986; Vai, 1995, p. 17–19). More than Steno, he illustrated their folding and faulting in remarkable geological profiles (Vai, 1995, 2003c) (Fig. 5). As an example, after frequently crossing the Romagna Apennines from Florence to Imola or Cesena, Leonardo concluded that: going down the Apennine valleys northwards, after having left the true lithic beds, dipping for a short distance at the root of the mountains, one can see beds or soils, made of earth used for pottery, full of shells; this last group of beds still dips for some distance at the foot of the hills, until common earth or terrain appears, just where the rivers, flowing down the Marche and Romagna regions, go out of the Apennines. (Vai, 1995, p. 18; my italics)

Figure 4. Steno’s bust. Courtesy of Museo Geologico Giovanni Capellini, Bologna (photo by P. Ferrieri and G.B. Vai).

2. Actually, long before Steno, Leonardo da Vinci in the early Renaissance had already obtained the same results. He had formulated the same general principles as Steno after studying almost the same Italian areas of northern Italy, and especially Tuscany. Like Steno, he wrote about strata, their original horizontality, their original continuity, their superposition, and their

Unlike Steno, Leonardo (like Aldrovandi) rejected the role of the Universal Deluge to explain the marine fossils found in the mountain. In so stating, Leonardo anticipated the philosophical and scientific European debates on diluvianism of the next three centuries. Instead, according to Leonardo, diluvianism was to cause serious inconsistency with the observed distribution of the fossils. The major scientific weakness in Steno’s otherwise admirably consistent doctrine was indeed the uncritical acceptance of diluvianism. Leonardo’s notebooks, however, remained practically secret until the beginning of the nineteenth century. This is not to say that nobody could have had direct or indirect access to his ideas. It could have happened by verbal transmission or informal circulation through restricted groups of friends, especially in Florence, Milan, and Amboise (in France, where Leonardo spent his closing years). Just to give an example, Girolamo Fracastoro (1485– 1553) used arguments very close to those of Leonardo in a letter for supporting a non-diluvianistic interpretation of the marine fossils excavated in Verona in 1517. I have been tempted to suggest that Fracastoro had some access to the manuscripts of his contemporary Leonardo or that he was influenced by some verbal reports of them (Vai, 2003b, p. 234). In a similar way, some of the cultural and artistic circles of Florence and Tuscany could have preserved a verbal tradition and memory of Leonardo’s geological ideas, which then became available to the very inquiring and prepared mind of Steno, once he came to look at the same landscape with strata and outcrops and began to seek information when visiting the Medici’s collections and library. In this way, Steno may well have benefited from or been inspired by Leonardo’s ideas about geological structures and processes. 3. Most of Italy is hilly or mountainous country, except for the Po Plain and some minor and narrow coastal plains. Beginning with the Middle Ages and progressing into the Renaissance, Italy underwent heavy deforestation related to the expansion of economic development, birth of cities, shipbuilding, and population growth (Vai, 2003b, p. 248–248). As a consequence, the backbone of the Italian peninsula—the Apennines—showed much better exposures of rocks and strata than today. Paintings, engravings, drawings, and views of that time provide clear evidence of large underground exposures, beginning with the works of Giotto (1267–1337) (Fig. 6) and his bare and

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Figure 5. Geological cross section by Leonardo da Vinci. View from the Southern Alps, possibly Venetian area or Lombardy, when Leonardo stayed in Milan from 1510 to 1513 (Carlo Pedretti, 9 May 2007, personal commun.). Windsor Royal collection, no. 12394, reproduced by permission of H.M. the Queen Elizabeth II.

rocky Umbrian landscape (the present-day green land). The same evidence continues through the early and late Renaissance up to the period of naturalism and the Baroque era. To a curious and open mind such as Steno’s, keen to observe and unravel the intimate anatomical structures of the human and animal organisms with a confident use of his reason, the spectacular Italian landscape displaying the internal structure of Earth must have acted as a shocking and fascinating intellectual challenge, and it was one that he immediately accepted. Like Saint Paul on the way to Damascus, Steno was dazzled and “converted” from anatomy to geology. This was not for him an immediate and dramatic change, but rather a major shift in his basic new scientific interest without an abandonment of the former (Troels Kardel, 2007, personal commun.). Even more, Steno recognized that anatomical aspects of living organisms were intimately connected with the mineralogical and lithological ones in the transformation of sediments into rocky materials referred to as the subject-matter of the new science called “geology” by Aldrovandi in 1603. On the other hand, it should be remarked that Steno had shown some early interest in “geology,” as witnessed by several remarks in his student notes, the so-called Chaos manuscript of 1659 (Ziggelaar, 1997; Yamada, 2003, p. 76; Vai, 2004; Yamada, 2006; Rosenberg, 2006), and by references made in 1663 to the glossopetrae brought back from Malta by his teacher Thomas Bartholin in 1644 (Scherz, 1969, p. 128, no. 72). Additionally, Steno knew about glossopetrae also from the Danish scholar Ole Worm (see Museum Wormianum, 1655, p. 67). Thus, the teeth of the shark at Livorno reawakened Steno’s interest in geology, and his anatomical skill paved the way to his turn from anatomy to geology (August Ziggelaar, 2007, personal commun.). 4. The interplay between geology and painting, just used as evidence of the stimulus that the rocky landscape of Italy, four centuries ago, would have had on Steno, acquires even more relevance if we seek to explain his “conversion” to geology.

Figure 6. Giotto’s Miracolo della fonte (1295–1300), Basilica di San Francesco, Chiesa Superiore, Assisi. St. Francis’ prayer on bare rock.

The new Italian—and European—painting was born with Cimabue (?1240–1302), Giotto, and Masaccio (1401–1428) a millennium after Roman paintings and mosaics had been almost completely buried or lost and as a reaction to the dominant Byzantine two-dimensional painting. Technically and philosophically, it was characterized by the aim to represent not only ideas and spiritual beings, through symbolic icons, but also bodies and material masses using shading and perspective to produce realistic 3-D effects. The revolution in art can be viewed as result of a more popular and incarnated Christian religion and a reappraisal of the value of both body and natural world as basic components of the Creation after the millennial fears. Italian and Western humanism came as a perfectly balanced vision, integrating both human and divine aspects of the world unknown to other cultures. It aimed to improve the static and purely theocentric Eastern Orthodox Byzantine and Russian iconic and spiritualistic culture. Under different conditions, this may also apply to Chinese art (Edgerton, 1975). This trend was reinforced by the Neoplatonic revival of humanism and the early Renaissance rediscovery and improvement of geometrical perspective by scientists and artists such as Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1466), who rediscovered the Greek

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Figure 7. Strata from the Romagna Apennines, middle Miocene Marnoso-Arenacea Formation, high Santerno Valley (photo by P. Fabbri). Caterpillars at the base of the central wall for scale.

and Roman principles of linear perspective and single vanishing point, inspired by Alberti’s treatise Della Pittura, and who was the first to built a hemispherical vault of enormous size on top of the Florence Cathedral without the traditional timbering; Paolo Dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1397–1482), mathematician; Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), theorist of Renaissance art; Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), a pioneer in single-point perspective and application of scientific laws to represent objects in a 3-D space following the school of Toscanelli; Piero della Francesca (1416–1492), the humanist painter most fascinated with geometry and mathematics and theorist of De Prospectiva Pingendi; Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), a philosopher who revived Platonism (and Plotinus’s Neoplatonism) and integrated it into Christian theology and Renaissance culture; and Luca Pacioli (1445–1517), a mathematician known for his ideas on the “divine proportion” and the concept of “golden section” used in both ancient and modern architecture and design (Vai and Cavazza, 2006). There is an immediate and natural link relating geometrical perspective to (artificial) architecture on the one side and (natural) geology on the other. This is well understood when building elements and setting of strata and other geological bodies have to be represented on a two-dimensional drawing or painting. As examples, Brunelleschi was able to build his vault in a 3-D space after having represented and calculated its building elements on 2-D plates following the laws of perspective (Vasari, 1550, p. 137–198). Similarly, Steno and Leonardo before him, based on the same laws, were able to understand and represent the 3-D setting of strata in Tuscany and Romagna (Vai, 1986, 1988, 1995) (Fig. 7). Such a simple statement, which results from historical observations and common sense, was analytically demonstrated by Rosenberg (2001, with references, 2006) and exemplified with reference to Leonardo’s and Steno’s works. The demonstration is convincingly backed by a

wealth of publications showing Leonardo’s invaluable contribution to the foundation of geology and its principles as written in his notebooks (Venturi, 1797; Richter, 1883, 1970; Uzielli, 1890; Baratta, 1903, 1912; Cermenati, 1912; De Lorenzo, 1920; D’Arrigo, 1939–1940, 1952; Gortani, 1952; Clark, 1985; Pedretti, 1953, 1985, 2002; Pedretti and Dalli Regoli, 1985; Brown, 1998; Fara, 1999; Kemp, 2001; Natali, 2002). Leonardo was unique in succeeding to establish an early written and illustrated treatise of what we now call geological sciences in his notebooks. However, he was not alone among artists showing in their paintings that the adoption of geometrical perspective in the Renaissance could result in the ability to unravel the setting and even the distinctive features of the geological elements of landscape. A few decades before, and after Leonardo’s life, many painters, impressed by the works of Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca (Fig. 8), represented clear and detailed geological elements, bodies, and features in their paintings. I refer, for instance, to Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), Antonio Pollaiolo (1432–1498), Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), Pietro Perugino (1450–1523), Giovanni Bellini (?1430–1516), and Marco Palmezzano (?1459–1539) (Vai, 1986, 2003c). In few decades in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, geology went fruitfully hand in hand with painting, especially in Italy and also in the Netherlands (see also Rosenberg, 2001, p. 134). This occurred coeval with Leonardo setting the principles of geology around 1500 and slightly before Aldrovandi introduced the term geology in 1603. As an example, Leonardo’s conclusion derived from his travels across the Romagna Apennines, quoted previously, implies that the three units recognized—“dipping true beds of hard rock,” “dipping beds of earth used for pottery,” “common earth or terrain”—are superposed on one another in the same order from bottom to top. Moreover, the first two crop out one after the other because of their dip toward the plain (north),

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whereas the third appears as “last,” dipping less or even flat over the earlier dipping beds (Vai, 1995, p. 19). Let me reiterate this correlation of geology to painting with a few, lesser known examples from Mantegna and Palmezzano, both of whom have recently been the subject of centennial celebration and important exhibitions of their works. Andrea Mantegna’s paintings often display prominent geological features, not only as distant and faint components of the landscape, but also as relevant elements of geometrical perspective and of the artist’s message in the front and intermediate planes of the paintings (Vai, 1986, 2003c). It is noteworthy that this was done by Mantegna in northern Italy coeval with or even slightly earlier than Leonardo, though Mantegna, staying in Florence in 1466 and being in Rome from 1488 to 1490, could have benefited from the influence of Tuscan-Umbrian humanism. Born near Vicenza and active in Padua, Verona, and Mantua, in or close to the Venetian region, Mantegna was certainly familiar with the many quarries of Rosso Ammonitico and other limestone/marble types of rocks exploited in the Venetian region, and he became acquainted with mining exploitation techniques in relation to different types of bedding, jointing and fracturing of strata, and other geological structures, which he represented in many of his works. The Rosso Ammonitico Formation is a well-known red-to-yellow nodular marine limestone, Jurassic in age, first sketched in a stratigraphic column by Luigi Ferdinando Marsili in the earliest 1700s and later recognized in the entire Tethyan area from Caribbean through the Alpine-Mediterranean region to the Himalaya. One of Mantegna’s masterworks deserves special attention because its interest in geology is revealed even by the title, the Madonna delle cave (Madonna of the Quarries), exhibited at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (Fig. 9). The Holy Virgin and Child are intimately related to a complex and imposing rocky outcrop that occupies most of the painting except for the far landscape in the upper left. The articulated outline of the outcrop represents a peculiar type of natural “throne,” the texture of which—upper, vibrant, fractured, angular, and oblique to spiral—sharply contrasts with the peaceful, meditative, and solemn albeit natural attitude and expression of the two figures (see their two right legs). A flat-lying bedding surface, perfectly planar and covered by small scattered pebbles, supports the feet of the sitting Virgin. The related underlying stratum (bottom left) is finely laminated. The same flat-lying bedding continues and becomes fainter in the reddish, altered, and smoothed cliff in the middle-left. At the base of the cliff, the bedding, although masked by some vegetation, is still suggested by the shepherd and sheep trails. At the other side of the Virgin (center-right), the flat-lying strata and bedding are more prominent in the quarry area, where the rocks present the fresh lighter color after recent quarrying (presumably light-pink– yellowish to gray limestone). Two miners are finishing a large prismatic rectangular building or paving plate. Another group of miners is shaping cylindrical columns and drums (Fig. 10). Quite abruptly, at the level of the Virgin’s breast, the rocky outcrop narrows on both sides, loses its regular flat-lying bedding, and takes

Figure 8. Detail from Piero della Francesca’s Brera Altarpiece (around 1472). Courtesy of Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

an irregular pervasive texture as if the rock had been shocked by an earthquake or animated by some internal force (Fig. 11). The upwardly changing texture of the outcrop can be explained in terms of the spaced jointing of a less competent marly or muddy massive layer (the upper part) following the bedded limestone beneath. This is consistent with the outcrop narrowing upward because of the lesser resistance of the mudstone to erosional and weathering processes. The selective rheologic response to regional open folding of multilayered successions of strata is quite common in the outer Southern Alps (Venetian region) and the outer Northern Apennines (Marche region), for example, in the Eocene Scaglia Cinerea Formation. Mantegna represented this upward transition from flatly bedded to obliquely fractured rock in other paintings too. Whether he was aware of this natural geological process or was simply surprised by the apparent evidence of “living” rocks is hard to say. Perhaps he simply recorded the basic distinction between flat-bedded and vertical-bedded rocks with no clear and conscious awareness of the differences between primary bedding, secondary jointing and fracturing of the same flat strata, and vertical displacement of previous flat-lying strata. Anyway, Mantegna might have used this graphic tool (flat to oblique and vertical transition) to converge back to the represented Divine Maternity and Christ Incarnation (upper level) of the different human and natural histories carefully illustrated in the lower level. Through the body of the Virgin, the Child brings humankind, symbolized by the flat-

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Figure 9. Mantegna’s Madonna of the Quarries (1488–1490). Courtesy of Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Antonio Natali (photo by P. Ferrieri and G.B. Vai).

lying “dead” strata, to eternal life, symbolized by the revitalized expanding fractured rock (as in this painting) or vertical rocks (as in the Louvre Mantegna’s Crucifixion). In addition to the Madonna of the Quarries (ca. 1490), there is at least one other painting, Christ on the Sarcophagus and Two Angels (at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen), where Mantegna provides rich and detailed representation of quarrying and mining works, also in the center-right intermediate plane of the painting. This anticipates the first drawings of mining operations published in Georgius Agricola’s De Re Metallica (1556) (Morello, 2006a) by six decades, and is an additional reason for Mantegna’s eulogy in Leonardi’s Speculum lapidum (1502) (Mottana, 2006). Internally consistent superposition and broadly flat-lying bundles of strata varying in color and thickness are shown in many other famous paintings by Mantegna, for example, the original three basal wood plates of the San Zeno altarpiece in Verona (Crucifixion, Agony in the Garden, Resurrection at the Louvre

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Figure 10. Detail of Figure 9. Courtesy of Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Antonio Natali (photo by P. Ferrieri and G.B. Vai).

in Paris and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tours, respectively), St. Sebastian at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Ascension and Adoration of the Magi at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Agony in the Garden at the National Gallery in London, and Adoration of the Shepherds at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts in New York. A prominent, rough, and often thick-bedded rocky landscape (similar to those of Perugino, Botticelli, and Giovanni Bellini) illustrated with classic arched ancient Roman architecture (as in Mantegna) was used by Marco Palmezzano in many of his paintings to set a rigorous geometrical perspective frame. Just as in Leonardo’s works (Rosenberg, 2001), Palmezzano’s paintings show that the bedding of strata of the outcrops depicted in the front, medium, and rear planes is consistent with both a common regional dip and with the geometrical perspective of the painting, and thus that the artist had a clear perception of the 3-D setting of the strata.

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The Adoration of the Shepherds (1526, oil on wood, 191 × 126 cm), usually kept in the archives of the Brera Gallery in Milan and temporarily available to visitors at the Palmezzano Exhibit in Forlì in 2005–2006 (Fig. 12), is of considerable geological interest. In fact, between the rocky cliffs in the far and middle distance at the left of the broken antique arch and the Christmas crib in the front, a pale, angular, and rocky ridge crosses the entire picture. The ridge is large enough to allow for a detailed finebedded structure to be easily observed from a short distance at both ends and less clearly midway behind the Holy Virgin (Fig. 13). The bedding of the ridge is perfectly even and partly folded and faulted similar to that which is commonly seen in what is today known as the Miocene Marnoso-Arenacea Formation, crossing the valleys in the Romagna Apennines (Fig. 7). In this case, the painter showed not only his skill in geometrical perspective and his representation of the regional setting of bedded strata, but also his interest in representing rocky features that he had evidently considered in the field and tried to understand, following Leonardo’s example. An additional example of understanding the 3-D setting of regional geological strata and their use for providing geometrical perspective in landscape paintings is provided by Bartolomeo Montagna (1449–1523), who was not casually active in Vicenza and the Venetian region. In his Saint Jerome at the Brera Gallery in Milan, very gentle strata dipping to the left are consistently traced from the frontal rocky “throne” of the sitting saint to the intermediate cliffs behind him to the vertical rocky walls in the distance, and are finely underlined by the staircase that was apparently easily excavated along the bedding planes in the steep rocky walls (center-right) (Fig. 14). Not long afterward, and still in Italy, geology and art, especially painting, again merged in the work of a paleontologist and painter—Agostino Scilla—who published a well-illustrated book on the organic origin of fossils just one year after the publication of Steno’s masterpiece: his Prodromus. Scilla (1629–1700) studied fossils and the sediments in which they were embedded using the same approach as Steno and made a step forward by recognizing the tectonic deformation often suffered by shells subsequent to their sedimentation. It should be noted that Steno applied true geometrical perspective with a vanishing point in a plate of Elementorum Myologiae Specimen 1667 (Kardel, 2002), even if nothing similar appeared in his Prodromus. It is worthwhile mentioning, however, that this was only a summary of Steno’s original research, which he intended to follow with a complete work, but which never appeared. However, solid geometry is masterfully used in the part of the plate attached to the Prodromus where crystal morphology and growth are represented (see Ellenberger, 1988, p. 276–289). In a letter to Grand Duke Cosimo III in 1671, Steno showed the internal shape of a north Italian grotto by longitudinal and cross sections (Yamada, 2003, p. 91).

Figure 11. (A–B) Detail of Figure 9. Courtesy of Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Antonio Natali (photo by P. Ferrieri and G.B. Vai).

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Figure 12. Palmezzano’s Adoration of the Shepherds (1520). Courtesy of Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Luisa Arrigoni (photo by P. Ferrieri and G.B. Vai).

Steno’s description and interpretation of the six successive past tectono-facies of Tuscany require that he had a clear idea of the 3-D structure of subsurface strata in the region. In this sense, Steno may have influenced even the visual language of Leibniz and moreover the German mining school (Yamada, 2003, p. 90–94; Hamm, 1997). In sum, Steno was methodologically skilled, intellectually curious, and thematically open to the stimuli of the geological landscape and geological culture of Italy in order to unwittingly rediscover, more than one and a half centuries after Leonardo, the principles of geology and to solve the problem of the origin of all kinds of fossilia in 1669. Winning this challenge was a worthy shift from anatomy to geology. It should also be clear that without his Italian experiences and related researches, plus his exposure to Italian art, Steno’s conversion to geology would almost certainly not have occurred. On the other hand, Steno’s turn to geology did not require abandoning anatomy; soon after, he would become an anatomist in

Copenhagen. Instead, it was an opening for other research without closing the first field. FROM LUTHERAN REFORMED TO ROMAN CATHOLIC CONFESSION Steno’s father, the goldsmith Sten Pedersen, came from a family of Lutheran priests. Steno’s upbringing was orthodox Lutheran. During his years in the Netherlands, his three best friends were Jan Swammerdam 1637–1680), Regnier de Graaf (1641–1673), and Theodor Kerchring (1640–1693). The two latter were Roman Catholics, so they may have played a role in his later conversion. The most appropriate and essential motto to describe Steno’s second conversion could well be “from science to God.” In this respect, Steno was an exception to the usual “movement.” Most of the physico-theologian diluvianists in fact moved in the opposite direction, deriving their science from the sacred

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Figure 13. (A–B) Details of Figure 12.

writings. However, moving to Italy for Steno played the role of a trigger and a basic cause also for his second and major conversion. It is important to stress that it was a conversion from Lutheran orthodoxy to the Roman Catholic Church, and not from a kind of deism, as has been recently proposed. There are some early preparations to Steno’s conversion. Before reaching Italy, Steno discussed Catholic faith with a lady in Paris, who for theological issues, referred him to a Jesuit in Cologne (August Ziggelaar, 2007, personal commun.). The conversion was made possible mainly by some favorable factors, some of which were remote or operating before Steno’s Italian experience, while others were closer and triggered the conversion once Steno was in Italy. Most of them were stated by Steno himself in two letters explaining his conversion to his German Lutheran friends Johannes Sylvius, Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz, and in a theological work he wrote in reply to a dissertation by Johann Wilhelm Bayer (Scherz, 1952, 1958, 1971a, 1971b, 1987–1988; Naldini, 1986). Among the remote factors were: 1. Steno’s skill in making detailed anatomical observations down to the core of natural objects and processes to look for scientific truth free of ideological, philosophical, and religious prejudices and other kinds of nonscientific prejudgments. Thus, when observing, examining, and evaluating the religious beliefs and practices of his Italian colleagues, friends, and the general population, he adopted the same methodology as that manifested in his experimental dissections and stratigraphic field observations, with the same aim of reaching the truth and making new discoveries: a typically Galilean attitude. 2. This experimental, inductive, nondogmatic, scientific attitude led Steno to a critical analysis of Descartes’ philoso-

phy. The four basic rules of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode (1637) were (1) to take nothing as true unless recognized clearly as such (methodical doubt); (2) solve problems by analyzing them part by part; (3) proceed from the simple to the more complex; and (4) review every thing to avoid omitting something. The criticism referred to inconsistencies between the method that Descartes had formulated and his actual implementation of it. This convinced the formerly enthusiastic young Steno to detach himself from the French philosopher. His sharp criticism of Cartesian philosophy was contained in his Defensio written in reply to Bayer’s Dissertatio (Larsen and Scherz, 1941/1947, v. I, p. 380–437; Naldini, 1986, p. 24– 82; Vai, 2003b). Steno praised the method but criticized the Cartesian presumption. [The method] is appreciated when it aims at discovering biases, but not when it imposes to presume everything to be false. I consider that method at the first place among the reasons why I detached from the ancient bias: it deserves from me praise instead of blame in this respect. However, I believe this same philosophy presumes as certain those things not yet established through reasoning. (Steno, Hannover, 1680; Naldini, 1986, p. 33)

In these passages, Steno demonstrated that he had reached methodological independence, essential balance, and ontological equality among experimental science, philosophy, and religion, which he considered to be perfectly integrated in an individual, thinking human being, but having autonomous and different scales of value. If his mind was open to a changing paradigm in response to outer suggestions, it must be said that the Italian cultural and religious condition he found in Tuscany was just what Steno was looking for.

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Figure 14. Montagna’s Saint Jerome. Courtesy of Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Luisa Arrigoni (photo by P. Ferrieri and G.B. Vai).

Steno’s Defensio contains a sharp detachment also from Spinoza and Spinozists. Steno had earlier been a friend of Spinoza (Naldini, 1986, p. 34; Ascani et al., 2002; Totaro, 2002; Yamada, 2003, p. 82–85; Sobiech, 2004, p. 51–68). The Spinozists are considered by Steno to have de-formed rather than reformed Cartesianism. Although in his Prodromus Steno had followed a historical method to understand geology, and he concluded that “Nature does not contradict what Scriptures determines,” he could not accept Spinoza’s statement that “the [historical] method of interpreting Scripture…entirely accords with the method of interpreting nature” (see Yamada, 2003, p. 84). This would have reduced religion to the field of science, leaving

no room for faith and transcendence, both of which were gaining even more importance to him. An earlier letter by Steno to his colleague and friend Leibniz (1646–1716) (Fig. 15) written in 1677 is very useful to help understand the reasons for his conversion to Catholicism (Scherz, 1952, v. I, 143, p. 366–369; Naldini, 1986, p. 20–23). Again, Descartes’ philosophy, once “held in greatest esteem” by the young Steno, was by then at the core of his refusal of the Cartesian system (Kardel, 1994; Vai, 2003b; Sobiech, 2004; Rosenberg, 2006). Steno was grateful to God “for having saved him from all the sophistry of harmful philosophers, and from all the quibbling shrewdness of certain persons who like this type of

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A

B

Figure 15. (A–B) Plate XII from Leibniz’s Protogaea. (A) A mammoth tooth labeled as “Dens animaly marini Tidae prope Stederburgum e colle limoso effossi” (tooth of a marine animal excavated from a loamy hill near Stederburg). Worthy of note is the similarity with a drawing from Aldrovandi’s Tavole Acquarellate, Volume 1 (about 1590s). (B) A mammoth tooth labeled as “Dens beluae marinae ex terra visceribus in Russiae et Prussiae partibus effodi solitus ad lapideam substantiam conversus” (tooth of a marine wild beast which is usually excavated from the interior of the Earth in Russia and Prussia after having been converted into lapideous matter) (Vai and Cavazza, 2006). Courtesy of Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, Biancastella Antonino (photo by G.B. Vai).

philosophy” (Naldini, 1986, p. 20). He thanked God for saving those who “inclined to the same path from the human presumption, could be dragged along the ravine of this philosophy” (Steno to Leibniz, 1677; Naldini, 1986, p. 20). He also wrote about his disillusionment with philosophy over empirical observation Comparing the heart with muscle structure, for which I followed the system of the infallible Mr Des Cartes, each muscle I dissected at the first cut showed me the muscle structure, what turned over Des Cartes’ entire system. (Steno to Leibniz, 1677; Naldini, 1986, p. 22) 1. If these gentlemen, revered by almost all savants, have considered as infallible demonstrations what I could let be done by a ten-year-old boy in only one hour in such a way that the direct experience alone overthrows the most ingenious systems of such great minds, what reliability can the other quibbles they boast about have? I say: if they were mistaken about material things that fall under our senses, what guarantee are they providing to me not to be equally wrong when treating about God and the soul? (Steno to Leibniz, 1677; Naldini, 1986, p. 22)

2. …Although I did not abandon the entire doctrine which contains points of truth, I felt myself to be losing little by little the excessive esteem I had for them, and I began to know more and more the weakness of the human spirit and the ruins to which presumption is leading…So sir [this is ] how God, by pushing me to refrain from the philosophic presumption as an outcome of my anatomic discoveries, enabled me to gradually accept a love for Christian humility, which is indeed the worthiest love available to a reasoning soul. (Steno to Leibniz, 1677; Naldini, 1986, p. 22–23)

It should be noted here that Steno’s scientific experiments on anatomy and geology apparently led his critical mind to abandon the Cartesian theoretical system that had fascinated him earlier, along with most of Europe’s young scientists. It should also be noted that the Cartesian philosophy, through its methodical doubt and the dualism of mind and body (cogito, ergo sum), acted as a major source and streamlined much of modern thinking, denying

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metaphysics and God, and leading to the primacy of science over philosophy and religion. On Steno’s criticism of Cartesianism, see Gohau (1990, p. 137–140), Meschini (1998, p. 9), Yamada (2003, p. 82), Morello (2003b, p. 251–253), and Rosenberg (2006, p. 795–796). The letter to Leibniz provides information about additional reasons for Steno’s conversion. Relevant questions Steno posed to himself were: Is it by chance that God let me discover such false statements in those great philosophers just when I credited them with highest esteem, or is it due to God’s goodness? Is every religion good or the Roman Catholic one only? Is religion a human law established to witness to the Creator the duties toward Him, or is the religion a prescription by God itself so that there can be only one, necessarily uninterrupted, from the beginning of the world till its end, unique as it is that which worship Jesus Christ and represents an uninterrupted society, established since the promises of His arrival? (Steno to Leibniz, 1677; Naldini, 1986, p. 22–23)

It would seem that Steno’s faith was great even before his conversion (Sobiech, 2004), which was then a natural outcome. It is impossible that He who gave me the power to think does not see all my thoughts…Finally, God did so much that I found myself in the Church’s arms in a way that I did not understand until I came in. (Steno to Leibniz, 1677; Naldini, 1986, p. 23)

Now we may consider the factors more directly influencing Steno’s conversion. The influence exerted on Steno by his acquaintance with the circle of Galilei’s disciples, the renowned Florentine Accademia del Cimento (Galluzzi, 1986, p. 114). It was the second scientific society founded in 1657, a half a century after the Accademia dei Lincei was established in Rome in 1603. It anticipated in time and inspired the aims and scope of the Royal Society in London and the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Steno was expected to interact with the scientists of the Tuscan Grand Duchy and therefore was immediately admitted to the circle and the Accademia. The Accademia del Cimento was active in Florence from 1657 to 1666–1667. Prominent members were Evangelista Torricelli, Vincenzo Viviani, Carlo Dati, Orazio Rucellai, Lorenzo Magalotti (the Secretary), Francesco Redi, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Carlo Fracassati, Lorenzo Bellini, Claude Aubery, Carlo Rinaldini, Alessandro Marsili, Donato Rossetti, Alessandro Marchetti (Fig. 16). Most of these learned scientists were as firm Roman Catholic believers as their beloved maestro Galileo Galilei. This is why the cultural movement they represented has been called Galileian Catholicism (Raimondi, 1978). Galileo’s life itself was inspiring to Steno. In spite of the trial and retraction, Galileo did not lose his faith and did not withdraw from the Roman Catholic confession. In this, he was aided by his beloved daughter Virginia and sister Maria Celeste in a Florentine monastery.

Figure 16. Session of members at the Accademia del Cimento (after Serie di Ritratti di Uomini Illustri, v. 4, Firenze, 1773, no. 124).

Steno immediately felt himself well within this circle of Galilei’s disciples, first from a scientific and methodologic point of view and second for its human and friendly relations (except for some disagreements notably with Antonio Magliabechi [1633–1714]). Even with the anatomist and mathematician Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1673), a potential competitor on myology (but no longer present in Florence) (Galluzzi, 1986, p. 114–116, 127, 144), agreement and integration were excellent. In fact, Borelli (1670) described the 1669 catastrophic eruption of the Etna volcano in terms of Stenonian geology, extruding basaltic lava flows down to the Catania coast of Sicily (Morello, 2003b, p. 254). The Florentine literati Carlo Roberto Dati (1619–1676) provided Steno with Mercati’s manuscript Metallotheca Vaticana representing shark’s head and teeth (Morello, 1979, p. 39). Steno established a close friendship with the biologist Redi (1626–1697), the mathematician Viviani (1622–1703), and the humanist and scientist Magalotti (1637–1712) (Naldini, 1986). The Roman Catholic leaning of these scientists and learned savants was serious, not opportunistic, as has sometimes been suggested (Cavazza, 1990). They were really convinced of their

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religious confession. Their position was not instrumental toward any material benefits. They found no contradiction between the sciences under investigation and the faith they professed, nor did they feel limited in their search for truth under the aegis of the new Galileian science. Galileian Catholicism was an open-minded and balanced approach to develop the new science independently from, but not in conflict with, religion, and it had developed around Galilei’s pupils beginning with the Gesuater mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri (1598–1647), professor at the University of Bologna (Battistini, 2003, p. 35). Galileian Catholicism may be simply explained by the following statements: (1) the Bible should be followed for its moral and religious teaching, not for the astronomical implications; (2) there is compatibility of science with the Christian doctrine and religion if distinction of fields is observed. In spite of and as a redeeming reaction to regrettable events such as Giordano Bruno’s burning in 1600 and Galilei’s house arrest in 1635, Galileian Catholicism spread over most of Italy during the second half of the seventeenth century, and from the 1670s it evolved into the cultural movement called Aemilian Erudition (Raimondi, 1978). Basically, it was opposed to the antireligious quarrels of some cultural circles and favored the free development of science, also for educational and social purposes, supported by the Catholic CounterReformation. Aemilian Erudition was propagated by savants such as Marcello Malpighi, Geminiano Montanari (1633–1687), the brothers Anton Felice Marsili (1653–1710) and Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (1658–1730)—all friends of Francesco Redi—Benedetto Bacchini (1651–1721), Jean Mabillon (1632–1707), Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), and its influence extended up to Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729–1799), Ambrogio Soldani (1736– 1808), and Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) (Figs. 17 and 18), all of whom had a common imprint: the advancement of sciences and the Roman Catholic confession (building a sort of Catholic wing of the Enlightenment). Some of them were also monks or clerics. Malpighi, physician and anatomist, a fellow of the Royal Society since 1669, was called to Rome by Pope Innocent XII as his archiatrics (Pope’s head physician) in 1691. The same year, he purchased a grave for his family in the church of Saint Gregorius in Bologna and requested to be buried there as witness to his faith (Fig. 3). Montanari, mathematician, astronomer, and expert on hydraulics, wrote in 1676: From a young age I had rejected Judicial Astrology, Medicine and Theology, the former two because I could not believe, the latter because I wanted to believe it. My studies for some time in Germany made me see controversies about Faith, and I learned to believe even more firmly in the Roman Catholic confession. (Montanari, 1679)

Like Montanari, Antonio Felice Marsili, the elder brother of Luigi Ferdinando and a clergyman, claimed there was a distinction between faith and science. Autonomy had to be complete in each field to avoid any risk that could arise only from mutual intrusions. Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, fellow of the Royal Society

Figure 17. Luigi Galvani’s portrait with the frog experiment. Courtesy of Archivio Storico Università di Bologna, Daniela Negrini (photo by E. Mattei and P.P. Zannoni).

since 1691, gave to his Istituto delle Scienze e delle Arti a statute in 1711, updating the guidelines established by Aldrovandi, Galilei, Francis Bacon, and the Royal Society. The first chapter of the statute deals with the Sacred Cult to be observed in the Istituto and reads (Vai, 2003b, p. 224, 226): Art. 1. – Professors, and any person training in this Institute must accept as Creator God Optimus and Maximus, and have to implore from Him life existence and advancements, through the Holy Virgin Mary’s intercession, for his major glory. To obtain effective protection for this Enterprise in all tools and writings one must number time from the Incarnation, although as for astronomic observations one follows the usage and style of the present age. Art. 2. – St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Carlo Borromeo, and our St. Caterina de Vigri are to be recognized and venerated as protectors; in the home Chapel, to be erected in the Institute, professors and students must celebrate a Mass for the Holy Annunciation as thanksgiving for the goods obtained from the Institute and for her countless mercy, especially donated to General L.F. Marsili in that day…1 1 Marsili was freed from the Turks on 25 March, the Annunciation, after two years of prison in Istanbul. See Vai (2003a, p. 103–105).

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Figure 18. Galvani’s grave. Courtesy of Chiesa della Santa, Bologna, Biancastella Antonino (photo by P. Ferrieri and G.B. Vai).

Later, in 1728, Marsili himself rejected a diluvianist approach to geology and the fossil question as was usually professed by most fellows of the Istituto, including Johann Jacob Scheuchzer: The idea that the ordered setting of many marine bodies found in the mountains of Italy, Germany, and France are a result of the effects of the deluge is groundless, based on the many observations I have made on the living marine organisms. (Marsili Ms. 90, A, 21, c. 148v, in Vai, 2006)

Nevertheless, Marsili did not change his mind about his Roman Catholic confession. Galvani and his bride are buried in the church of St. Caterina de Vigri mentioned previously as a protector of the Istituto. A single chapel is wholly dedicated to the discoverer of electricity in animal tissue and of electrophysiology (1773). Opposing the violence and religious intolerance of the French Revolution, he refused to swear allegiance to the Cisalpine Republic established by Napoleon in

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northern Italy in 1796. Therefore, he was dropped from rolls of the University of Bologna, and two years later he died at age 61. He was a great scientist and victim of the Jacobin abuse of power. Are there special reasons for Galilean Catholicism and Aemilian Erudition having flourished in the two adjoining regions on both sides of the Apennines—Tuscany and Aemilia—which happened to become the birthplace of the new science of geology (Vai and Cavazza, 2003; Vai and Caldwell, 2006)? The answer is yes, mainly due to the role played by the University of Bologna on one side and the grand duchy of Tuscany on the other. The liberal, tolerant, balanced approach followed by Galilean Catholicism and Aemilian Erudition in the advancement of sciences had in fact largely been predated by the works and actions undertaken by a brain trust strongly influenced by Aldrovandi during the late Renaissance in Bologna, when the city was the second capital and the largest city of the Church States. Beyond Aldrovandi, the group consisted of Pope Gregory XIII (1502–1585), Christopher Clavius (1538–1612), Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597), artists of the Carraccis’ school, and scientist members of the Jesuit schools of Collegio Romano and Collegio Santa Lucia who gathered in Rome and Bologna in the second half of the sixteenth century. All of these people strove for an integration of science, arts, philosophy, and religion (Battistini, 2000, 2003; Vai, 2003b). Some have claimed that Clavius’ work and Dürer’s method influenced Steno’s geometrical treatment of mineral crystals in the Prodromus (Schneer, 1971, p. 296; Yamada, 2003, p. 81). Aldrovandi, one of the founders of modern science and its method, which greatly influenced Galileo Galilei and Francis Bacon (Vai, 2003a, p. 87; Vai and Cavazza, 2006, p. 55–57), had been groundlessly accused of heresy. He asked for a trial and demonstrated his innocence. As an advisor for science and education of Cardinal Paleotti—one of the masterminds of the Counter-Reformation—he joined the session of the Council of Trent in 1562. Paleotti and Aldrovandi shared the same views on naturalistic and religious education and inspired the painting revolution of Carraccis and Guido Reni, which adopted a naturalistic approach along the lines of Aldrovandi’s “theatre of nature” (Fig. 19) and supported the artistic goal of “joining the classical ideal to the heavenly perfection” in the late Renaissance (Emiliani, 1988, 1993) (Fig. 20). Aldrovandi’s “theatre of nature” was his renowned museum. Aldrovandi had established the first natural history museum in Bologna in 1547, from the beginning having clear scientific research, taxonomic, and higher-education objectives. Unlike the courtly Wunderkammer and studiolo, and other private, collections of his time, the Aldrovandi museum was designed as a public institution (Vai, 2003a; Beretta, 2005; Vai and Cavazza, 2006, p. 51). In the same year, 1562, Cardinal Legato Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584), a future saint and founder of the Roman Catholic seminaries with Pope Gregory XIII, was instructed by Aldrovandi to reform the University of Bologna by calling teachers from foreign cities and countries—such as Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576)—and providing it with a new building—the

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Figure 19. Detailed view from Aldrovandi’s restored museum. Courtesy of Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Bologna, Fulvio Simoni (photo by D. Lelli).

Archiginnasio Palace, which opened a year later. Pope Gregory XIII, the Bolognese Ugo Boncompagni, leader of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation, author of the Canonical Code, promulgator of the Gregorian calendar that reformed the Julian calendar (1582), was Aldrovandi’s cousin. Additionally and remarkably, both Aldrovandi and his older German friend Georgius Agricola (1494–1555) were impervious to the powerful Lutheran Reformation and remained faithful to the Roman Catholic Church. Aldrovandi named the pro tempore Archbishop of Bologna as his testamentary executor. He also asked for the Pope’s support for his museum. An example of firm religious belief common to many late Renaissance scientists is found in a letter that a famous botanist Luca Ghini (ca. 1490–1556), professor at the Universities of Bologna, Padua, and Pisa, sent to his pupil Aldrovandi in 1554: “because we don’t know what we ask for, I have always thought God is governing me and I believe that what happens must be his will for the best” (De Toni, 1905; Vai, 2003a, p. 85). So, as described already, Aldrovandi and his friends had created a scientific-cultural-religious network extending from Bologna to Florence (see above for his relations to the Tuscan Grand Dukes) to Padua, Pisa, Milan, Rome, and southern Italy, which

set the ground for the subsequent growth of Galilean Catholicism. I have called this movement Aldrovandian Catholicism (Vai, 2003b, p. 228; Vai, 2006, p. 60). Aldrovandi’s scientific and cultural approach was not driven by opportunism, having predated Bruno and Galileo by decades. It may have influenced the opportunistic metaphysical neutrality (Cavazza, 1990) later adopted by Bacon and the Royal Society in the more dogmatic Anglican realm, as shown by the longlasting impact of the physico-theologic theories of Earth (Vai, 2003b). Conversely, Aldrovandi, questioning the effects of the Universal Deluge as to the distribution of fossils, stimulated a “soft liberal” diluvianism (visibly represented by Steno and the Bologna Istituto delle Scienze) or even an anti-diluvianism (dominating the Tuscan and Venetian geological schools) that was practiced in Roman Catholic Italy (Vai, 2003b). Also, in the Anglican “frame,” there were anti-diluvianistic voices such as Robert Hooke (1635–1703), but only a few and much later than in Catholic Italy. In a broader perspective, the central authorities of the Roman Catholic Church might perhaps have intentionally planned to support the advancement of science as a tool of both control and even education rather than to fight against it. Hard conflict

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Holy Writ until the early nineteenth century. Instead, rather than pure defense from or compromise with religion, Italian geologists enjoyed distinction, independence, and mutual respect of the fields of science and religion. To the rationalist and open-minded Steno, the merging of science and faith in the learned Italians both inside and outside the Accademia del Cimento was an inspiring surprise he could not ignore. In a letter about his conversion to the Calvinist preacher Johannes Sylvius written on 12 January 1672 (Scherz, 1952, v. I, 73, p. 257–260; Naldini, 1986, p. 15–19), Steno said: I was impressed by the life-style of some Roman Catholic friends; a similar style is not assured by philosophers nor was I able to observe for friends of other religions, although I was already convinced that the truth of a doctrine does not depend on the ignorance and the badness of its believers. (Steno to Sylvius, 1676; Naldini, 1986, p. 16)

Figure 20. Guido Reni’s Arianna (1638–1640) sitting on a vertical bedded rocky cliff. Private collection. Courtesy of Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna.

and repression—up to the stage involving the loss of freedom or even life—were always deplorable and occurred only when heresy accusations were instrumental to, or in direct relation with, religious or political struggles. At least in northern and central Italy, and in the fields of natural sciences and geology, the result was to establish a pragmatic, open, and liberal approach to science. This was in contrast to the dogmatic approach of the British Anglican Church, which imposed a rigid diluvianism. The Baconian metaphysical neutrality was conceptually different from the Aldrovandian-Galilean Catholicism and represented an euphemism for many British scientists. Unlike the Italian geologists, who were earlier free to develop a school independent from prejudgments related to the Noachian Deluge, the majority of British scientists had to conform to the

The example of a life of holiness provided to Steno by his Roman Catholic friends and by Lady Lavinia Arnolfini (Naldini, 1986) soon prepared him to change his paradigms in science and culture in the continuous pursuit of consistency that always characterized Steno. Strictly connected to this, the greater consistency of religious life of Roman Catholics compared with that of Lutherans played a decisive role in Steno’s conversion. A triggering event was the Corpus Domini procession in Leghorn in 1666, where the rationalistic Lutheran scientist was touched by the spontaneous expression of popular religiosity by the city community. In the same letter to Sylvius, Steno listed three basic theological reasons for his conversion: (1) the apostolic origin of the Roman Catholic Church; (2) its previous long-standing existence, and its teaching and sacramental authority rooted in the apostles, fathers, and martyrs; and (3) the demonstration of its holiness. These reasons, however, are not discussed in terms of a scholastic approach but following the same historical and experimentalinductive method that Steno had used in his previous anatomical and recent geological works. Additionally, the open-minded liberal or less dogmatic approach to natural sciences and the question on the origin of fossils by the learned Catholic Italians compared to the Lutheran or other Reformed Europeans was fundamental to Steno’s critical evaluation and decision to change his confession (see previous discussion). One sometimes comes across statements in the historical literature saying that, while the Renaissance was a Catholic achievement, the Scientific Revolution was a Protestant one. Such a statement is badly simplistic or even ideological. Surely, humanism and the Renaissance originated in Catholic Italy, but Reformed savants did emerge. Similarly, although the Enlightenment was strongly supported by the Protestants’ more individualistic approach, Catholic savants contributed very significantly to the origin and development of the Scientific Revolution, and even the Roman Catholic Church supported this evolution as a consequence of the Counter-Reformation and the establishment of Jesuit schools and their research labora-

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Figure 22. Marble inscription placed in the Basilica di San Lorenzo as a tribute to Steno by the 32nd International Geological Congress in Florence, 2004 (photo by E. Abbate).

Figure 21. Steno’s portrait as a bishop. Private collection. Courtesy of Basilica di San Lorenzo, Florence, Father Angelo Livi.

tories (e.g., Battistini, 2000). Furthermore, the evidence related to geology and the earth sciences contained in this paper and other works (Vai and Cavazza, 2003; Vai and Caldwell, 2006) supports and favors a more nuanced view. The only safe generalization one can make, based on factual evidence, is that humanism, the Renaissance, and the Scientific Revolution were all connected intimately and developed within European or Western Christian culture. CONCLUSION Steno’s two conversions appear to have been not only contemporaneous but also intimately connected. The major scientific shift from anatomy to geology occurred as a reaction to a new, intellectually stimulating, naturally exposed, and artistically rep-

resented geological environment. Thus, new truths and a “new world” became available to Steno. Steno’s religious conversion was based on a rational and experiential process starting from scientific discoveries shedding doubts on apparently reasonable philosophical statements elaborated in a mind largely free from external constraints and inclined to a religious sensibility. The initial conditions were those of a perfect balance and autonomy among science, philosophy, and religion representing different approaches to knowledge and life. After his conversion, however, Steno decided spontaneously to devote his remaining time life to religion, after having spent a large part of it devoted to science and philosophy. The “paradox” of this is deceptive. He did not mean to impair the balance nor to depreciate either science or philosophy. Otherwise, he would not have stressed the basic role of his scientific discoveries in rejecting Descartes’ statements and in hearing and responding to the voice of God. He simply claimed the priority of what he saw as total religious Truth over the partial truths of science and philosophy. He only claimed his right to follow God’s Love once his science and research method had allowed him to comprehend God’s voice (Fig. 21). On the other hand, his confidence in his research method was increased by his geological discoveries. So, the two conversions cross-fertilized each other. Thus, Steno remained a champion of the free rational advancement of science ending with finding God. He was ready for, and reacted rapidly to, the influence of the natural, geological, cultural, and religious environment found in Italy. In this sense, Steno’s life was an anticipated claim and a warning for a sustainable Enlightenment, which was heralded by minority circles such as the Aemilian Erudition in Italy, and it also anticipated opposition to the feared decay of the Enlightenment from the darkness of rationalism, nihilism, and relativism. Steno’s two conversions provide additional evidence of an open and liberal attitude toward science that was at the time more lively in the Catholic domains than in the Reformed confession.

The Scientific Revolution and Nicholas Steno’s twofold conversion We called for a tribute to the Blessed Nicholas Steno— one of the founders of modern geology—celebrated in the San Lorenzo Basilica in Florence, where his body lies buried, during the 32nd International Geological Congress in Florence, 2004, with the aim of emphasizing a remarkable case of harmony between science and religion, made possible by mutual respect of their autonomy and freedom (Capellini, 1870; Angeli, 1996; Anonymous, 2005) (Fig. 22). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to Dr. Biancastella Antonino, Director of the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna (BUB), for providing access to ancient manuscripts and books stored in the library and granting permission to publish original reproductions from them. Reviewers such as David Oldroyd, Toshihiro Yamada, Troels Kardel, Hugh Torrens, August Ziggelaar, and the editor have greatly improved the text. All of them are warmly acknowledged. I thank the History of Geology Division and the International Division, Geological Society of America (GSA), for travel funds facilitating my presentation of this paper at GSA’s 2006 annual meeting in Philadelphia. REFERENCES CITED Angeli, R., 1996, Niels Stensen: Il beato Niccolò Stenone, uno scienziato innamorato del Vangelo e dell’Italia (L. Negri, ed., second edition): Milano, San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo, 366 p. Anonymous, 2005, A tribute to Steno: General Proceedings, 32nd International Geological Congress, Florence, Italy, 20–28 August 2004: Florence, Newtours, p. 20–22. Ascani, K., Kermit, H., and Skytte, G., eds., 2002, Niccolò Stenone (1638– 1686): Anatomista, Geologo, Vescovo: Atti del Seminario Organizzato da Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsø e l’Accademia di Danimarca, Lunedì 23 Ottobre 2000: Analecta Romana Instituti Danici, supplementum 31, 83 p. Baratta, M., 1903, Leonardo da Vinci e i Problemi della Terra: Torino, Fratelli Bocca, 318 p. Baratta, M., 1912, Importanza per la geologia e la geografia fisica della pubblicazione dei manoscritti di Leonardo da Vinci: Bollettino Società Geologica Italiana, v. 30, p. 1007–1014. Battistini, A., 2000, Galileo e i gesuiti. Miti letterari e retorica della scienza: Milano, Vita e Pensiero, 419 p. Battistini, A., 2003, Bologna’s four centuries of culture from Aldrovandi to Capellini, in Vai, G.B., and Cavazza, W., eds., Four Centuries of the Word Geology: Ulisse Aldrovandi 1603 in Bologna: Bologna, Minerva Edizioni, p. 13–63. Beretta, M., ed., 2005, From Private to Public: Cambridge, UK, Natural Collections and Museums: Science History Publications, 272 p. Borelli, G.A., 1670, Historia et Meteorologia incendi Aetnaei anni 1669 ac responsio ad censuras Honoratii Fabri contra librum de vi percussionis: Regio Julio, in Officina Dominici Ferri, 162 p. Brocchi, G., 1814, Conchiologia fossile subapennina, con osservazioni geologiche sugli Apennini e sul suolo adiacente: Milano, dalla Stamperia Reale, v. 1, p. 1–56, i–lxxx, 1–240; v. 2, p. 241–712. Brown, D.A., 1998, Leonardo da Vinci: Origins of a Genius: New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 240 p. Capellini, G., 1870, Di Nicola Stenone e dei suoi studi geologici in Italia: Bologna, Gallet & Cocci, 35 p. (new edition 1881, Firenze, Gallet & Cocci, 16 p.). Cavazza, M., 1990, Settecento inquieto. Alle origini dell’Istituto delle Scienze di Bologna: Bologna, Il Mulino, 281 p. Cermenati, M., 1912, Da Plinio a Leonardo, dallo Stenone allo Spallanzani: Bollettino Società Geologica Italiana, v. 30, p. cdli–div. Clark K., 1985, La Sant’Anna, in Leonardo, La Pittura (P.C. Marani, cur.): Firenze, Giunti Martello Editore, p. 106–112.

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Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Benjamin Franklin and geology Dennis R. Dean 834 Washington Street, Evanston, Illinois 60202-4346, USA

ABSTRACT First as a colonial American, and later as a patriot of outstanding importance, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) maintained a now little-known interest in geological questions. He began as a follower of the English theorists Burnet, Woodward, and Whiston but soon assimilated some of their ideas with original observations and speculations. Though long attentive to earthquakes and their possible causes, Franklin learned from interactions with other naturalists to broaden the range of his theorizing. Eventually, his earth science topics included the origin of springs and rivers, the Flood and the Abyss, natural convulsions of great power, strata and their distortions, the age of Earth, the nature of its core, the origin of mountains, the history of life, and the problem of extinction. Through his championing of American phenomena and thought, he not only contributed to the work of European savants but significantly enhanced our national presence and its prestige. Yet, if remembered in the history of American geology at all, Franklin has received far less attention than his accomplishments and influence deserve. Even those who purport to write on him and science too often neglect his theorizing about Earth. Though Franklin is appropriately remembered as a physicist, inventor, diplomat, author, and printer, we have apparently forgotten that, for more than sixty years, he maintained an active interest in the physical geography, dynamics, and history of our planet. America’s longtime intellectual leader in those fields as in others, Franklin was regarded worldwide as a significant geological philosopher. Keywords: Benjamin Franklin, history of geology, England, France, United States. INTRODUCTION Calling what Benjamin Franklin (Fig. 1) did “geology” is evidently a misnomer because there was no such science of that name within his lifetime. The word itself did not securely acquire its present meaning until about the year he died, when such derivative forms of it as “geologist” and “geological” also appeared (Dean, 1979). Their coinage attests that the word “geology” had become part of our language. Franklin, however, never used any of the three terms.

We likewise distort Franklin’s accomplishment by calling him a scientist—another word not yet in use. In his own mind, Ben was a natural philosopher who proposed various theories of the earth, usually involving the whole earth. Such theories were largely closet speculations having little to do with fieldwork as we know it. The theorists themselves, often better read than traveled, could muster only very limited firsthand knowledge—if any—of the phenomena they were attempting to explain. Though Franklin lived substantial parts of his long and wonderfully productive life in France—as well as in what

Dean, D.R., 2009, Benjamin Franklin and geology, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 209–223, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(15). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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Dean What Franklin did see were the books and papers of his contemporaries, their letters to him, the contemporaries themselves, and occasional collections of rocks, minerals, and fossils. His overall understanding of nature reflected the fact that he had effectively disregarded biblical authority even while in his teens and twenties. The formative books he read about religion then and thereafter were deistic. Rejecting the miraculous, their authors did not accept as literal the text of Genesis but instead marshaled evidence on behalf of divine benevolence from the phenomena of God’s creation. While remaining alert to the implications of natural facts, Franklin would never be a citer of scripture. DELUGE AND EARTHQUAKES

Figure 1. Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, with bust of Newton. David Martin (1767), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

became (largely through his own efforts) the United States—his only real geological field trips took place in England. Unlike many later figures, and some in his own time, Franklin never saw or tried to see the volcanoes of Italy or southern France. Without having observed any in Europe himself, he assured correspondents that there were no volcanoes or volcanic products in the New World. He did not recognize columnar basalt on sight. Ben failed to study the Alps firsthand or any other major range, including the Appalachians in America. He never saw a glacier, a high mountain, a great river, or a major waterfall. Even his knowledge of Niagara Falls derived from the descriptions of others. It would be a long time before he came to understand the necessity of doing fieldwork.1 1 Franklin’s writings. All of them cited here are to be found in the variously edited Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 39 volumes to date (of 46): New Haven, Yale University Press and the American Philosophical Society, 1959. The entire contents of the set are available on the Internet and can be searched by date, name, word, and phrase at http://www.yale.edu/franklinpapers/collection. htm. Unedited texts of the last seven volumes are included but lack notes. The earlier Writings of Benjamin Franklin (ed. Albert Henry Smyth, 10 volumes, New York, 1905–1907) is now largely superseded. Most scholarship devoted to Franklin and science—for example, by I. Bernard Cohen (Benjamin Franklin’s Science, 1990; Science and the Founding Fathers, 1995) and Joyce E. Chaplin (The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius, 2006)—disappoints, his interest in earth sciences being scarcely mentioned.

John Ray’s The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691; many later editions) was one such deistic book that we know Franklin to have read. Its author was, of course, a distinguished naturalist and his times’ finest writer on the created world (Raven, 1986). In his several books (1691, 1692, 1693), Ray dealt often with evidence from nature and its applicability to scripture, including the traditional difficulties involved in explaining not only the six days of Creation but also the Flood or Deluge of Noah, the retreat of its waters, and the eventual demise of present-day Earth through a biblically prophesied Conflagration. As his title implies, Ray freely supplemented scriptural authority with original observations regarding the terraqueous planet on which we live.2 Other theorists of Earth in late seventeenth-century England had been or would be doing much the same. The three best known ones were Thomas Burnet (1684–1689), John Woodward (1695), and William Whiston (1696), all of whom also took for granted the reality of the Flood (Dean, 1985; see also Plot, 1677, 1686; Keill, 1698). Frequently reprinted, their works remained current throughout Franklin’s lifetime. Whiston drew freely on both Burnet and Woodward for parts of his own theory, which differed from theirs in taking more account of the expanded cosmos recently discovered by telescope and the gravitation of Newton. Franklin remained well aware of all three theorists and even sold copies of Burnet in his printing shop. Of the three, however, he paid most attention to Whiston, who accounted for the Deluge by postulating the near approach of a comet; its inevitable return would then instigate the Conflagration. Whiston’s knowledge of astronomy impressed Franklin to such an extent that he even featured the theorist’s supposed date for the creation of Earth (as one of five) on the front cover of Poor Richard’s Almanac from 1733 2 John Ray (1627–1708, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [ODNB]). In his Wisdom of God (1691), Ray knowledgeably surveyed the whole of nature to find evidence of divine benevolence throughout God’s creation in the stars, elements, animals, Earth, and man. Robert Boyle was an important predecessor; William Derham, an influential successor. Ray’s Three Physico-Theological Discourses (1693), which Franklin may well have read (fourth edition, 1721), concerned the primitive chaos and creation of the world; the causes and effects of the Flood of Noah (called the Deluge); and the future Conflagration that would destroy the world. Among his subsidiary topics was the nature and causes of earthquakes, a matter of great interest to Franklin (Dean, 1989).

Benjamin Franklin and geology to 1747 (Fig. 2). When the Almanac was redesigned, expanded, and renamed in 1748, this feature disappeared. After reading the first volume of Whiston’s immodest Memoirs, published in 1749, Ben admired their author a good deal less.3 Franklin was living in Philadelphia when the region was tousled by earthquake in 1727; many pamphlets and sermons were published concerning it. In 1732, his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, attributed an otherwise puzzling local gush of reddish water to a tremor. From the first, Franklin regarded earthquakes as natural, not supernatural, phenomena (a position not everyone in his time agreed with). In 1737, he reported in the Gazette for 15 December on a surprising earthquake felt on the 7th. After comparing various accounts of its perceived force, Franklin surmised that it had been felt most strongly somewhere north of Philadelphia. The term “epicenter,” coined by Robert Mallet, would not exist for another 140 years. On 15 and 22 December, he reprinted in the Gazette a long discussion on the “Causes of Earthquakes” from an English encyclopedia article (in Chambers, 1728) that was itself based primarily on a paper by Martin Lister in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1683. Lister believed the inner earth to be honeycombed with cavities. When ignited by spontaneous combustion, inflammable vapors within these cavities would explode, causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, thunder, and lightning. Other British theorists (e.g., Hales, 1750a, 1750b; Stukeley, 1750a, 1750b) attributed some or all of these to permanent subterranean heat or fire. Ben did not then have an earthquake theory of his own.

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Franklin was also influenced by Newton’s Opticks (1704), written—unlike the Principia (1687)—in English, and its influential “Queries.” These were a series of strikingly original, often provocative insights embodied as questions rather than assertions. They were therefore represented as possibilities rather than facts. The “Queries” were often imitated by later philosophers of nature. Erasmus Darwin, for example, following Franklin’s

INFLUENCES AND INFLUENCE Franklin himself often read the Philosophical Transactions, a publication available on both sides of the Atlantic. Some British friends and mentors may have introduced him to the periodical as early as the mid-1720s, when he was a young printer’s apprentice in England. The Philosophical Transactions remained important to Franklin throughout his life, especially after he became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1756. The American Philosophical Society, founded in part by Franklin, was inspired by the Royal Society, its Transactions being imitations of theirs. Both publications stressed the importance of data, as opposed to unfounded speculations or reverence to dead authorities. The presiding deity behind each was neither Moses nor Aristotle but Francis Bacon, who ridiculed traditional knowledge as so much flotsam on the river of intellect. Ben readily agreed.4 3 Further Flood fantasies. Burnet (1635–1715, ODNB), Woodward (1665– 1728, ODNB), and Whiston (1667–1752, ODNB) were Deluge theorists who attempted to explain the near-extermination of mankind and animals through science and theology. Franklin mentions all three, though Whiston most often. He had dealings with the London bookseller John Whiston, who was the theorist’s son. See Poor Richard for 1734, and Poor Richard Improved for 1749, 1750, 1751, and 1757, together with James Logan to Peter Collinson, 28 February 1749 (also in the Franklin Papers). The booklist sent to Franklin by William Strahan in London on 26 August 1762 includes several early geological titles (e.g., Woodward, Keill, and Plot). 4 Bacon. See Poor Richard Improved for 1749 and 1757, together with Chaplin (2006, p. 18, 137, and 370n54).

Figure 2. Whiston’s supposed date for the age of Earth appeared on the cover of every edition of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac from 1733 to 1747.

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lead, often utilized Newton’s convenient rhetorical device in the essay-length notes appended to his wide-ranging scientific poems.5 Like Newton in his Opticks, Franklin too presents his considered opinions as declarative questions, if I may call them that. They are frequent in his personal letters. Many of the contributions to the Philosophical Transactions that Franklin read were also epistolary in form; it was a way of sharing responsibility for the opinions expressed, as those opinions would remain private unless the recipient (rather than the writer) saw fit to promulgate them, which was usually done by sending them to be presented at the meeting of a learned society, like the Royal Society. A famous example of the genre, in which private letters serve as contributions to public knowledge, is Franklin’s only scientific book, Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751), which was compiled by Peter Collinson from Franklin’s letters to him and others. John Fothergill then undertook their editing and publication, seeing them through the press. There would be five English editions between 1751 and 1774, each longer than the last, which meant that Observations became a very influential book. Though Franklin’s major writings on electricity appeared in each, his thinking on other subjects expanded. The third edition of only 154 pages, for example, swelled to 496 pages in the fourth. There would also be translations of the book into French, Italian, German, Latin, and other European languages (but no American edition during Franklin’s lifetime). Few, if any, eighteenth-century colonial authors enjoyed such international success.6 In a letter to John Mitchell on 29 April 1749, Franklin had, like Martin Lister before him, already speculated on the physical cause or causes of thunder and lightning. His missive on that topic was read to the Royal Society over the course of two meetings that November. Though scheduled for publication in the Philosophical Transactions of 1750, it was bumped from consideration by the frightful British earthquakes of that year and did not emerge until added to the first edition of Franklin’s own Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751). After hearing only the oral presentation of it, William Stukeley (1687–1765, ODNB) gratuitously enlarged Franklin’s meteorological explanation of thunder and lightning to include earthquakes. Without waiting for the appearance of Franklin’s paper in print, Stukeley was quick to announce his own extension of Ben’s theory. Unexpectedly, there had been major tremors in England in 1750; when the great Lisbon tragedy of 1 November 1755 followed, the topic of earthquakes and their causes became immensely compelling in the minds of naturalists. Large portions of the Philosophical Transactions for both 1750 and 1755 were

devoted solely to earthquake reportage, including the prompt theorizing of Stukeley and Hales (Dean, 1989). Even so, nothing of permanent value emerged. On 26 March 1750, in the first of five short publications on earthquakes (1750 and 1756), Stukeley observed: We had lately a very pretty discourse read here [in November 1749], from Mr. Franklyn [sic] of Philadelphia concerning thundergusts, [northern] lights, and like meteors. He well solves them by the touch of clouds rais’d from the sea…and of clouds rais’d from exhalations of the land…That little snap which we hear in our electrical experiments, when produc’d by a thousand miles compass of clouds, and that re-echoed from cloud to cloud the extent of the firmament, makes that thunder which affrightens us. (1750a, p. 643)

Given the same conditions, he inferred that “an earthquake must necessarily ensue” (1750a, p. 643). By the time Stukeley came out with what was now The Philosophy of Earthquakes as a short book (1750d, second edition), Franklin’s “very pretty discourse” had been demoted in his mind to nothing more than a “very curious” one. As I. Bernard Cohen (1941) and others have pointed out, Stukeley’s work embodied a fundamental misunderstanding of Franklin’s. Of course, he had never read Franklin’s conjectures in print because they were not yet published. “From the same principle,” Stukeley now proposed, “if a non-electric cloud discharges its contents upon any part of the earth, when in a high electrified state, an earthquake must necessarily ensue. The snap made upon the contact of many miles of solid earth [he added] is that horrible uncouth noise which we hear upon an earthquake; and the shock is the earthquake itself” (1750d, second edition, p. 24–25). Despite his inability to follow Franklin’s argument, Stukeley had on other grounds devised an electrical theory of earthquake propagation that plausibly explained some well-known associated phenomena. Franklin himself never attributed the cause of earthquakes to electricity, but plenty of other theorists did. Besides Stukeley and Hales, they included the Italians Bina (1751) and Beccaria (1753), the American Thomas Prince (1727, 1755), who blamed Franklin’s lightning rods; the Frenchmen Isnard (1758), Buffon (1778), and Bertholon (1787); the further Italians Vivenzo (1783) and Vannucci (1787), and the further Frenchman La Metherie so late as 1815 (1815a, 1815b). Joseph Priestley wrote Franklin in 1770 to tell him about the obscure experiments of William Henly, Franklin’s most loyal supporter in London. All of these theorists except Franklin concurred in attributing earthquakes to electricity.7 TOWARD GREATER COMPREHENSION

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Newton. See Poor Richard Improved for 1748, together with Chaplin (2006, p. 2, 18–19, 29–32, 59–61, and 370n55). Erasmus Darwin’s versified tribute to Newton, less well known than Alexander Pope’s, is in his posthumous Temple of Nature (1803), Canto IV, lines 233–236. Newton commended both Burnet and Whiston for their geological theories but never attempted one himself. 6 Franklin, Experiments and Observations, 1751 (Chaplin, 2006, p. 132–133; fourth edition, 1769, p. 205–206).

Though earthquakes and electricity were prominent (yet always separate) among Franklin’s earliest scientific concerns, he came gradually to broaden his intellectual horizons. Other aspects of Earth began to interest him in part because as a nowfamous theorist and experimenter his opinions on all sorts of

Benjamin Franklin and geology questions were solicited and taken seriously. For example, in a letter of 16 July 1747 from Philadelphia to Jared Eliot in Connecticut, Franklin responded to the latter’s theorizing on the origin of springs and rivers: I think with you that most springs arise from rain, dews, or ponds, etc. on higher ground. Yet possibly some that break out near the tops of high hollow mountains may proceed from the Abyss, or from water in the caverns of the earth rarified by its internal heat and raised in vapour till the cold regions near the tops of such mountains condense the vapour into water, which comes forth in springs and runs down on the outside of the mountain…There is said to be a large spring near the top of Teneriffe [Pico del Teide on the Canary island of Tenerife]; and the mountain [now a caldera] was formerly a volcano, consequently hollow within.

Having mentioned elevations, it occurred to Franklin that the great Appalachian mountains, which run from Pennsylvania almost all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, “show in many places, near the highest parts of them, strata of seashells; in some places the marks of them are in the solid rocks.” As he then concluded, “‘Tis certainly the Wreck of a world we live on!” Though Thomas Burnet had characterized contemporaneous Earth as a ruin in his Deluge theory from the 1680s, he never mentioned fossils. Also from Burnet came Franklin’s acceptance of the Abyss, an entirely hypothetical huge reservoir of water within Earth thought necessary by some to bring about the Deluge. 7 Electricity and earthquakes (Adams, 1954, p. 411–414, 420–421). Regarding William Henly (ODNB), Joseph Priestley wrote Franklin on 26 October 1770 to inform him that “Mr. Henly has…, in a very ingenious manner, diversified several of the more entertaining experiments in electricity, particularly in his imitation of the effects of Earthquakes by the lateral force of explosions.” Henly’s design for an improved electrometer was described in this letter of Priestley’s to Franklin and later communicated to the Royal Society. Following nominations by Franklin and Priestley, among others, Henly was elected a fellow of the society in 1773. His Account of Some New Experiments and Observations in Electricity (1775) appeared just as the American war for independence was beginning. Nonetheless, when Henly died by his own hand in May 1779, Franklin—now back in Philadelphia—was speedily informed. Franklin’s example inspired Priestley to become a scientist. Priestley’s interest in electricity preceded the chemistry for which he is now better known. When they met for the first time, in 1765, Priestley at once became Franklin’s follower. The older man’s pervasive influence soon became evident in his protégé’s research, writing, and personal beliefs (Priestley, 1767, 1779–1786). Their extensive correspondence continued through the American Revolution and resulted in Priestley’s escaping to the United States in 1794 after being mobbed and burned out in Birmingham. Priestley’s scientific interests extended to geology, for which, see Schofield (1966, p. 68, [earthquakes, 1768], 112 [experiments on metals, 1772], and 203–205, 216–218 [experiments on slate, sandstone, basalt, toadstone, and lava, with application to volcanoes, 1781–1782]). In a letter to Jean André de Luc, 11 December 1782, Priestley thought that by successfully extracting gases from volcanic rocks he might recover “the original atmosphere of this earth, before it was purified by the growth of plants; which according to Moses, as explained by your excellent theory, were created a long time before any land animals” (p. 217). In his Experiments and Observations Relating to Various Branches of Natural Philosophy (1786, v. III, p. 215–222), Priestley identified himself with the Neptunist faction of geologists because for him such rocks as granite and basalt yielded too much air on heating to be products of volcanic forces (Schofield, 1966, p. 266–268). By this time, several other members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham had become interested in geology, and almost all of them were Plutonists. Priestley’s experiments on volcanic and other rocks preceded the more famous ones conducted later on by Sir James Hall (Dean, 1992, chapter four).

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On 1 January 1748, Franklin took into partnership his journeyman printer David Hall, who then assumed responsibility for the day-to-day labor, leaving Franklin more leisure in which to pursue his scientific interests. These included a friendship with Pehr (Peter) Kalm, a Swedish botanist, traveler, and disciple of the great Linnaeus who toured America from 1748 to 1751 (Kalm, 1770–1771, 1772). In 1748, Kalm sought advice from Franklin on the natural history of America, recording, preserving, and publishing his replies in a subsequent travel book. On 16 October, for example, Kalm asked Franklin and others “whether they had come upon any evidence that places which were now a part of the continent had formerly been covered with water.” The descriptions given him of buried shells, trees, and gravels soon convinced the Swedish naturalist that “those places in Philadelphia which are at present fourteen feet and more under ground were formerly the bottom of the sea, and that by several violent changes [my italics], sand, earth, and other things were carried upon them.” The Delaware River, moreover, had changed its course, and was still “tearing off material from the bank on one side, and depositing it on the other.” Kalm’s perceptive observations alerted Franklin to the everyday geological changes going on around him, aroused Franklin’s scientific curiosity, and obliged the Philadelphian to formulate more comprehensive geological beliefs. John Bartram (1699–1777, Dictionary of American Biography [DAB], ODNB), often regarded as the first American botanist, was also interested in geology. Extensive travels by him throughout colonial America resulted in an unusually broad knowledge of our flora, fauna, and mineral resources. Undertaken at his own expense, Bartram’s various expeditions took him to western Virginia and the Blue Ridge (1738), through the Catskills (1755), and to the Carolinas (1760). His chief work, Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, etc. of regions west (1751) may be compared with Franklin’s very different book published the same year. In his, Bartram described personal explorations of frontier lands from Philadelphia to Lake Ontario in 1743, and his subject matter covered both natural history and Indian tribes. A description of Niagara Falls by Kalm was also included. On this official mission for the government of Pennsylvania, Bartram was accompanied for a time by Lewis Evans. A later travel journal by Bartram, also published, described east Florida (1766, 1769). He was by then the royal botanist. Bartram’s western survey of 1743, for which Franklin had attempted to raise money in 1742, resembles the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 as conceptualized by Thomas Jefferson and may even have inspired it. On 13 December 1742, Franklin donated to the Library Company of Philadelphia (which he founded) some fossils that Bartram had collected in the Allegheny mountains, including shells and their impressions. Presumably, they were then displayed in the company’s cabinet of “curiosities,” as had long been customary in Europe. Sometime after that, Bartram sketched for Franklin a rough map of the Alleghenies and nearby river systems, indicating on it where he had found

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the fossil shells. His information may have underlain the geological portions of Ben’s letter of 16 July 1747 to Jared Eliot, as quoted already. In 1743, Bartram and Franklin together founded in Philadelphia the American Philosophical Society (Lemay, 2006, p. 114, 115, 465–468), which is still very much in existence.8 A naturalist, surveyor, and draftsman even closer to Franklin than Bartram was his sometime clerk Lewis Evans (1700–1756, DAB, ODNB), who studied the Appalachians with John Bartram in 1743 and filled his journal with astute geological observations, some of which Bartram later published as his own. Centering his attention on the classic geological problem of shells on mountaintops, Evans alluded to the geological theories of Burnet and Woodward but rejected their biblically inspired catastrophes in favor of slow processes and extended time. His “Map of the Middle British Colonies” and accompanying Analysis (Philadelphia, 1755) were published by Franklin and Hall. Evans’s gradualistic geological assumptions clearly influenced both Bartram and Kalm, but their impact (if any) on Franklin is less demonstrable. When he sent copies of Evans’s map to friends in England, Franklin did so primarily as the printer thereof, the map in particular being something of a technological accomplishment. However, because Franklin never fully accepted an extended age for Earth, the uniqueness of past life, and the persistence of slow geological forces, he was unable to appreciate much of what Evans had foreseen.9 For his part, Lewis Evans made use of Franklin’s geological speculations, as expressed in Ben’s letter of 1747 to Eliot, in comments added to the published version of the Evans map. 8 Kalm and Bartram. In his Travels in North America, Kalm relates how, shortly after his arrival in September 1748, he visited the already-famousin-Europe botanical garden of John Bartram in Philadelphia. As he would do with Franklin, Kalm asked Bartram if he knew of any evidence that the land the city was on had ever been covered with water. The point underlying his inquiry was that several earlier theorists—most importantly, Edward Stillingfleet in his Origines Sacrae (1662)—questioned whether or not the Deluge had been universal. Stillingfleet was among those who preferred to leave America unsubmerged. Kalm’s interview with Bartram then proceeded to the Deluge itself, and the immense number of supposed elephant bones found incongruously in the freezing cold of Siberia. Bartram provided numerous examples of fossil shells that he had collected inland and on mountaintops, thereby substantiating his opinion that the Flood had indeed covered America as well as the rest of the world. To explain the presence of elephant bones in Siberia, Bartram accepted Thomas Burnet’s theory that the axis of Earth had tilted at the time of the Deluge, thus changing the climate, but these ideas themselves would change. In 1751, shortly after Kalm’s departure, his sometime sponsor and fellow Quaker Peter Collinson, a British friend well known to Franklin, wrote Bartram about an often-found but unknown species of fossil mollusk. Bartram replied that though the mountaintops had once been covered by water, he could not agree with Dr. Woodward (the seventeenth-century Deluge theorist) that the rocks and mountains were so dissolved at the Deluge as he represents; nor with Burnet, that there were none of either before the Flood: “Moses expressly says that all the hills were covered.” For Bartram now, the fossil shells and other marine remains found atop the Blue Ridge mountains of Pennsylvania had been deposited not by the Deluge but during the first days of Creation, “after the spirit of God had moved on the face of the waters, and light was separate from darkness, before beasts lived on dry lands, or fowls flew in the air.” He again invoked Burnet’s theory of axial tilt to explain how the bones of tropical species like elephants could be found in the chilly tundra of the far north (Kalm, 1772, p. 75; Berkeley and Berkeley, 1992, p. 335; Semonin, 2000, p. 89–90).

The folded structure of the ancient Alleghenies, for example, was reflected in Evans’s astute observation that “They are not confusedly scatter’d…but stretch in long uniform ridges.” The fossil shells found atop some of the highest ridges, he surmised, must once have been at the bottom of the sea. Since sea and land do not readily change places, he could only imagine (with Franklin) that the shells had been brought thither by the biblical Deluge— to which Evans added the possibility of another such flood. He had apparently seen layers of fossil shells at two distinctly separate elevations. If so, then a single inundation would not explain them. Such puzzling phenomena, Evans commented, “furnish endless funds for systems and theories of the world” but it was clear to both him and Franklin that “this earth was made of the ruins of another” (Lemay, 2006, p. 486–487). PROMOTING AMERICAN SCIENCE When Franklin returned to London in 1757, he did so as perhaps—I think undoubtedly—the most famous man of science in Europe and was everywhere so honored. One of his new acquaintances in England was the astronomer and geological theorist John Michell (1724–1793, ODNB), whose sixty-eight pages of “Conjectures Concerning the Cause, and Observations upon the Phenomena of Earthquakes” (Philosophical Transactions, 1760) marked the beginning of modern understanding. He was the first to recognize earthquakes as waves but did not associate them with faults. They are caused, he argued, when large quantities of water suddenly intrude on Earth’s subterranean fires (he made no use of lightning), producing steam explosions that disrupt the strata. Michell alluded to a number of particular earthquakes, connected them in several instances with volcanoes, and attempted to substantiate all this in an especially important treatment of stratification. Having drafted some portion of this essay by the end of 1757, Michell lent a copy of what he had written to John Pringle, an influential member of the Royal Society, who in turn lent Michell’s draft to Franklin, also by now a fellow. 9 Evans (Semonin, p. 97, 174; Chaplin, 2006, p. 117–122). In Poor Richard Improved for 1765, Franklin conventionally acknowledged Noah as “Founder of the New World after the Flood.” Writing to Margaret Stevenson on 25 January 1779, he described a piece of elephant’s tooth as being “old ivory, perhaps of the time before the Flood.” For Franklin and the age of Earth, see his “Account of Living Toads Found Enclosed in Limestone” (6 April 1782): “The part of the rock in which they are found is at least 15 feet below the surface, and is a kind of limestone. A part of it was filled with ancient sea shells and other marine substances. If these animals have remained in that confinement since the formation of the rock, they are probably some thousands of years old.” For his early view of past life, see BF to Cadwallader Colden, 16 October 1746: “No species or genus of plants were ever lost, or ever will be while the world continues.” Franklin did not, at that time, believe in extinction. The reference to plants suggests that he was relying on the sixty-year-old History of Plants by John Ray. In the second volume, Ray declared that “The number of true species in nature is fixed and limited and, as we may reasonably believe, constant and unchangeable from the first creation to the present day” (Historia Plantarum, II [1692], p. 1188; the conclusion to Ray’s preface in his Wisdom of God [1691 ff.] is similar but not limited to plants; see also Raven, 1986, p. 234).

Benjamin Franklin and geology What Franklin saw had nothing to do with earthquakes. It consisted only of what would later become twelve numbered paragraphs from his remarks on stratification. Early in 1758, Franklin replied to Pringle, saying: I return Mr. Michell’s paper on the strata of the earth with thanks. The reading of it, and perusal of the draft [a diagram] that accompanies it, have reconciled me to those convulsions which all naturalists agree this globe has suffered. Had the different strata of clay, gravel, marble, coals, limestone, sand, minerals, etc. continued to lie level, one under the other, as they may be supposed to have done before these convulsions, we should have had the use only of a few of the uppermost of the strata, the others lying too deep and too difficult to come at. But the shell of the earth being broke, and the fragments thrown into this oblique position, the disjointed ends of a great number of strata of different kinds are brought up to day, and a great variety of useful materials put into our power, which would otherwise have remained eternally concealed from us. So that what has usually been looked upon as a ruin by this part of the universe was in reality only a preparation, or means of rendering the earth more fit for use, more capable of being to mankind a convenient and comfortable habitation.

Like Michell’s reliance on subterranean fire, Franklin’s opinion about the providential utility of convulsions derived from John Woodward. He rejected Burnet’s arguments affirming that the present world is only the ruin of an earlier one.10 As published in 1760, Michell’s essay included a number of unusual references to American publications. They are most easily explained by assuming that Franklin, having found Michell’s original earthquake theory either missing or deficient, recommended and lent him several transatlantic sources that he might use to bolster his position. Michell mentions these American contributions in no fewer than five places. In particular, he 10 Michell to John Pringle, 6 January 1758; reprinted in Franklin’s Experiments and Observations (1769 edition, p. 362). Apart from his birth, we know nothing about the life of John Michell (1724–1793, ODNB) until he matriculated at Queens College, Cambridge, in 1742. After graduating in 1748 (M.A., 1752; B. Div., 1761), he remained there as a fellow, teaching arithmetic, geometry, Hebrew, and Greek. His only book, a treatise on artificial magnets (1750), earned him admission to the Royal Society of London. Then, and in 1755, he was much agitated by the unusual British earthquakes, with which the Philosophical Transactions were equally concerned, publishing many accounts. His interest in geology probably began at this time. Michell visited Birmingham in 1757, becoming known to the incipient circle of naturalists forming there. Franklin followed him to Birmingham the next year, carrying a letter of introduction from Michell to Matthew Boulton, who was at the center of the local scientific coterie. How Franklin and Michell became acquainted is unknown, but their scientific books—on electricity and magnetism, respectively—probably introduced them to each other. In 1758, Franklin read Michell’s drafted remarks on stratification and no doubt encouraged him to expand the scope of his remarks to include the presently compelling topic of earthquakes. Michell’s essay on earthquakes included stratigraphy and was published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1760; though neither he nor Franklin could have known, it was some of the best work that anyone in England had done in geology since the earlier observations on earthquakes of Robert Hooke. In this and subsequent communications, Michell not only brought English understanding of earthquakes to a higher level but proved himself to be the finest British stratigrapher of his time. From 1762–1764, Michell was the Woodwardian professor (of geology) at Cambridge, an appropriate position named for one of his two most influential predecessors, Hooke being the other. He resigned in order to marry, accepting

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was indebted to the 1755 theory of John Winthrop, which had preceded his in suggesting aqueous intrusions as a major source of earthquakes. Michell also mentions the topographic map of Lewis Evans, who, together with its theorizing, the Royal Society and its Transactions had otherwise ignored. The Royal Society would recant in part by later electing Winthrop (and two other Americans) to membership, on Franklin’s nomination.11 IN THE FIELD According to Desmond King-Hele (1968), it was Franklin’s visit to Birmingham in 1758 that decisively stimulated Erasmus Darwin’s interest in science. From then onward, natural philosophy became a major theme in his work, which included eight published papers (seven of them in Philosophical Transactions), three scientific poems with encyclopedic notes, and three long treatises in prose—one on organic life, one on female education (which he supported), and one on agriculture (Darwin, 1791–1803). Despite their announced subjects, the poems and treatises often dealt with geology. In the manner of Newton’s Opticks and Franklin’s letters, for example, Darwin speculated in his prose treatise Zoonomia (1794–1796) on the derivation of all forms of life from one or more living filaments: Shall we then say that the vegetable living filament was originally different from that of each tribe of animals…? And that the productive living filament of each of these tribes was different from the other? Or, as the earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals—and many families of these animals long before other families of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life?

a living within the Anglican church at the provincial mining town of Thornhill, Yorkshire, which was near Leeds and therefore convenient to Dr. Joseph Priestley, who became a frequent guest. In 1772, both Michell and Franklin subscribed to Priestley’s history of optics. Michell’s assistance with that book is acknowledged by Priestley in his Memoirs (London, 1806, v. I, p. 64–65); work by William Herschel the astronomer and Henry Cavendish the chemist also profited from Michell’s generous cooperation (Hardin, 1966, p. 40, 43, 45). Michell remained at Thornhill until his death, but visited London regularly as a fellow of the Royal Society. While traveling back and forth to the metropolis, he did serious geological fieldwork, achieving through it an understanding of the stratigraphy of southern England perhaps unequalled by anyone before William Smith. As he published nothing further on the topic after 1760, we know of his accomplishments only through the memoir on him by Archibald Geikie, who located three virtually unknown documents—a letter of Michell’s in 1788 to Henry Cavendish the chemist, an avid geologizer; Cavendish’s geological reply; and some brief but remarkable notes taken down in the same year by the eminent engineer John Smeaton (died 1792) entitled “Mr. Michell’s account of the south of England strata” (Geikie, 1918, p. 45–58 [for Cavendish] and p. 65–71 [for Smeaton]). The latter had been published by John Farey in Philosophical Magazine for August 1810. In Geikie’s opinion, Michell “unquestionably established the succession of the main subdivisions of the English Mesozoic formations, and he did this by laborious determinations of the orders of mineral characters over a wide region, without any help from palaeontological evidence” (Geikie, 1918, p. 68). We have since lost sight of Michell’s accomplishments as a stratigrapher. 11 Michell, “Conjectures” (1760, Philosophical Transactions, v. 51, 1760, p. 566–634). Geikie (1962 [1905], p. 271–277, 378–380) on Stukeley and Michell is also worth consulting. Besides Winthrop, the other two F.R.S. Americans were Arthur Lee and Alexander Garden.

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If this gradual production of the species and genera of animals be assented to [he continued]…some kinds of the great changes of the elements may have been destroyed…Of the myriads of belemnites, cornua ammonis, and numerous other petrified shells,…none now are ever found in our seas, or in the seas of other parts of the world, according to the observations of many naturalists. Some of whom have imagined that most of the inhabitants of the sea and earth of very remote times are now extinct; and as they scarcely admit that a single fossil shell bears a strict similitude to any recent ones, [theirs] is an argument countenancing the changes in the forms, both of animals and vegetables, during the progressive structure of the globe which we inhabit. (p. 244–245)

Darwin’s evolutionary thinking about the history of life on Earth had clearly gone beyond Franklin’s more limited conceptions. Even after Franklin’s death, however, Darwin continued to honor the Philadelphian in his works. There are posthumous tributes to “Immortal Franklin” in The Botanic Garden (1792), Canto II, lines 355 and 365, as well as in Darwin’s notes to Canto I, lines 373 and 383. Sharing many friends between them, Franklin had been a potent stimulus to Darwin, the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and the further scientific circles in which Darwin would function until his own death in 1802.12 In 1759, Franklin journeyed toward Scotland through the Peak District of Derbyshire, an area long famous for its geological wonders (Dean, 2007). No other landscape ever influenced him so much. At this time he probably met John Whitehurst (1713–1788, ODNB) and Anthony Tissington, both of whom were knowledgeable about Derbyshire’s minerals and stratigraphy. In deference to their geological enthusiasm or his own, Franklin visited the Northwich salt mines in Cheshire shortly afterward. This exposure to the subterranean world of caves and mines prompted Ben to theorize. As he wrote the following year to his brother: It is evident from the quantities of sea-shells, and the bones and teeth of fishes found in high lands, that the sea has formerly covered them. Then, either the sea has been higher than it is now, and has fallen away from those high lands, or they have been lower that they are, and were lifted out of the water to their present height by some internal mighty force, such as we still feel some remains of when whole continents are moved by earthquakes.

He elaborated on each possibility before admitting that the whole was “a fancy I had on visiting the saltmines at Northwich with my son.”13 FURTHER SPECULATIONS A return visit to Birmingham, in September 1760, gained Franklin increased rapport with the Lunar Society and its members, of whom Erasmus Darwin had the liveliest mind. Though 12 Birmingham 1758. For Franklin’s visit, see Schofield (1963, p. 23–25, and other references to him, Whitehurst, Priestley, and Darwin). For Franklin and Darwin, see also King-Hele (1968, p. 15–16, 31, 80, 136, and 176). 13 Northwich 1759. BF to Peter Franklin (brother), 7 May 1760, reprinted in Franklin’s Experiments and Observations (1769 edition, p. 379–380). Northwich, Cheshire, was the center of an industrial district sustained largely by the mining of brown rock salt.

the precise date on which he first met Franklin (in 1758) has never been fully ascertained, Darwin—grandfather of Charles (Origin of Species)—was notorious throughout England for his unorthodox religious opinions but equally reputable for the breadth and originality of his scientific ones, which (as we have seen) included a kind of biological evolution. The boldness of Daewin’s conjectures was legendary and fully appreciated by Franklin, whose own became livelier and farther-reaching in response. That November, the “Father of Electricity” wrote at length to Mary Stevenson, his Polly, on the nature and workings of rivers. He no longer attributed any part of their waters to the Abyss. On returning to America in 1763, Franklin received a letter from Whitehurst, a Derbyshire natural philosopher, clockmaker, and member of the Lunar Society. He enclosed, for Franklin’s expected approval, a short sketch of his “General Theory of the Earth,” the first new one of importance in England since the longdeparted days of Burnet, Woodward, and Whiston. In his sketch, Whitehurst affirmed that “fossil shells were originally the offspring of the sea,” but he denied that natural evidence can establish the age of Earth. For Whitehurst, the oblately spheroidal shape of our planet, as asserted by Newton and Whiston, had been established as fact by the geodesic expeditions of Maupertuis and Condamine in the 1730s. That Earth at one time had been entirely fluid was the assumption from which Whitehurst reasoned out his scenario. Though Franklin, responding on 27 June, assured the ingenious clockmaker that his new theory of Earth was “very sensible, and in most particulars quite satisfactory,” he neither supported Whitehurst’s eventual book nor publicly endorsed it. Nor did he ever assimilate Whitehurst’s reasoning with his own. When published belatedly in 1778, therefore, during the American War, Whitehurst’s book prudently failed to mention Franklin, who was not a subscriber, and the only American material within it is a brief notice of some elephant bones found in the Ohio valley. Whitehurst unoriginally attributed them to the Deluge, in which Franklin also continued to believe.14 These specimens were probably some of those collected in 1767 from Big Bone Lick on the Ohio River in Kentucky and sent to Franklin in London by George Croghan (died 1782), an Irish adventurer who divided his time between collecting fossils and trading with or fighting Indians. In a 5 August 1767 letter to Croghan, Franklin identified the bones as being those of elephants but thought their molars belonged to a carnivore. The presence of meat-eating, supposedly tropical elephants in a country of harsh winters led him to conjecture boldly that Earth’s tilt and climate must have altered. In a further letter of January 1768, to Abbé Chappe, however, he changed his mind about the elephants’ supposed appetite for the flesh of other animals, thinking now that they would have been too large and slow to run down their prey as a predatory meat-eater must. 14 See references in footnote 12. BF to Mary Stevenson, November 1760; Whitehurst to BF, 18 March 1763; BF to Whitehurst, 27 June 1763; Whitehurst, 1778, 1786.

Benjamin Franklin and geology Franklin regarded the American mastodon (to which the bones actually belonged) as no more than a minor variation of the present-day elephant. In two Philosophical Transactions papers of 1767, however, Peter Collinson more correctly deduced from the same bones that the animal from Big Bone Lick was either a new species of elephant or completely new and unknown. A further paper on the Croghan specimens, by the distinguished anatomist William Hunter (1718–1783, ODNB; brother of John) in 1769 likewise described the animal as carnivorous, fortunately extinct, and either a new species of elephant or a previously unknown creature, an “American incognitum.” Rembrandt Peale would later apply that same phrase to the incorrectly restored mastodon skeleton exhibited by him in London (1803), though it had not been found at Big Bone Lick.15 As part of a European “grand tour” in 1768 intended to enlarge his geological horizons, the Genevese Alpinist Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1740–1799, DSB) visited London, where he met Franklin by prearrangement, probably at the Royal Society in November. They conversed at length about the meteorological significance of atmospheric electricity. As we recall, Ben’s paper on that topic, read to the Royal Society of London in 1749, had inspired William Stukeley to supplement Franklin’s theorizing by attributing not only thunder and lightning to atmospheric electricity, as he did, but earthquakes as well. The high velocity of earthquake propagation seemed to Stukeley and others more plausibly explainable if electric in nature. At the time of his London meeting with Franklin in 1768, Saussure still believed that earthquakes were caused by subterranean fires attempting to unblock their volcanic outlets. Only in 1784, after much thinking and fieldwork among the Alps, did Saussure abandon his obstructed fires theory of seisms in favor of an electrical one. His earlier assumption that large caverns underlay the Alps was thereafter untenable. Those now-banished cavities had supported two of Saussure’s most cherished theories: that expanding elastic fluids within them caused earthquakes; and that waters retreated into them following a great flood. Through his supposed “debacle” (a misunderstanding of the not yet postulated Ice Age), Saussure (1779–1786) had ventured to explain the distribution of erratic boulders and other geological anomalies.16 Franklin had also been involved for some years with the intelligent but destitute geological author Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737–1794, ODNB), whom he had met on a tour of Germany in 1766. A recent graduate of Göttingen University, Raspe had the good fortune to be appointed a junior clerk in the manuscripts room of the Royal Library at Hanover, his home town. As it did Goethe’s, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 turned Raspe’s mind toward geology (Carswell, 1950). By 1762, Raspe had published the first installment of what was intended to be his “specimen” of a large Theory of the Earth 15 For mastodon discoveries in North America and their extrageological significance, see Semonin (2000, chapters four to six). 16 Freshfield and Montagnier (1920, p. 119, 130, 436, 458); Carozzi and Newman (1995); BF to Saussure, 23 August 1783, and reply.

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and Mountains written by himself in Latin. On its completion the next year (Raspe, 1763), one copy of his “specimen” was sent to the Royal Society of London, where Franklin might have seen it (though he did not read Latin). He may even have received a personal one, as Raspe—a good linguist—was lavish in his giving and, in return for such unexpected generosity, soon had a number of scientific correspondents throughout Europe. What we do know is that Franklin, in London, received a letter in English from Raspe on 28 August 1766 and replied to it promptly on 9 September. As requested, Franklin had delivered a communication of Raspe’s to Dr. Gowan Knight, F.R.S. (Fellow of the Royal Society of London), a Copley medalist, and writer on magnetism, not to mention the principal librarian of the British Museum. Raspe had previously shipped to Knight a not-yet-arrived box of fossils. He also urged Franklin to ensure that a copy of his 1763 book reach John Michell, of whom the American had no doubt spoken well. Franklin expeditiously dispatched to Raspe copies of Lewis Evans’s map and Knight’s book on magnetism. He would send a copy of his own book (a later edition of Experiments and Observations on Electricity) as soon as it was out. Ben invited Raspe to visit him in either England or America (later adding France) and relished memories of the hospitality he had received throughout Germany when there. In a subsequent letter, from Passy on 4 May 1779, Franklin acknowledged Raspe’s gifts of two recent geological translations by himself (1776 and 1777). Both contained, Ben thought, “a good deal of information that may be useful to America.” Unfortunately, they appeared just as Raspe’s professional and personal life was crumbling. For instance, as of 7 December 1775, he had become the only F.R.S. ever to be expelled on grounds of deficient character. Though knowing that, on 7 October 1779, Franklin nonetheless invited him to Passy for a stay of two months. He was well aware that German troops were fighting American ones in the war for independence and bore Raspe no ill will because of it.17 In May 1771, Franklin revisited Derbyshire and Peak Cavern, then went on to inspect recent industrial developments, including steam engines. In July 1772, he similarly visited Yorkshire and the Lake District, an excursion then becoming fashionable. At Whitehaven, he went into coal mines that stretched out under the sea. Franklin thought them compelling evidence of great natural convulsions. The coal, he believed, originated as plant remains; accumulated near the surface of Earth, they had later been buried and lithified into fuel by geological turmoil. Some further cataclysms brought the strata of now hardened coal back nearer to the uses of mankind. Franklin no longer believed that the Deluge had been Earth’s only geological catastrophe. The utility of coal to man, moreover, arose through happenstance, not Providence. He was generally up-to-date regarding the origins of coal, shale, and 17 For Raspe, Franklin, geology, and his books, see Carswell (1950, p. 28–31, 34, 114–118, and 148); Robinson, 1955 (David Williams); David Williams to BF, August 1775; and William Hodgson to BF, 12 May 1780 (re: Williams).

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fossils but continued to endorse foreshortened geological time and the permanence of species.18 On 2 December 1773, Jean Antoine Nicolas, Marquis de Condorcet, wrote Franklin in London to obtain some preliminary knowledge of American geology. Ben forwarded his queries to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. However, on 20 March 1774 he also responded personally to the marquis with several observations of his own. Though Pennsylvania had limestone and marble in abundance, he wrote, no flint had been discovered. Small seashells, some of them representing kinds no longer seen along the Atlantic coast, had been collected from the tops of America’s highest mountains, the Appalachians. Several skeletons and tusks, of animals supposed to be elephants, had been found near the Ohio River (at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky). Franklin was unaware that any evidence of volcanoes—lava or pumice—had ever been met with anywhere in North America. Last of the philosophes, Condorcet supported the American war for independence, as he did the French Revolution, but when zealots of the latter arrested him in 1794, he died in his cell, probably by suicide.19 AMERICAN WAR By March 1777, Franklin had retired to Passy (now a western sector of Paris), only to be overwhelmed with attention from cor18 Whitehaven, a seaport in Cumberland, was surrounded by coal mines, several of which extended under the sea. Franklin regarded them as evidence of great geological catastrophes that had occurred sometime in the recent past. See also Dean (1989, p. 491). 19 The French Revolution, of course, was on its way. Any attempt to weaken the power and authority of the politico-religious establishment was regarded by the Crown and its supporter the Church with extreme disfavor. In the year of his death, Condorcet wrote Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), the book for which he is now most often remembered. Within it, he traced the development of human thought from its beginnings up to his own times. Despite the Reign of Terror (1793), of which he was a victim, Condorcet ended with a prediction that the future would be a time of “indefinite and infinite progress” brought about by science and public education. Better science for him guaranteed a better society. Though the Philadelphian was by then deceased, Condorcet regarded Franklin’s uncanny ability to comprehend the workings of nature as a portent of the golden age soon to come. It had been Turgot, Condorcet’s mentor, who said famously of Ben that “he snatched the lightning from heaven and the scepter from tyrants.” 20 Palissy, a committed Protestant, worked as a surveyor, a potter, and a writer. His two chief scientific publications, both dialogs, are Recette véritable (1563) and Discours admirables (1582). Stressing observation, his topics include fountains, metals, salts, alchemy, fossils—identified correctly as animate remains— and religion. He died in the Bastille. 21 Ruault’s dedication to Franklin (original):

En vous offrant les Œuvres de Bernard Palissy, c’est honorer la mémoire du plus grand Physicien que la France ait produit dans un temps où l’Histoire Naturelle était encore au berceau. Ce profond Observateur, presque oublié depuis deux siècles, ne pouvait reparaître plus dignement que sous vos auspices. Le génie qui le caractérise se retrouve dans vos ouvrages: comme lui, vous annoncez, Monsieur, les plus grandes vérités avec ce ton modeste qui sied si bien au vrai Sage; et il y a une si grande analogie entre la méthode de Palissy et celle que vous avez employée pour les découvertes des phénomènes de la Physique, que je ne pouvais associer deux noms plus dignes de l’admiration des Savants. Mais le Philosophe François, livré tout entier à la recherche des secrets de la Nature, ne pénétra point dans ceux de la Politique, Science que les Sages de l’antiquité cultivaient comme une des plus importantes de la Philosophie. Vous en avez senti tous le prix Monsieur; vos travaux n’ont pour but que le bonheur

respondents and visitors. That year a French bookseller named Ruault dedicated to Franklin a collected edition of the works of Bernard Palissy (1510?–1590, DSB), a prescient sixteenth-century French geological theorist who had recognized the real nature of fossils and the origin of springs and rivers from precipitation.20 Unfortunately, the edition also alluded unacceptably to Franklin’s republican political activities; through royal intervention, therefore, the dedication was revoked and, like the accompanying engraved portrait, survives now in only a few copies.21 Even so, the text of the edition includes appreciative notes on Palissy’s revolutionary geological theories by Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (1741–1819, DSB), the basalt geologist and friend of American independence probably responsible for putting forward the work’s original dedication to Franklin. His Yankee chum, meanwhile, was helping him to finance an elegant but expensive volume. In 1778, Saint-Fond published an important and wellillustrated folio on the extinct volcanoes of southern France, in which Franklin is listed as a subscriber. That same year, despite the American war, John Whitehurst sent Franklin a copy of his completed geological theory; derived primarily from Derbyshire, it was the one that Franklin had thought “sensible” in draft fifteen years earlier. For all these men, science, religion, and politics were distinct and independent endeavors (Faujas de Saint-Fond, 1778; Whitehurst, 1778). d’un Peuple libre et vertueux. Toute Nation qui intéresse par la sagesse de son gouvernement, a dû beaucoup sans doute à son premier Législateur, mais que ne doit-elle pas à ceux dont les lumières et le courage ne tendent qu’à donner à ses lois une forme plus parfaites et plus stable. «Le peuple est admirable, dit M. de Montesquieu, pour choisir ceux à qui il doit confier une partie de son autorité: il ne se détermine que par des choses qu’il ne peut ignorer et des faits qui tombent sous ses sens.» Ruault’s dedication to Franklin (translation by Dean and Alan Chan): Offering you the Works of Bernard Palissy is a way to honor the memory of the greatest man of science France had produced in a time when natural history was still in its infancy. This profound observer, almost forgotten two centuries ago, could not reappear in any more flattering manner than under your auspices. The genius that characterizes him can be found in your works. Like him, Sir, you proclaim the greatest truths in the modest tone that belongs to the true sages. There is a very close analogy between the methods that Palissy used to discover physical phenomena and those that you do. Therefore, I cannot associate two more honored names than yours and his in my admiration of your work as interpreters of nature. However, the philosopher François [Franklin], devoted solely to the unveiling of nature’s secrets, shuns politics, a field that the sages of antiquity cultivated as one of the most important. Sir, you have kept in mind the highest goals; your accomplishments are intended solely to promote the happiness of a free and virtuous people. All nations concerned with the sagacity of their governments no doubt owe much to the vision of their founder, but Wisdom itself is indebted to those courageous and enlightened spirits who, for the sake of principle, support high-minded and enduring laws. “The people are admirable,” says Montesquieu, “for choosing those to whom they delegate some of their authority: They determine on their own only the matters that they cannot ignore and the facts that fall under their senses.” Aldridge (1957, p. 64–65) did not find a copy of the original dedication to Franklin. I am grateful to Dennis Sears of the Rare Book Room at the University of Illinois–Urbana for supplying the one transcribed here. Condorcet praises Palissy’s geology in “The Eighth Stage” of his Progress of the Human Mind (1795); Ruault probably intended a similar compliment to Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin and geology In June 1783, the great Laki rift in Iceland split open and began to erupt prodigiously, gushing forth an unprecedented quantity of lava that eventually proved fatal to ~10,000 local people—one-fifth of the population. In July, a thick, acrid blue haze of sulfuric aerosols (as we now know) spread all over Iceland and eventually throughout the world, darkening both Europe and North America. The haze coincided with anomalous atmospheric phenomena of other kinds and produced grossly unseasonal weather in the Northern Hemisphere for almost three years, of which there are many records (Scarth, 1999). Franklin is credited by most historians as being the first naturalist to realize that the blue haze and other meteorological peculiarities had been caused by the Icelandic volcanism. He suggested the connection as one of two possibilities in a short paper presented by himself in Manchester, May 1784: During several of the summer months of the year 1783, when the effect of the sun’s rays to heat the earth in these northern regions should have been greatest, there existed a constant fog over all Europe…The cause of this universal fog is not yet ascertained. Whether it was adventitious to this earth and merely a smoke proceeding from the consumption by fire of some of those great burning balls or globes [meteors or comets] which we happen to meet with in our rapid course round the sun, and which are sometimes seen to kindle and be destroy’d in passing our atmosphere, and whose smoke might be attracted and retain’d by our earth; or whether it was the vast quantity of smoke long continuing to issue during the summer from Hecla in Iceland and that other volcano [Eldeyjar] which arose out of the sea near that island. Which smoke [of the two kinds] might be spread by various winds over the northern part of the world is yet uncertain.

Ben had not yet fully escaped from the influence of Whiston. A more decisive French essay by the little known Mourgue de Montredon, citing volcanism only, was published in Paris the same year (1784) but could not compete with such a famous name as Franklin’s. Unseasonable frost and cold temperatures throughout normal growing months in France led to a series of failing harvests in the middle to late 1780s. Execrable weather afflicted the peasantry with cruel famines (“Your Majesty, the people have no bread!”) and reconciled all but a few to the fomenting French Revolution of 1789 (“Then let them eat cake!”). Franklin’s fundamental insight about the influence of major volcanic eruptions on the weather of the world has since been repeatedly validated, most strikingly after the Tambora eruption of 1815 and the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 (Dean, 2007). Whether entirely his own or not, it stands today as Franklin’s chief contribution to our knowledge of Earth.22 22 Laki rift eruption. See Franklin’s “Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures” (May 1784; given and published in Manchester); and Chaplin (2006, p. 303–304). Because the rift was new and poorly reported, Franklin attributed the eruption to Hecla, apparently the only Icelandic volcano he knew by name. See also Scarth (1999, chapter eight, p. 116). In 1737, Franklin did not recognize the “unusual redness” appearing in the evening sky above Philadelphia, as reported by him in the Pennsylvania Gazette for 15 December. Such coloration was not caused by the recent earthquake of the 7th but more probably by the prolonged eruption of Mount Vesuvius from 18 May to 6 July 1737, the volcano’s powerful effluents having blown around the world.

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Faujas de Saint-Fond visited Passy on 21 November 1783, securing a letter of introduction from Franklin to Whitehurst, whom Saint-Fond visited in London the following year. The two of them discussed and disagreed about the origin of basalt, a topic then endlessly disputed. Their geological differences notwithstanding, Faujas discovered “a remarkable resemblance between Mr. Whitehurst and his friend Benjamin Franklin,” good nature, candid speech, simplicity of manners, and mild philanthropy being common to them both. Franklin himself, always the diplomat, never mentioned the basalt controversy (Faujas de Saint-Fond, 1907, v. I, p. 17–22). MATURE VIEWS Even more than Faujas de Saint-Fond, however, Franklin’s most influential geological associate during the Passy years was the Abbé J.L. Giraud-Soulavie (1752–1813, DSB), whose controversial Natural History of Southern France had reached three volumes, and officials of the church, by 1781. The first volume (Paris, 1780), which was censored and then republished in a more orthodox version, called attention to the succession of fossil life, thereby emphasizing the age of Earth. Volumes 2, 3, and 4 all dealt with nonfossiliferous volcanic formations. Soulavie believed (and under theological pressure increasingly so) that one major catastrophe had disordered the strata. In September 1782, Franklin, a subscriber to his book, asked Soulavie to explain what evidence he had found in southern France to substantiate his great bouleversement [convulsion, disruption, upheaval], offering him some evidence from Derbyshire that seemed to support a similar conclusion. Soulavie was sufficiently impressed by Franklin’s observations to make note of them. He then sent his notes for correction to Franklin, whose lengthy reply of 22 September 1782 is the most comprehensive adumbration of his mature geological opinions that we have. I shall only summarize it here. Finding oyster shells mixed in the stone of high mountains in Derbyshire, and plant fossils well below sea level in the coal mine at Whitehaven, Franklin had necessarily postulated a great bouleversement of his own. At some point, he supposed, geological forces had depressed parts of Britain under the sea while raising others far above it. Such movements seemed to prove that Earth was not solid to the center. Rather, its surface is but a shell—one probably resting on a body of compressed air that feeds Earth’s subterranean fires and occasionally disrupts its surface. The powerful influence on Franklin of earthquake theories and steam engines continued. Franklin then went on to “indulge imagination, in supposing how such a globe was formed.” It must have been “almighty fiat,” he suggested, that by ordaining gravity caused the initial chaos to sort itself into a sphere arranged in layers by specific gravity [Woodward’s idea], yet with air at the center and heavier materials consolidated into a smooth, undifferentiated crust. The original whirling movement of the parts toward a common center caused this newly made globe to rotate. By some accident, however, Earth’s axis changed, and its “dense internal fluid”

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of compressed air burst its shell, causing “the submersions and emersions of its lands, and [through axial tilt] the confusion of its seasons.” Alternatively, the polar shift may have been gradual, with land rising in what are now Earth’s tropics and sinking at what are now its polar regions. “Such an operation as this,” wrote Franklin, “possibly occasioned much of Europe—and, among the rest, the mountain of Passy on which I live, and which is composed of limestone, rock, and sea shells—to be abandoned by the sea, and to change its ancient climate, which seems to have been a hot one.” He fully accepted now that life and conditions had been vastly different in the past. At some early time, Franklin believed, the iron contained in Earth’s crust became magnetized and aligned our planet’s axis with, as he thought, the magnetic poles of the universe; if so, then Earth’s axis had stabilized and would not shift again. We are still subject to accidents on its surface, however, including violent explosion waves from within Earth occasioned by subterranean junctions of water and fire [Michell’s earthquake theory]. “I can conceive,” he added, “that in the first assemblage of the particles of which this earth is composed, each brought its portion of the loose heat that had been connected with it, and the whole, when pressed together, produced the internal fire that still subsists.” This was the fullest and most comprehensive synthesis of his various geological conjectures that Franklin was ever to write (Chaplin, 2006, p. 303; Dean, 1989, p. 492–493).23 Franklin’s theory is interesting as one of the earlier attempts at geophysical speculation but somewhat old-fashioned (or perhaps irrelevant) as science, its indebtedness to Burnet, Woodward, and Whiston remaining all too apparent. The freedom with which he improvised a history for Earth is reminiscent of Whitehurst. In addition, he had fully assimilated the earthquake speculations of Winthrop and Michell but not the increasing stratigraphic evidence for a succession of extinct species in the past. Unfortunately, he also neglected to acknowledge the evolution of landforms, which such French investigators of extinct volcanoes as Guettard (1715–1786, DSB) had already emphasized (1746, 1752). On the other hand, Franklin’s belief that the core of Earth is gaseous was largely original to himself and had considerable influence throughout the nineteenth century before being disproved (Brush, 1996). This letter, read to the American Philosophical Society in 1788 and published by them five years later (Franklin, 1793a), is Franklin’s best-known writing on geology. Franklin’s final letter about Earth was written from Philadelphia to James Bowdoin on 31 May 1788 and read at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society on 15 January 1790 (Franklin, 1793b). Embodying the “Socratic method” of questioning that Franklin had discovered as a boy, it is a further attempt to reconcile geological evidence with physical forces and the old cosmologies, including a now-specific mention of the biblical Deluge. He began by first asking how Earth received its magnetism. Iron ore, he suggested, no doubt accumulated within it over a 23

BF to Soulavie, 22 September 1782.

period of time. Earth was probably not magnetic for some ages, until it became sufficiently ferrous to receive and hold a charge from the magnetic power existing throughout our solar system (and perhaps others). Second, continued Franklin, “might not, in ancient times, the near passing of some large comet, of greater magnetic power than this globe of ours, have been a means of changing its poles, and thereby wrecking and deranging its surface, placing in different regions the effect of centrifugal force, so as to raise the waters of the sea in some, while they were depressed in others?” This then, with the addition of Whiston’s oversized comet, is a more elaborate version of the same theory that Franklin had proposed to Abbé Giraud-Soulavie some six years before. He also added “another question or two, not relating indeed to magnetism, but, however, to the theory of the earth”: Is not the finding of great quantities of shells and bones of animals natural to hot climates in the cold ones of our present world some proof that its poles have been changed? Is not the supposition that the poles have been changed the easiest way of accounting for the Deluge…? Does not the apparent wreck of the surface of this globe, thrown up into long ridges of mountains, with strata in various positions, make it probable that its internal mass is a fluid, but a fluid so dense as to float the heaviest of our substances? Do we know the limit of condensation air is capable of?…Can we easily conceive how the strata of the earth could have been so deranged if it had not been a mere shell supported by the heavier fluid? Would not such a supposed internal fluid globe be immediately sensible of a change in the situation of the earth’s axis, alter its form, and thereby burst the shell and throw up parts above the rest?…

In his letter of 1788 to Bowdoin, Franklin clearly remembered the earlier thinking and observations of John Bartram, both with regard to the possibility of axial tilt (though caused for Ben in Whiston’s manner rather than Burnet’s) and the long, parallel ridges of the folded Allegheny mountains that plausibly convinced Franklin of Earth’s having a fluid core. He of course did not realize how flexible even hard layers of rock could be if subject to the reshaping forces of heat and pressure over an immense period of time. Typically, Franklin proposed his ideas as a series of questions, and yet he concluded by affirming an earthquake theory similar to his 1782 one, though without mention of intrusive waters. This letter, too, was published in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Following these bold suggestions, Franklin wrote no more upon geology.24 CONCLUSION During Franklin’s long, productive lifetime, geological science changed greatly, from a largely religious-philosophical exercise devoted to the elaboration of scripture, the justification of Providence, and the fanciful creation of theories to a more cau24 BF to J. Bowdoin, 31 May 1788. René Descartes and John Michell had earlier believed Earth’s core to be liquid; Franklin was apparently the first theorist to suggest that it might be gaseous instead. See also Semonin (2000, p. 266–267; Rittenhouse on the structure of Earth, 1786).

Benjamin Franklin and geology tious, less theological interrogation of nature based on increasingly adequate empirical observations and rigorously applied inductive reasoning. It was from this fundamental transformation that the science of geology emerged. Franklin assisted its birth by rejecting supernatural explanations for natural phenomena and by assuming that natural explanations were both possible and sufficient. He encouraged field observations in America, fostering work on earthquakes and other topics. On both sides of the Atlantic, he supported institutions that collected specimens, accumulated scientific libraries, discussed topics, and published secular knowledge. By encouraging others while engaging in geological theorizing himself, he lent prestige to a hitherto undervalued intellectual endeavor. Together with John Bartram, he founded an academy in Philadelphia that eventually became the American Philosophical Society. With characteristic generosity, he stimulated others to scientific accomplishments while remaining modest about his own. Though obsolete today, Franklin’s final theory of Earth was a personal accomplishment to which he devoted considerable thought, and his vividly expressed ideas have all the imaginative power that he attributed to them. But by 1780 or so, the imaginative method of geological analysis was decidedly passé. Though Franklin saw numerous geological phenomena for himself, he never made the necessary transition from closet theorist to field geologist—yet of the distinction, he was well aware. As he wrote in 1782 to Abbé Soulavie: “You see I have given a loose to imagination, but I approve much more your method of philosophizing, which proceeds upon actual observation, makes a collection of facts, and concludes no further than those facts will warrant.” In July 1785, while en route to the United States from Passy, Franklin observed near Rouen “a chain of chalk mountains very high, with strata of flints.” As he then deduced, “The quantity that appears to have been washed away on one side of these mountains, leaving precipices of three hundred feet high, gives an idea of extreme antiquity.” “It seems,” he further surmised, “as if done by the beating of the sea” (Franklin’s diary for 15 July). This rather surprising example demonstrates the aged Franklin’s sincerity in assuring Soulavie that he realized empirical observation in the field was superior to closet theorizing in the study. In June 1787, Temple Henry Croker wrote Franklin at home in Philadelphia to assure him that “Systems are exploded now,” and genuine science was being “founded upon data.” Earlier that same year, on 3 January, Franklin had written John Jay, then a cabinet minister, to recommend that Congress and the Mint hire Samuel Vaughan Jr. “to explore the United States, with respect to the ores, minerals, etc., that may be contained in their territories.” Franklin had known Vaughan for some years, during which, the latter diligently studied metallurgy and mineralogy while traveling through the chief mining districts of Europe. As Franklin argued, the books and specimens Vaughan had collected would in themselves be a valuable acquisition to our country. Though his suggestion was not taken up, we may credit Franklin with proposing the first geological survey of the fledgling United States.

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Franklin’s modest place in the history of European geology depends largely on his pivotal ability to organize, encourage, and stimulate the efforts of others. His position within American geology is similar but much higher, given the slow growth of our earth sciences during his lifetime. Franklin was centrally concerned with promoting the development of increasingly secular geology in America when it scarcely existed, by lending his prestigious name and influence to secure European recognition of our first, often obscure accomplishments. While Franklin himself holds only a secondary rank among British and French geological theorists contemporary with him, several of them benefited from his work. He compares even more favorably with his countrymen. From 1747 until his death, Benjamin Franklin was the best known, most highly respected, and, ultimately, the most productive American student of geology. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I had the distinct honor of presenting an earlier version of this paper at the Geological Society of America (GSA) convention in Philadelphia, Franklin’s city, on 22 October 2006, the tercentenary of his birth year. I owe special thanks to Gary D. Rosenberg. Roy Goodman and Julie Newell also helped to make this publication possible. The present essay is an expanded revision of Dean, 1989 (Franklin and earthquakes). My additional research was aided by librarians in Evanston, Chicago, and Urbana, Illinois, and Kansas City, Missouri; my assistant Alan Chan and several GSA staff facilitated the preparation of its text. REFERENCES CITED Adams, F.D., 1954 (1938), The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences: New York, Dover, 532 p. Aldridge, A.O., 1957, Benjamin Franklin and His French Contemporaries: New York, New York University Press, 260 p. American Philosophical Society, 1771–present, Transactions, American Philosophical Society. Bartram, J., 1751, Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, Rivers, Productions, Animals, and Other Matters Worthy of Notice (Made by Mr. John Bartram, in His Travels from Pensilvania [sic] to Onandago, Oswego, and the Lake Ontario, in Canada. To Which is Annex’d, a Curious Account of the Cataracts at Niagara by Mr. Peter Kalm): London, J. Whiston and B. White, [9]–94 p. Bartram, J., 1769, A Description of East-Florida… from St. Augustine up to the River St. John’s as Far as the Lakes (third edition): London, W. Nicoll, 75 p. (first edition, 1766). Beccaria, G., 1753, Dell’electricismo artificiale, e naturale: Torino, Campana, 245 p. Berkeley, E., and Berkeley, D.S., eds., 1992, John Bartram to Peter Collinson, 20 September 1751, in The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734–1777: Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 808 p. Bertholon, P., 1787, De l’Électricité des Météores. 2 vol.: Lyon, Bernuset. Bina, A., 1751, Ragionamento Sopra la Cagione de Terremoti: Perugia, Constantini e Maurhij, 48 p. Brush, S.G., 1996, Nebulous Earth: The Origin of the Solar System and the Core of the Earth from Laplace to Jeffreys: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, xii, 312 p. Buffon, G.L.L., 1778, Des Époques de la Nature (Supplément A Histoire Naturelle, tome cinquième): Paris, L’imprimerie Royale, 615 p. Burnet, T., 1684–1690, The Theory of the Earth (Containing an account of the original of the earth, and of all the general changes which it hath already undergone, or is to undergo, till the consummation of all things. The first

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two books, concerning the Deluge and concerning Paradise (1684); the last two books, concerning the burning of the world, and concerning the new heavens and the new earth [1690]. Includes “A Review of the Theory of the Earth” and a world map showing the Americas as then known [California as an island]): London, W. Kettilby, 327, 224, 52 p. (many later editions). Carozzi, A.V., and Newman, J.K., 1995, Saussure’s manuscript oration on earthquakes and electricity (1784) influenced by William Stukeley and Benjamin Franklin: Archives des Sciences, Genève, v. 48, p. 209–237. Carswell, J., 1950, The Prospector, Being the Life and Times of Rudolf Erich Raspe, 1737–1794: London, Cresset Press, 278 p. Chambers, E., 1728, Cyclopedia; or An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2 vol.: London, J. and J. Knapton. (Franklin later bought the 1749 edition and reprinted materials from it.) Chaplin, J.E., 2006, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius: New York, Basic Books, 421 p. Cohen, I.B., 1941, Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments (A new edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, edited with a critical and historical introduction): Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, xxviii, 453 p. Collinson, P., 1767, An Account of Some Very Large Fossil Teeth Found in North America: Philosophical Transactions, v. 57, p. 464–469, doi: 10.1098/rstl.1767.0048. Condorcet, J.A.N., de Cantat, Marquis de, 1795, Esquisse d’un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l’esprit Humain: Paris, Agasse, viii, 389 p. Darwin, E., 1791–1803, The Collected Writings of ED (in facsimile): Intro: Martin Priestman, 9 vol.: Bristol, Thoemmes (published 2003). Dean, D.R., 1979, The Word “Geology”: Annals of Science, v. 36, p. 35–43, doi: 10.1080/00033797900200111. Dean, D.R., 1985, The rise and fall of the Deluge: Journal of Geological Education, v. 33, p. 84–93. Dean, D.R., 1989, Benjamin Franklin and earthquakes: Annals of Science, v. 46, p. 481–495, doi: 10.1080/00033798900200351. Dean, D.R., 1992, James Hutton and the History of Geology: Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 304 p. Dean, D.R., 2007, Romantic Landscapes: Geology and Its Cultural Influence in Britain, 1765–1835: Ann Arbor, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 604 p. Evans, L., 1755, Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical and Mechanical Essays: Philadelphia, Franklin and Hall, 32 p., together with the folded map. (The first essay comprises an “analysis” of a general map of the middle British colonies in America… The map, separately published in numerous editions [1755 ff.], located Big Bone Lick with the words “Elephants Bones found here.” See Chaplin [2006, p. 116–122] and Semonin [2000, p. 97, 174], for Evans, Franklin, and maps.) Faujas de Saint-Fond, B., 1778, Recherches sur les volcans éteints du Vivarais et du Velay…: Paris, Genoble, Cuchet, 460 p. Faujas de Saint-Fond, B., 1907, A Journey through England and Scotland to the Hebrides in 1784 (trans. Archibald Geikie; French original, 1797), 2 vol.: Glasgow, H. Hopkins. Franklin, B., 1751, Experiments and Observations on Electricity: London, E. Cave, 86 p. (Includes the first printing of Franklin’s paper of 16 November 1749; fourth edition, 1769; fifth edition, 1774.) Franklin, B., 1784, Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures: Manchester: Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society, v. 2, p. 373–377. Franklin, B., 1793a, Conjectures concerning the theory of the Earth: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, v. 3, p. 1–5, doi: 10.2307/1004845. Franklin, B., 1793b, Queries and conjectures relative to magnetism, and the theory of the Earth [BF—Bowdoin, 31 May 1788]: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, v. 3, p. 10–13. (Pages 5–8, 8–10 were also by Franklin, but not geological.) Franklin, B., 1959–present, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Labaree, L.W., et al., eds.): New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press (and American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia). Unless otherwise noted, all references to BF in the present essay are to this edition. See footnote 1 for details. Although this edition rightly preserves BF’s original punctuation and capitalization, I have, for the reader’s convenience, modernized both. Freshfield, D.W., and Montagnier, H.F., 1920, The Life of Horace Benedict de Saussure: London, E. Arnold, xii, 479 p. Geikie, A., 1918, Memoir of John Michell: Cambridge, University Press, 3, 1, 107 [1] p. Geikie, A., 1962 (1905), The Founders of Geology (second edition): New York, Dover, 486 p.

Guettard, J.-É., 1746, Mémoire et carte minéralogique sur la nature et la situation des terrains qui traversent la France et l’Angleterre: Paris, Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, p. 363–392. Guettard, J.-É., 1752, Mémoire sur quelques montagnes de la France qui ont été des volcans: Paris, Mémoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, p. 27–59. Hales, S.S., 1750a, Some Considerations on the Causes of Earthquakes, Read before the Royal Society, 5 April 1750: London, Manby and Cox, 14 p. (See also Peter Collinson to BF, 25 April 1750, and BF’s reply, 27 July 1750; as well as Guillaume Mazéas—Hales, 20 May 1752 [all throughout in Franklin, 1959]). Hales, S.S., 1750b, Some Considerations on the Causes of Earthquakes: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, v. 46, p. 669–681. Hardin, C.L., 1966, The Scientific Work of the Reverend John Michell: Annals of Science, v. 22, p. 27–47, doi: 10.1080/00033796600203015. Hunter, W., 1769, Observations on the bones commonly supposed to be elephant bones, which have been found near the river Ohio in America: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, v. 58, p. 34–43. Isnard, M., 1758, Mémoire sur les Tremblemens de Terre: Paris, David the Younger, 92 p. Kalm, P., 1770–1771, Travels into North America (trans. [and abridged] John Reinhold Forster), 3 vol.: London, The Editor. Newly edited, this translation was reprinted in 1937; passages from it involving Franklin and his conversations with Kalm appear in the Franklin Papers under Kalm’s name and date. The Swedish original was published from 1753–1761. See also Bartram, 1751, and Kalm to BF, 2 September 1750 (on Niagara Falls). Kalm, P., 1772, Travels in North America (second edition), 2 vol.: London, T. Lowndes. Keill, J., 1698, An Examination of Dr. Burnet’s Theory of the Earth, Together with Some Remarks on Mr. Whiston’s New Theory of the Earth [both authors replied to his objections]: Oxford, printed at the Theater, 67 p. (second edition, 1734). King-Hele, D., 1968, The Essential Writings of Erasmus Darwin: London, MacGibbon and Kee, 223 p. (for BF, p. 15–16, 28, 31, 80, and 136). La Métherie, J.C. de, 1815a, Suite de mes vues sur l’action galvanique. Des commotions souterraines: Journal de Physique, de Chimie, d’Histoire Naturelle et des Arts, v. 80, p. 221–237. La Métherie, J.C. de, 1815b, Suite à mes vue sur l’action galvanique, comme cause principale des commotions souterraines et des volcans: Journal de Physique, de Chimie, d’Histoire Naturelle et des Arts, v. 81, p. 276–287 (addition, v. 81, p. 393). A spirited controversy followed in volumes of the same journal. Lemay, J.A. Leo, 2006, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, II: Printer and Publisher: Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. Lister, M., 1683, On the Nature of Earthquakes: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, v. 13, p. 512–519 (reprinted [partial] in Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1737. Text in Smyth, but not in Franklin [1959] because not original). Michell, J., 1760, Conjectures concerning the cause, and observations upon the phenomena of earthquakes; particularly of that great earthquake of the first of November, 1755, which proved so fatal to the city of Lisbon, and whose effects were felt as far as Africa, and more or less throughout almost all Europe: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, v. 51, no. 2, p. 566–634. Mourgue de Montredon, M., 1784, Sur l’origine et sur la nature des vapeurs qui ont régné dans l’atmosphère pendant l’été de 1783: Paris, Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, p. 754–773 (année MDCCLXXXI [published 1784]). Newton, I., 1687, Philosophicae Naturalis Principia Mathematica: London, J. Streater for Royal Society (Imprimatur S. Pepys, 5 July 1686), [4], 510, [496] p. Newton, I., 1704, Opticks, or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions, and Colours of Light (also Two Treatises of the Species and Magnitude of Curvilinear Figures): London, S. Smith and B. Walford, printers to the Royal Society, [4], 144, 211, [1] p. Palissy, B., 1777, Oeuvres de Bernard Palissy: Revues sur les Exemplaires de la Bibliothèque du Roi, Avec des Notes par MM. [Barthélemy] Faujas de Saint-Fond, et [Nicolas] Gobet: Paris, Ruault, 734 p. Peale, R., 1803, An Historical Disquisition on the Mammoth, or Great American Incognitum, an Extinct, Immense, Carnivorous Animal, Whose Remains Have Been Found in North America: London, for E. Lawrence by E. Mercer, 80 p.

Benjamin Franklin and geology Plot, R., 1677, The Natural History of Oxford-shire: Oxford, At the Theatre, 356 p. (second edition: London 1705). Plot, R., 1686, The Natural History of Stafford-shire: Oxford, At the Theatre, 450 p. Priestley, J., 1767, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments: London, J. Dodsley, xxxi, 736 p. Priestley, J., 1779–1786, Experiments and Observations Relating to Various Branches of Natural Philosophy, 3 vol.: London and Birmingham, J. Johnson. Priestley, J., 1806, Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Priestley, To the Year 1795, 2 vol.: London, J. Johnson. Prince, T., 1727, Earthquakes the Works of God and Tokens of His Just Displeasure: Boston, Massachusetts, D. Henchman, 3, [1], 45, [3] p. (also 1755, with altered subtitle). Prince, T., 1755, An Improvement of the Doctrine of Earthquakes: Boston, Massachusetts, D. and Z. Fowle, 16 p. Raspe, R.E., 1763, Specimen Historiae Naturalis Globi Terraquei: Amsterdam and Leipzig, J. Schreuder and P. Mortier, 191 p. Raspe, R.E., 1776, An Account of Some German Volcanos, and Their Productions. With a New Hypothesis of the Prismatic Basalts; Established upon Facts: London, L. Davis, 140 p. (Enlarged from the original German edition of 1774). Though Franklin exchanged several letters with Raspe, and even invited him for a two-month stay, he is not known to have read the disgraced immigrant’s books of 1763 and 1776. (Raspe) Ferber, J.J., 1776, Travels through Italy (described in a series of letters to Baron Born; translated with explanatory notes and a preface on the present state and future improvements of mineralogy by R.E. Raspe): London, L. Davis, xxxiii, 377 p. (Raspe) Born, I. von, 1777, Travels through the Bannat of Temeswar, Transylvania, and Hungary (described in a letter to Professor Ferber; to which is added John James Ferber’s Mineralogical History of Bohemia): London, C. and G. Kearsley, xxxix, [12], 320, [22] p. Raven, C.E., 1986, John Ray, Naturalist: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 506 p. Ray, J., 1686–1713, Historia Plantarum, 3 vol. (I, 1686; II, 1692; III, 1713): London, H. Faithorne. Ray, J., 1691, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation: London, S. Smith, Walford, 249 p. (fifth edition, 1709; eighth edition, 1722; eleventh edition, 1743). Ray, J., 1692, Miscellaneous Discourses Concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World: London, S. Smith, 259 p. Ray, J., 1693, Three Physico-Theological Discourses (second edition of 1692): London, S. Smith, 406 p. (third edition, 1713). Robinson, E., 1955, R.E. Raspe, Franklin’s “Club of Thirteen,” and the Lunar Society: Annals of Science, v. 11, p. 142–144. Royal Society of London, 1665–present, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Saussure, H.B. de, 1779–1786, Voyages dans les Alpes, 2 vol.: Volume I: Neuchâtel: S. Fauche; Volume II: Genève: Barde, Manget & compagnie. (Franklin died before volumes 3 and 4 came out in 1796.) Saussure, H.B. de, 1981, Dictionary of Scientific Biography (DSB) v. 12, in Gillispie, C.C., ed.: New York, Scribner, p. 119–123. Scarth, A., 1999, Vulcan’s Fury: Men Against the Volcano: New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 300 p. (chapter eight for Laki, 1783; p. 116 and 283–284 for Franklin). Schofield, R.E., 1963, The Lunar Society of Birmingham: Oxford, Clarendon Press, 491 p. Schofield, R.E., 1966, A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (1733– 1804) selected scientific correspondence edited with commentary: Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, xiv, 415 p.

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Semonin, P., 2000, American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity [a history of mastodon discoveries and their significance]: New York, New York University Press, 482 p. Soulavie, J.L.G., 1780–1784, Histoire Naturelle de la France Mériodionale, 7 vol.: Nisme, Belle. Stillingfleet, E., 1662, Origines Sacrae (or a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith as to the Truth and Divine Authority of the Scriptures, and the Matters Therein Contained): London, printed by R.W. for Henry Mortlock, [40], 619 p. (eighth edition, 1709, reprinted 1724). Stukeley, W., 1750a, 1750b, On the causes of earthquakes: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, v. 46, p. 641–645 and 657–669 (Concerning the causes of earthquakes). (Read 15 and 22 March 1750. On p. 643, Stukeley extended Franklin’s storm theory [heard, but not yet published] to include earthquakes.) Stukeley, W., 1750c, The philosophy of earthquakes: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, v. 46, p. 731–750 (read 6 December). Stukeley, W., 1750d, The Philosophy of Earthquakes, Natural and Religious, Or, an Inquiry into Their Cause and Purpose: London, C. Corbet, 48 p. (Second edition, 1750, adds Part II; third edition, 1756, adds Part III and was issued because of Lisbon 1755. A presentation copy of 1756 was inscribed by Stukeley “To Benjamin Franklin Esq. Father of Electricity. The Author.”) Vannucci, G.A., 1787, Discorso istorico-filosofico sopra il tremuoto: Che nella notte del di 24, venendo il 25. diciembre dell’anno 1786, dopo le ore 9. scosse orribilmente la citta de Rimini e varj paesi vicini. Cesana: G. Biasini, 42, [4] p. (second and third [expanded] editions, 1787). Vivenzo, G., 1783, Istoria e eoria di tremuoti in generale. Ed in particulare di quelli della Calabria, e de Messina del MDCCLXXXIII: Napoli, Stamperia Regale, ccclxxxiv, 56, [3] p. Ward, D.C., and Carozzi, A.V., 1984, Geology Emerging [a bibliography]: Urbana, University of Illinois Library, 565 p. Whiston, W., 1696, A New Theory of the Earth, From its Original, to the Consummation of all Things. Wherein the Creation of the World in Six Days, the Universal Deluge, and the General Conflagration, as Laid Down in the Holy Scriptures, are Shewn to be Perfectly Agreeable to Reason and Philosophy: London, B. Tooke, 95, 388, [2] p. (third edition, 1722; fifth edition, 1737). Whiston, W., 1749–1750, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston, 3 vol.: London, J. Whiston. Whitehurst, J., 1778, An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth, Deduced from Facts and the Laws of Nature: London, W. Bent, 21 [18], 199 p. (second edition [expanded], 1786). Franklin did not live to see Works, 1792, nor did Whitehurst. Winthrop, J., 1755, A Lecture on Earthquakes (Read in the Chapel of HarvardCollege, New-England. 26 November 1755, On Occasion of the Great Earthquake Which Shook New-England the Week Before): Boston, NewEngland, Edes and Gilles, [5], 38 p. Winthrop, J., 1757, An Account of the Earthquake Felt in New England, and Neighboring Parts of America: Separate from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, v. 50, no. 1, p. 1–18. (See also Elizabeth Hubbart to BF, 16 February 1756, and Ezra Stiles to BF, 5 February 1762.) Woodward, J., 1695, An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth; and Terrestrial Bodies, Especially Minerals: as Also of the Sea, Rivers, and Springs. With an Account of the Universal Deluge, and of the Effects It Had upon the Earth: London, R. Wilken, 277 p. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Stephen M. Rowland† Department of Geoscience, University of Nevada–Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada 89154, USA

ABSTRACT In the eighteenth century, many Europeans and Americans embraced a worldview in which the natural world was seen as complete, full, and perfect, as created by God. Within this worldview, no species ever became extinct because such an event would destroy the perfection of nature. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the concept that no species had ever become extinct was increasingly challenged by evidence from the fossil record. By the early nineteenth century, a new paradigm, the “former-worlds” view of Earth history, began to emerge. Buffon had argued that New World quadrupeds were degenerate varieties of Old World species, and that at least one of them had gone extinct. The idea of New World degeneracy thus became connected with the concept of extinction. Thomas Jefferson conducted a long, personal campaign to discredit these ideas of Buffon’s, arguing against them in the early 1780s in Notes on the State of Virginia and also in his 1797 Megalonyx memoir. Jefferson resisted the concept of extinction for a very long time, and he was never able to let go of his “completeness-of-nature” worldview. I suggest that several factors contributed to Jefferson’s inability to relinquish his worldview, in spite of the fact that there was considerable empirical evidence showing that it was not valid. The most influential factors were (1) Jefferson’s emotional and public commitment to the completeness-of-nature worldview, and (2) Jefferson’s personality traits, which were acquired in part through his experiences as an eldest son. Keywords: extinction, Thomas Jefferson, Great Chain of Being, completeness-ofnature, Megalonyx, Megatherium, birth order, Lamarck, Cuvier, Buffon, Enlightenment. INTRODUCTION In the story of Rip Van Winkle, early nineteenth-century American author Washington Irving tells us about a Dutch American farmer who goes for a walk in New York’s Catskill Mountains shortly before the beginning of the American Revo†

E-mail: steve [email protected].

lutionary War. Rip encounters a group of dwarfs playing ninepins; he gets drunk on some of their liquor, and he falls into an enchanted sleep. He sleeps for 20 years and misses the Revolutionary War. When Rip finally awakens and returns to his village, at first he is very disoriented by all of the changes. He inadvertently gets himself into trouble by expressing loyalty to King George III, but, in the end, Rip adjusts to the new paradigm, and it all ends happily.

Rowland, S.M., 2009, Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 225–246, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(16). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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The story of Rip Van Winkle, which was published in 1819 and is representative of the romantic movement in literature, serves as a felicitous metaphor for the scientific paradigm shift that naturalists of Washington Irving’s day had themselves just experienced. If a geologically attentive Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep around 1790 and awakened 20 years later, he too would have missed a revolution and found himself in a disorienting world. During the two-decade interval that spans the closing of the eighteenth century and opening of the nineteenth century, several contentious issues concerning Earth history were being debated. One significant paradigm shift that occurred during that period was the collapse of the widely accepted, eighteenthcentury view of nature known as “the Great Chain of Being,” which crumbled, at least in part, under the weight of accumulating evidence that some species are now extinct. Extinction did not fit comfortably within the Great-Chain-of-Being paradigm. In this paper, I focus on the chronology of the recognition of extinction as a recurring natural phenomenon, and of its acceptance into European and American culture. I will first provide an overview of the common eighteenth-century perspective on fossils and extinction, as well as a brief summary of the paradigm shift that occurred across the turn of the nineteenth century. The core of the paper is an examination of the views of Thomas Jefferson on extinction and related topics, as expressed in his published works and private letters. As characterized by Boorstin (1948), Jefferson formed the intellectual nucleus of a late eighteenth-century “community of philosophers” that included Benjamin Franklin, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Smith Barton, Charles Willson Peale, and Thomas Paine. Most of these men were closely associated with the American Philosophical Society, which had been founded by Franklin in 1743, the year of Jefferson’s birth. If there was a distinctive American philosophical perspective in the late eighteenth century, it was that of Jefferson and this “community of philosophers.” Thus, I will use Jefferson’s perspective as a proxy for the American intellectual worldview of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, supplemented where possible by the views of other members of his “community of philosophers.” Most of the components of this narrative are well represented within the voluminous literature on Thomas Jefferson, beginning with Boorstin’s (1948) classic treatment of Jefferson’s Enlightenment worldview. Jefferson’s views on extinction, his description of Megalonyx, and his obsession with the rejection of Buffon’s theory of New World degeneracy have been described and dissected by, among others, Martin (1961), Gerbi (1973), Greene (1984), Bedini (1986, 1990), and Rudwick (2005). Cohen (1995) discussed the important influence of high-stakes politics on Jefferson’s aggressive rejection of Buffon’s theory of degeneracy, and Semonin (2000) explored the role of the “American incognitum” (mastodon) in eighteenth-century American culture. In addition to recasting these stories in a new context, I hope to demonstrate how difficult it was for Jefferson—and, by extension, American culture generally—to abandon his entrenched worldview. We commonly think of Jefferson as very progressive,

and certainly not a person who was resistant to new ideas, and yet I will demonstrate that in comparison with his contemporaries, both in Europe and America, including his “community of philosophers,” Jefferson was extremely resistant to the concept of extinction. I will explore the sources of this resistance and compare Jefferson’s views to those of Cuvier and Lamarck. THE SHIFTING VIEW OF NATURE, FOSSILS, AND EARTH HISTORY AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The Enlightenment was a social and intellectual movement, roughly corresponding in time to the eighteenth century. It was more a mood than a clearly defined worldview, but one core belief that characterizes this period was the conviction that nature and man can best be understood through our own mental faculties, rather than through faith, tradition, or sudden illumination (May, 1986). In keeping with this belief in the power of human rationalism, many eighteenth-century Europeans embraced the view that the universe was created by a benevolent God, that it behaves according to natural laws, and that science offers the best methodology for revealing these laws. To devote one’s life to the pursuit of a deeper understanding of God’s laws through science was considered to be a noble undertaking, completely compatible with Enlightenment philosophy. The spirit of scientific inquiry flourished during the eighteenth century, while religious orthodoxy struggled to maintain its influence in European cultures. In the previous century, brilliant savants such as Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton had made spectacular scientific breakthroughs, thereby becoming role models for eighteenthcentury naturalists. Some domains of the natural world gave up their secrets more readily than others. The laws that govern the behavior of gases and planets, for example, turned out to be easier to discover than those that govern the world of animals and plants. As we now know, living organisms have complex evolutionary and biogeographic histories that greatly influence their morphologies and distributions. The properties of gases and the orbits of planets can be discovered with no concern for history, but the fundamental characteristics and geographic occurrences of living organisms cannot. As discussed herein, some eighteenth-century naturalists, most notably Buffon, included a historical component in their interpretations of the morphologies and distributions of plants and animals, but such naturalists were unable to appreciate how complex this story would turn out to be. So, the field of biology lagged behind the fields of physics and chemistry. Nonhistorical aspects of geology, such as mining and mineralogy, developed as specialized branches of chemistry. The reconstruction of Earth history through a systematic study of strata was just beginning in the eighteenth century through a few pioneering stratigraphers such as Giovanni Arduino (1714–1795) (Vaccari, 2006). Paleontology did not yet exist as a branch of study in the eighteenth century because the fossil record was not a recognized body of phenomena.

Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history The Completeness-of-Nature Worldview Since ancient times, Europeans had generally assumed that all species of plants and animals that exist today—indeed all of nature—had been created at approximately the same time, i.e., at Creation. Furthermore, it was commonly assumed that, because of the perfection and goodness of God, the natural world contains as much variety as it possibly can contain; it is full, complete, and perfect. Lovejoy (1936) called this idea “the principle of plenitude.” He traced this principle to Aristotle, but, as he showed, it became a very strong component of Enlightenment philosophy. I will call the worldview that incorporates the principle of plenitude the “completeness-of-nature” worldview. Closely associated with this worldview is a metaphor for the structure that God is presumed to have used to construct the natural world: the scala naturae, or “Great Chain of Beings” (Lovejoy, 1936). In the completeness-of-nature worldview, each species is seen as a link in a great hierarchical chain, where humans, angels, and God typically form the highest three links. European philosophers most commonly used the more metaphysical, singular variation of this metaphor—Chain of Being—while American philosophers typically preferred the less abstract, plural form— Chain of Beings (Boorstin, 1948). The Great-Chain-of-Being metaphor for nature reached the peak of its popularity in the eighteenth century. Lovejoy (1936, p. 184), called the Great Chain of Being “the sacred phrase of the eighteenth century.” It was a favorite theme for philosophers and poets, as exemplified in the following lines from The Seasons, written in the 1720s by English poet James Thomson: How wond’rous is this scene! where all is form’d With number, weight, and measure! all designed For some great end…each moss Each shell, each crawling insect, holds a rank Important in the plan of him who form’d This scale of beings; holds a rank which lost Would break the chain and leave behind a gap Which nature’s self would rue.

Similar imagery, this time in heroic couplets, was invoked by Alexander Pope in Essay on Man, written in the 1730s. This long poem is structured as a series of epistles, the first of which is titled “Of the Nature and State of Man with Respect to the Universe.” The passage quoted here refers to the destruction of the great scale, and the breaking of Nature’s chain: Vast Chain of Being! Which from God began; Natures aethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see, No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee; From thee to nothing.—On superior powers Were we to press, inferior might on ours; Or in the full creation leave a void, Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroyed: From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike, Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

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In each of these poems, the poet invokes the powerful image of links being lost. Once God had established His perfect order within the natural world, it was inconceivable that He would allow that natural order to be destroyed by a species becoming extinct. Extinction was equivalent to a lost link in the Chain of Beings. Therefore, within this completeness-of-nature worldview—Thomas Jefferson’s worldview—such a thing simply could never happen. Extinction was therefore unimaginable. Origin and Expansion of the Concept of Extinction Extinction was not a new idea in the late eighteenth century, but it was a controversial one. Europeans had been collecting fossil shells for centuries. At least as early as the sixth century B.C., some people interpreted fossils to be the remains of organisms that lived in the distant past, although other interpretations were also common (Gregory, 1984). The term fossil itself became more narrowly defined during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, having originally been applied to any object that was dug up. A necessary precursor to the discovery of extinct species was the development of a distinction between the buried products of biological processes, such as brachiopod shells, and the products of nonbiological processes, such as quartz crystals. This evolving definition of the term fossil has been explored in detail by Rudwick (1976). Throughout this paper I use the term fossil in the modern sense of the remains of a once-living organism, even though the people being discussed may not have used this term in precisely this way. Through medieval times and well into the seventeenth century, the origin and depositional history of fossils remained a debatable question. For example, Leonardo da Vinci (1452– 1519) explored the question of the origin of fossil seashells in his unpublished notebooks, accepting their biological origin and rejecting the widely held view that they had been carried from the sea to their present position by the biblical Deluge (Gregory, 1984). However, as late as 1664, German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) interpreted such fossil shells to be the products of nonbiological processes. In his influential encyclopedia Mundus Subterraneus (The Subterranean World), published in 1664, Kircher attributed the morphology of fossils to a spiritus plasticus, rather than to a biological origin (Rudwick, 1976). Just three years later, in 1667, Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686) persuasively defended the biological origin of fossils. Steno began by comparing teeth from a large shark caught by the fishermen of Livorno with nearly identical fossil “tongue-stones.” He then made the inductive leap that all fossil objects that resemble the parts of living animals are indeed the remains of formerly living animals (Rudwick, 1976; Yamada, 2006). The publication of Steno’s shark tooth study roughly coincided with the creation of a new medium for scientific communication: the scientific periodical. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, which began publication in 1665, published an abstract of Steno’s conclusions concerning fossil

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objects, thus ensuring that his conclusions were widely disseminated among English naturalists. The Royal Society’s secretary added a comment that the Society’s “Curator of Experiments,” Robert Hooke (1635–1703) had already lectured on the topic, and that his conclusions agreed with those of Steno (Rudwick, 1976). Thus, by the late seventeenth century, there was widespread acceptance among European naturalists of the conclusion that fossil objects in the earth are the remains of formerly living organisms. However, more than a century later, Thomas Jefferson questioned this interpretation. In Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the early 1780s, Jefferson reviewed three hypotheses to explain the presence of fossil shells in mountains far from the sea: (1) a universal deluge that flooded the mountains, (2) uplift of the seafloor to form the mountains, and (3) a nonbiological origin for the shells. He concluded that “the three hypotheses are equally unsatisfactory; and we must be content to acknowledge, that this great phenomenon is as yet unsolved” (Jefferson, 1787, in Peterson, M., ed., 1984, p. 156). So, at least in some circles, the significance of fossil shells remained debatable into the late eighteenth century. Some eighteenth-century naturalists who accepted the biological origin of fossils wondered why some of their fossil shells seemed to lack living representatives. Most conspicuously, ammonites and belemnites were locally common in the fossil record, and they were very popular among collectors, but no one had ever reported finding them alive in the sea. Did they live in the deep sea, which had not yet been explored, or were they extinct? In the first edition of his Handbook of Natural History, published in 1779, German medical professor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840)1 characterized the viewpoints of European naturalists as follows: “Since we know so many animals only as petrifactions, and not yet in [living] nature, some distinguished men have concluded that many genera and even whole families must be extinct [ausgestorben]” (quoted in Rudwick, 2005, p. 256). One species that was known to be extinct was the dodo, a large flightless bird endemic to the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean. The dodo had been hunted into extinction by visiting sailors around 1690, without a noticeable collapse of the natural world, thereby weakening the completeness-of-nature worldview. Furthermore, its extinction within historical time helped to create a conceptual bridge between contemporary animals and animal-like fossils in rocks (Rupke, 1983). The Role of New World Fossil Quadrupeds in the Debate about Extinction New World fossil quadrupeds were central to the late eighteenth-century discussion about extinction. Fossil bones, molars, and tusks from Big Bone Lick, near the Ohio River (in what is now northeastern Kentucky), had been excavated by European travelers as early as 1739 and shipped to Paris. These were mostly the remains of animals later called mastodons, but in the 1 Blumenbach is best known for his division of the human species into five races on the basis of craniometry, and for his popularization of the term “Caucasian.”

eighteenth century they were commonly referred to as “mammoths,” the “Ohio animal,” or the “American incognitum.” Throughout this paper, when any of these three terms appear, the reader should understand that the animals being referred to are those that we now call mastodons. The Big Bone Lick locality became famous, and many travelers visited the site to collect fossil bones and teeth. Typically, the mastodon molars were found separated from the jaw bones, which led to great uncertainty about how many different types of animals were represented and how similar they were to living elephants. Although mastodons are proboscideans, related to elephants and mammoths, their molars have very distinctive, high-profile, cone-shaped cusps. These are very different from the much flatter chewing surfaces on the molars of elephants and mammoths. Mastodon teeth are more similar to the teeth of hippopotamuses than to those of elephants, so one French naturalist, Louis Jean Marie Daubenton (1716–1799), thought that two species of large quadrupeds were represented in the Big Bone Lick assemblage: an elephant and a hippopotamus. Daubenton concluded that the size and morphology of the Big Bone Lick bones and teeth were not distinctively different from those of living elephants and hippopotamuses, so he concluded that these fossils were the remains of extant species (Rudwick, 2005). In the 1760s, one mastodon jawbone with intact teeth found its way to the British Museum where it was described by anatomist William Hunter (1718–1783). In a paper read to the Royal Society in 1768, Hunter documented the fact that the hippopotamus-like teeth occurred in an elephant-like jaw, so the “Ohio animal” was neither an elephant nor a hippopotamus; it was a new species that had never before been described. Hunter referred to the animal as the “American incognitum.” Based on the teeth, he concluded that the animal had been a carnivore. No trappers or their Indian informants had reported encountering such a ferocious beast, so Hunter concluded that it was almost certainly an extinct species. “[T]hough we may as philosophers regret it,” Hunter wrote, “as men we cannot but thank Heaven that its whole generation is probably extinct” (quoted in Rudwick, 2005, p. 269). Shortly after Hunter’s description of the American incognitum was published, mastodon teeth were also discovered in a region of Russia called Little Tartary, which indicated that the animal had lived in both the Old World and the New World. That was enough evidence to persuade Europe’s most prominent eighteenth-century naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), that this fearsome animal had formerly been widely dispersed across the globe, and that it indeed had become extinct. In Buffon’s very influential Des Époques de la Nature (The Epochs of Nature), published in 1778, he referred to the American incognitum as the only species that has definitely become extinct. Buffon’s explanation for this extinction was that Earth had gradually cooled since its formation, and that a hypertropical climate had formerly existed in some regions. The American incognitum had been adapted to this climate. As Earth cooled and the hypertropical climate disappeared, the animal became extinct (Rudwick, 2005). In this way, Buffon used the putative extinction to support his theory of Earth history.

Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history We now know that mastodons were herbivores. However, for some late eighteenth-century naturalists who were struggling to accommodate the growing evidence for extinction with their completeness-of-nature worldview, the interpretation of the American incognitum as a ferocious carnivore may have offered a partial solution. When Hunter suggested that men should “thank Heaven that [the American incognitum’s] whole generation is probably extinct,” he almost certainly meant it literally. One might imagine that the Creator had providentially removed this terrible carnivore from Earth in order to make the world safe for human expansion. In this way, the interpretation of mastodons as fearsome carnivores may have permitted some people to accept the reality of extinction—in rare cases—without completely abandoning their eighteenth-century, completeness-of-nature worldview. Mastodons may have been an expendable link in the chain of beings. In the case of the extinction of the dodo, this providential argument was specifically made by John Thompson in 1829. As seen in the passage quoted here, Thompson suggests that God had intended humans to cause the extinction of the dodo, which is why no great calamity resulted from it. If we seek to find out what link in the chain of nature has been broken by the loss of this species, what others have lost their check, and what others necessarily followed the loss of that animal which alone contributed to their support, I think we may conclude that, the first [i.e., the extinction of the dodo] being foreseen by the Omniscient Creator, at least no injury will be sustained by the rest of the creation; that man, its destroyer, was probably intended to supplant it, as a check; and that the only other animals which its destruction drew with it, were the intestinal worms and Pediculi peculiar to the species. (J. Thompson, 1829, quoted in Rupke, 1983, p. 172)

Thus, we see expressed the concept that one religiously based idea (that providential concern for human welfare explains why some species might have become extinct) trumps another religiously based idea (that God made nature complete and unalterable). Emergence of the Former-Worlds Paradigm From the foregoing discussion, it is apparent that by 1778— the date of publication of Buffon’s Époques de la Nature— several prominent naturalists in England, France, and Germany had accepted the idea that at least one species, and possibly many more, had become extinct (Fig. 1). As I will document in this paper, the idea of extinction continued to gain traction during the final decades of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century. Within the first decade of the nineteenth century, primarily through the work of Cuvier, a new paradigm of Earth history began to emerge in which extinction was no longer seen as a rare event that threatened the integrity of God’s Creation, but rather as a recurring process that occurred in catastrophic pulses. Entire faunas and floras of extinct organisms had apparently lived together in fantastic “former worlds,” each of which had been abruptly terminated, probably in a great flood. I will call this new perspective on Earth history the “former-worlds worldview.” This

Selected Events in the Transition from the “Completeness-of-Nature” Worldview to the “Former-Worlds” View of Earth History

229 Experiences and Writings of Thomas Jefferson Relevant to His Views on the History of Life on Earth 1760

Wm Hunter describes the “American incognitum” from Big Bone Lick, arguing that it is an extinct carnivore (1768)

1770

Buffon’s Époques de la Nature (1778) in which the “American incognitum” is said to be an extinct species “Maastricht animal” fossil discovered in the Netherlands (1780) (later named a mosasaur by Cuvier) Cuvier describes Megatherium, a giant ground sloth from South America (1796) Cuvier’s Memoir on the Species of Elephants, Both Living and Fossil (1796) Cuvier begins a systematic study of fossils of animals not known to be extant (1798)

1780

Notes on the State of Virginia (1781–1783); published in 1785

1790 Megalonyx memoir presented to APS (1797); published in 1799

1800

Instructions to Meriwether Lewis (1803)

1810

Cuvier’s compilation of research on fossil bones of quadrupeds (1812) Wm Smith’s fossil-based geologic map of England and Wales (1815)

Revolutionary leader and author of the Declaration of Independence (1769–1776)

American Minister to France (1785–1789)

Parkinson’s Organic Remains of a Former World (1804) Return of Lewis and Clark with no evidence of mammoths or megalonyxes (1806)

At the College of Wm and Mary (1760–1762), Jefferson is introduced to the Enlightenment worldview by Prof. Wm Small, a Scot

1820

Letter to Francis Van der Kemp continuing to question extinction (1818) Letter to John Adams with thoughts on extinction (1824)

First dinosaur genus described (Megalosaurus) (1824)

Jefferson dies (1826)

1830

Figure 1. Time line of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries juxtaposing relevant events, letters, and publications in Thomas Jefferson’s life with selected events that characterize the transition from a “completeness-of-nature” worldview to the “former-worlds” view of Earth history.

was the paradigm that dominated the first half of the nineteenth century, ultimately being transformed into the Darwinian worldview of the late nineteenth century and beyond. In the introduction, I suggested the interval from 1790 to 1810 as the time during which this paradigm shift occurred. Of course, this is an arbitrary two-decade interval, chosen in part because it symmetrically straddles the transition from one century to another. Certainly, it was during this interval that the empirical evidence in support of extinction became significantly stronger, and many naturalists on both sides of the Atlantic, especially the younger generation, accepted this evidence. The transition from the completeness-of-nature worldview to the former-worlds view of Earth history was driven by a combination of factors. One factor—perhaps the most important—was the continued discovery of fossil species for which there were no apparent living representatives. In the eighteenth century, this did not

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include dinosaurs; the first genus of dinosaur, Megalosaurus, was not described until 1824 (Fig. 1), and the term “Dinosauria” was not coined until 1842. A second factor was the decreasing acreage of unexplored territory on Earth where one might imagine such living representatives to be lurking. For example, as discussed later, the interior of North America was not explored by European Americans until the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–1806; until that time, it remained plausible for large mammals to live there that were not known in the civilized region along the eastern seaboard. A third factor that probably contributed to the growing acceptance of extinction and the former-worlds paradigm was the weakening influence of the Enlightenment and the growing popularity of romanticism. The romantic movement, which began in the late eighteenth century, represented a rejection of the rationality of the Enlightenment. Untamed nature was celebrated, in contrast to the Linnaean orderliness of the eighteenth century. Strange beasts that lived in former worlds must have resonated well with the readers of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, a classic example of romanticism in literature, first published in 1812. THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE QUESTION OF EXTINCTION Thomas Jefferson’s life spanned, and played a very important role in, the flowering of Enlightenment philosophy in the New World. He fully embraced the Enlightenment zeitgeist, which promoted the use of one’s own reasoning abilities and the rejection of religious orthodoxy. More than any of the other founding fathers, Jefferson infused Enlightenment philosophy and prose into the formative documents of American democracy. Most significantly for this study, Jefferson wrote down his thoughts about extinction and related phenomena at several times in his life, spanning a 42 yr interval, from 1781 to 1823 (Fig. 1). This interval brackets the turn-of-the-century transition from the completeness-of-nature worldview to the former-worlds view of Earth history. Thus, Jefferson provides us with the opportunity to see the world through the eyes of a very attentive, intellectually gifted person, across an interval of time during which the canonical worldview collapsed and was reconstructed. Jefferson’s Religious Views As a student at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson was exposed to the Enlightenment intellectual spirit, which caused him to abandon the Anglican Church of his youth. He ultimately rejected all varieties of Christianity in favor of Enlightenment rationalism (Walters, 1992), but he remained a religious person. Much has been written about Jefferson’s religious views (e.g., Boorstin, 1948; Sanford, 1984; Gaustad, 1986; May, 1986; Walters, 1992; Wills, 2007). My intent here is to examine only those aspects of his religious beliefs that bear on the question of extinction and the structure of the natural world. It is commonly said that Jefferson was a deist, along with George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas

Paine, and many other eighteenth century American leaders. Wills (2007, p. 153) refers to deism as “the religion of the [American] educated class in the middle of the eighteenth century.” However, deism is a loosely defined term. To Jefferson himself, deism simply meant “monotheism”—the belief in only one God— which included Jews, for example, but excluded Trinitarian Christians who believed in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In this sense, Jefferson was certainly a deist (Wills, 2007). Philosophers sometimes distinguish between deism and theism (sensu stricto), which, in the case of Jefferson, is a useful distinction. Both deists and theists believe in a God who created the universe and its moral and physical laws, but the deist god does not monitor the actions of each earthly creature and does not respond to prayer. The theist god, in contrast, is attentive and providential. The theist believes that God continues to be active in His creation, whereas the deist does not (Sanford, 1984). As succinctly summarized by Immanuel Kant, “The deist believes that there is a God; the theist believes that there is a living God” (quoted in Sanford, 1984, p. 91). In accordance with this distinction, Jefferson was a theist rather than a deist (Sanford, 1984). Jefferson’s God was definitely not a deist’s clockmaker God who created the universe and then lost interest in it. Rather, Jefferson “believed in a God of providence who was active in his world and was guiding human affairs” (Sanford, 1984, p. 93). He frequently spoke of divine providence, such as in the concluding sentence of the Declaration of Independence: “...with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, & our sacred honor.” Similarly, in his first inaugural address, Jefferson invoked the blessing of “that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the Universe,” and in his second inaugural address, he sought “the favor of that Being in whose hands we are,…[and] who has covered our infancy with his providence, and our riper years with his wisdom and power” (quoted in Gaustad, 1986, p. 293). E.S. Gaustad (1986), a student of Jefferson’s religious views, considers such statements to be sincere expressions of Jefferson’s religious convictions rather than hollow rhetoric. Although Jefferson believed in providence, he did not believe in revelation—the direct transmission of messages or directives to humans by God. So, from his student days at William and Mary until his death, Jefferson believed in a benevolent God who guides our destiny with His providence, but who does not communicate with us directly. I will argue that an understanding of this religious outlook helps explain Jefferson’s attitude toward certain scientific issues that I explore in this paper, particularly the compulsion he felt to write a memoir about Megalonyx. The Entanglement of Paleontology and Patriotism in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia The esoteric debates of the late eighteenth century about extinction and other aspects of natural history were taking place within the context of very dramatic geopolitical events. The American colonies declared their independence from Britain

Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history and created the United States of America in 1776; France formally recognized the United States in 1778 and declared war on Britain; and the Revolutionary War was fought, finally ending in 1781. Of course, Thomas Jefferson was highly engaged in politics during this period, serving as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, writing the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, and serving as governor of the new state of Virginia. It is surprising, perhaps, that he had any time at all to think about fossil quadrupeds during these years, but it should not be surprising that some of the paleontological thoughts he did have were entangled with his politics. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Buffon had been writing about the similarities and differences between animals of the Old World and those of the New World. Upon considering the New World mountain lion, or cougar, which has no mane and is smaller than Old World lions, he concluded that New World animals in general are small, weak, and inferior, compared to their counterparts in the Old World (Gerbi, 1955). In the cases of the largest of the Old World animals, the New World had no counterparts at all. “Elephants belong to the Old Continent,” Buffon wrote, “and are not found in the New…one cannot even find there any animal that can be compared to the elephant for size or shape” (quoted in Gerbi, 1973, p. 4). Nor did the New World have rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, camels, or giraffes. Domestic animals that had been introduced into the Americas by Europeans were reported by Buffon to be smaller and weaker than those in Europe. Even American Indians were claimed by Buffon to be small, mentally inferior, and to suffer diminished virility, in comparison to Europeans. “In the savage,” Buffon wrote, “the organs of generation are small and feeble. He has no hair, no beard, no ardour for the female…His sensations are less acute [than those of Europeans]; and yet he is more cowardly and timid” (quoted in Chinard, 1947, p. 31). Such views on America occur in Buffon’s 1749 book Théorie de la Terre (Theory of the Earth), and in a somewhat modified form in various subsequent publications. In his last major publication, Des Époques de la Nature, published in 1778, Buffon downplayed the degeneration of American Indians and also nonhuman animals, but by then other French authors had expanded the degeneracy idea beyond even Buffon’s original concept (Semonin, 2000). The explanation for all of this New World inferiority, Buffon reasoned, was the cold temperatures and high humidity of the American continents (Gerbi, 1973). Buffon reasoned that some continents, particularly the Americas, had cooled more than others. Some mammal species, such as elephants, had been created much larger than the contemporaneous versions, but as the Earth became colder, they became progressively smaller. Fossil mammoths from Siberia, in Buffon’s scenario, represented the giant ancestors of modern elephants who lived at a time when Siberia had a tropical climate. The climate in America had deteriorated beyond the conditions under which elephants and other large animals could survive at all. This view of the New World as an unhealthy land with a degenerate fauna became widely accepted in eighteenth-century France (Gerbi, 1973).

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Buffon’s concept of New World degeneracy was an element of his “environmentalist” view of life. It incorporated the novel notion that the appearance and vigor of a species of plant or animal would change in response to the “conditions of existence” within which it found itself. Each species had a set of optimal conditions under which it would thrive, with the best circumstances for many species, of course, being those of north-central France. Buffon was interested in the degree to which deviations from optimal conditions affected the well-being of individuals of a particular species. The process of degeneracy was reversible, in his view. If one were to move, say, North American cougars to the Old World, Buffon would expect them to develop manes and grow larger, like the African lions from which they had degenerated. There is no evidence that Jefferson rejected Buffon’s environmentalist ideas per se. He apparently only objected to Buffon’s specific inferences about the conditions of existence in North and South America being suboptimal compared to those in the Old World. Buffon’s New-World degeneracy theory, and Jefferson’s obsession with proving it wrong, is a complex story with interesting subplots that I cannot adequately explore in this paper. See Chinard (1947), Gerbi (1973), and Semonin (2000) for more detailed accounts of this episode. Suffice it to say that, as an American patriot with a keen interest in natural history, Jefferson found Buffon’s degeneracy theory to be not only completely wrong, but also politically dangerous and personally offensive. During and after the Revolutionary War, Jefferson was all too aware that the fledgling American democracy desperately needed financial and military support from France, where Buffon’s writings were most influential. Jefferson was promoting the image of America as an energetic young country with a bright economic and political future, while Buffon was popularizing the perception that America is an excessively cold and humid continent where big animals cannot survive, domestic animals become scrawny, and men become stupid and lose their sexual vigor. So, for a combination of overlapping scientific and political reasons, during the 1880s and 1890s, Jefferson devoted much effort toward discrediting Buffon’s theory of American degeneracy (Gerbi, 1973; Cohen, 1995). While the Revolutionary War continued to rage, Jefferson served two consecutive one-year terms as governor of Virginia, from 1779 to 1781. During that time the French consul in Philadelphia circulated a questionnaire among the states, as part of an intelligence-gathering campaign, asking a broad range of questions about natural resources and the characteristics of the population within each state. Jefferson decided to personally write a response to the questionnaire, but it wasn’t until he left the governor’s office that he had time to devote to it. In the summer of 1781, with the duties of governor finally behind him, Jefferson wrote a lengthy response to the French questionnaire. During 1782–1783, he expanded his response into a book titled Notes on the State of Virginia. Writing this book provided Jefferson with an opportunity to formulate and express his views on a wide variety of subjects. For example, although he continued to own slaves, Jefferson condemned the practice of slavery and advocated its

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abolishment. He also proposed that a new constitution be drafted for Virginia, with, among other provisions, a separation of church and state. Most relevant for the purposes of this paper, Jefferson used Notes on the State of Virginia as a vehicle to forcefully discredit Buffon’s pernicious theory of American degeneracy. It is in Notes that Jefferson’s paleontological and biogeographical ideas can be seen to have merged with his completeness-of-nature-based belief structure into a comprehensive worldview that was completely compatible with his patriotic political agenda, and which stayed with him, only slightly modified, for the rest of his life. Jefferson’s knowledge of American natural history and ethnography allowed him confidently to dismiss Buffon’s degeneracy theory; if Buffon was so wrong about the degeneracy of American quadrupeds and Indians, why couldn’t he be equally wrong about the extinction of the American incognitum? Buffon had never set foot in North or South America, and he certainly had no clear concept of the remoteness of the North American wilderness. Extinction of the American incognitum and the degeneracy of other American animals were two sides of the same axe. Together they undercut the image of America as a vibrant land with a bright future, and Jefferson was determined to prove them both wrong. By far the longest chapter of Notes, comprising fully one quarter of the two-hundred-page book, is devoted to natural history. That chapter is essentially a double-barreled rebuttal of Buffon’s theory of American degeneracy and his assertion that the American incognitum is extinct. Unapologetically expanding the scope of his book far beyond the boundaries of Virginia, Jefferson included three tables with the names and weights of aboriginal and domesticated quadrupeds of America and Europe. He used these data to aggressively attack Buffon’s assertions, mentioning him by name, or referring to him as “the Count,” at least twenty times within the chapter. The first species in Jefferson’s first table is “mammoth” (referring to the “American incognitum”). The following passage, laced with the familiar eighteenth-century imagery of the “broken link,” is Jefferson’s justification for including “mammoth” on a list of extant species: The bones of the Mammoth which have been found in America, are as large as those found in the old world. It may be asked, why I insert the Mammoth, as if it still existed? I ask in return, why I should omit it, as if it did not exist? Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.2 To add to this, the traditionary testimony of the Indians, that this animal still exists in the northern and western parts of America, would be adding the light of a taper to that of the meridian sun. Those parts still remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed by us, or by others for us. He may as well exist there now, as he did formerly where we find his bones. (Jefferson, 1787, in Peterson, M., ed., 1984, p. 176) 2 As mentioned already, the dodo had become extinct in the seventeenth century. Although this extinction was well known, and Jefferson almost certainly knew about it, it was not compatible with his completeness-of-nature worldview. For this reason, presumably, he never mentioned it in his writings.

The “traditionary testimony of the Indians,” which Jefferson used to shore up his philosophically based argument against extinction as a general phenomenon, refers to an earlier passage of Notes in which Jefferson related the story of meeting with a delegation of warriors of the Delaware tribe and asking them about the mammoth, or “big buffalo.” As described by Jefferson, upon being asked this question one of the Delaware warriors immediately assumed “an attitude of oratory,” and he related to Jefferson a tribal legend about “tremendous animals” that once had lived in the Ohio River Valley and that were said to still be living beyond the Great Lakes. Each of the three lists of quadrupeds that Jefferson included in Notes was designed to refute one or another aspect of Buffon’s theory of American degeneracy. Jefferson’s Table I (not reproduced here) lists the names and maximum weights (where available) of aboriginal species that occurred in both America and Europe. For six of these species, Jefferson listed weights of the largest known specimens from both sides of the Atlantic; in five of the six cases, the weight of the American representative was greater than that of the European, and in some cases, the American animal was much heavier than its European counterpart. For example, the American bear is shown as weighing 410 pounds, while the European bear is listed as weighing only 153.7 pounds. Jefferson used this table to argue that Buffon was wrong about American quadrupeds being smaller than Old World varieties. Jefferson’s Table II (not reproduced here) listed species of quadrupeds endemic to either Europe or America. The list of American species is more than four times longer than the list of European species. Jefferson’s description and interpretation of this list are as follows: The result is, that there are 18 quadrupeds peculiar to Europe; more than four times as many, to wit 74, peculiar to America; that the first of these [the tapir] weighs more than the whole column of the Europeans; and consequently this second table disproves the second member of the assertion, that the animals peculiar to the new world are on a smaller scale, so far as that assertion relied on European animals for support: and it is in full opposition to the theory which makes the animal volume to depend on the circumstances of heat and moisture. (Jefferson, 1787, in Peterson, M., ed., 1984, p. 179–180)

In Jefferson’s Table III (not reproduced here), he listed the names and weights (where available) of domesticated species of quadrupeds in both Europe and America. In only one case, the cow, did he show the weight of both American and European animals; the American cow is listed as weighing 2500 pounds, while the European cow is listed as weighing only 763 pounds. Jefferson argued that any differences that might be observed in the size of domesticated animals in Europe and America were due to the care and feeding provided by the farmer, not to climatic differences. He concluded that “the climate of America will preserve the races of domestic animals as large as the European stock from which they are derived” (Jefferson, 1787, in Peterson, M., ed., 1984, p. 182).

Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history Jefferson used his personal knowledge of American Indians to combat Buffon’s claims of degeneracy among New World natives. He argued that civilization alone, and not climatic differences, could account for the differences between Europeans and Native Americans. Jefferson in Paris Jefferson finished writing Notes on the State of Virginia in 1783, but he did not rush it into print. Concerned about the reaction to his proposals for the separation of church and state in a new Virginia constitution, as well as the predictable negative response of influential people in slave-holding states to his position on slavery, he put the manuscript aside for a few months. In the summer of 1784, Jefferson traveled to France to join the American legation headed by Benjamin Franklin. Within Jefferson’s baggage was his unpublished manuscript of Notes, along with the skin of a large cougar that he had bought for sixteen dollars in a Philadelphia hatter’s shop (Semonin, 2000). He hoped to use both the book and the cougar skin to assist in disabusing Buffon and other Europeans of the idea of American degeneracy. In the spring of 1785, shortly before he replaced Franklin as the American ambassador to France, Jefferson paid a Parisian printer to print, in English, a small run of two hundred copies of his book, which he published anonymously. He discreetly distributed these among a small circle of friends and acquaintances in France and America (Semonin, 2000). One copy was transmitted to Buffon, whom Jefferson had not yet met. Although Buffon may never have read it, toward the end of 1785, he did invite the new American ambassador to dine with him at his country house at Montbard, in Burgundy. Jefferson was introduced to Buffon as the Mr. Jefferson who had challenged his views about America in Notes on the State of Virginia. In response, Buffon reportedly reached to a bookshelf for a copy of his own latest book, Des Époques de la Nature, and presented it to Jefferson. “When Mr. Jefferson shall have read this,” he said in French, “he will be perfectly satisfied that I am right” (Schachner, 1951, p. 285). Jefferson in turn presented Buffon with the sixteen-dollar cougar skin, which precipitated a lively discussion about the relative size of American and European quadrupeds. Being a gracious host, Buffon conceded some points to Jefferson concerning the presence of this or that species in America, promising to correct the errors in the next edition of Époques, but his belief in the general correctness of his theory of degeneracy was not shaken. The case of the American incognitum, and whether or not it is extinct, was apparently never discussed (Semonin, 2000). Following his meeting with Buffon, Jefferson was as determined as ever to disprove the theory of degeneracy of American quadrupeds. He wrote to friends back home, asking them to send him the skins, bones, and antlers of various species of ungulates, with the intention of having them stuffed to their full dimensions in Paris, and presenting them to Buffon. Before leaving America, he had asked the governor of New Hampshire to send him the skin, bones, and antlers of the largest New Hampshire

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moose that could be found. The moose parts finally arrived in Paris, along with a bill for more than forty-six pounds sterling. Jefferson was stunned by the expense, and, although it was a very big animal—about seven feet tall, it was not a magnificent specimen. Most of the hair had fallen out of the skin. However, no moose of such size had ever been reported from Europe, so Jefferson was very pleased to be able to present it to Buffon. Buffon was apparently impressed, and he admitted to Jefferson that his statements about the diminutive size of American quadrupeds required some revision (Schachner, 1951). However, a few months after receiving Jefferson’s giant moose, Buffon died, in April of 1788. So Jefferson never had the satisfaction of seeing a published retraction by Buffon of his views on the degeneracy of New World animals. Although he had a contentious relationship with Buffon, Jefferson enjoyed his time in France and developed many friendships with French citizens. His close association with France and his alleged pro-French inclinations were later used against him by political enemies at home. In every copy of the privately distributed, 1785 printing of Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had written a restraint against its unauthorized publication. However, one copy came into the possession of an unscrupulous French printer who had it translated into French and was preparing to publish it. Jefferson could not prevent its publication, but he was invited to correct the proofs. He greatly disliked the translation and begrudgingly corrected the worst passages. This French translation was published in 1786. Meanwhile, the informal reviews of the copies Jefferson had privately distributed the previous year were mostly favorable. With the French translation in press—with Jefferson’s name on it—there was no reason to delay publishing a proper English edition. So he arranged for such an edition with a printer in London, and it was finally published in the summer of 1787. This is the version upon which all later printings are based (Schachner, 1951; Semonin, 2000). End of the Age of Enlightenment and Jefferson’s Return to America If there is a single event that symbolizes the end of the European Enlightenment, it is the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, which triggered the 10 year French Revolution. Jefferson, still the American ambassador in Paris, was shocked by these events. He struggled to maintain American neutrality and not get caught up in partisan politics, but it was not easy. Life in France was also becoming dangerous. Jefferson’s house in Paris was broken into and burgled three times (Schachner, 1951). When the French Revolution erupted, Jefferson had been in France for more than four years. Even before the beginning of the Revolution, he had been planning to return home for a few months, to attend to personal affairs in Virginia. His wife Martha had died in 1782, and his two daughters, Martha (called Patsy) and Mary, ages 17 and 11, respectively, were with him in France, along with some servants. Of Jefferson’s six children, Patsy

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and Mary were the only two who survived beyond childhood.3 After the storming of the Bastille, Jefferson was understandably anxious to get his daughters out of harm’s way, so he arranged for a five- to six-month leave of absence to take Patsy and Mary home and also to take care of personal business. He had planned to return to Paris and resume his duties, but when he arrived home, in November of 1789, he found a letter from President George Washington. Washington’s first term as president had begun in April, but he had not yet completed his cabinet. His letter requested that Jefferson be his secretary of state. Jefferson reluctantly accepted that post, and he never returned to France. The Madrid Megatherium During Jefferson’s years in France, in addition to the publication of his Notes on the State of Virginia and his interactions with Buffon about the supposed degeneracy of American animals, there was one peculiar incident that occurred concerning the interpretation of fossil quadrupeds. It seemed so unimportant at the time that Jefferson evidently completely forgot about it, but it foreshadowed a very significant later event in Jefferson’s scientific life. A few months before he left France, Jefferson received a letter from William Carmichael, the American chargé d’affaires in Madrid. In addition to communicating to Jefferson various items of interest concerning Spanish politics, Carmichael included a sketch and written description (in awkward English), drawn and written by an unidentified Spanish anatomist. The object that had been sketched and described was the skeleton of a large fossil quadruped that had been discovered in South America, near Buenos Aires (Fig. 2). The bones had been sent to the Royal Museum by a Dominican priest, in response to orders from King Charles III of Spain directing Spaniards in the provinces and colonies to search for objects that would bring prestige to the museum (Boyd, 1958). The bones had been reassembled by a museum preparator named Juan Bautista Brú. The resulting display was the first mounting of a fossil skeleton anywhere in the world (Boyd, 1958). The handwriting on the sketch matched that of the written description, but mistakes in the description indicate that it was not Brú himself, but perhaps one of his anatomy students, who had sketched the skeleton, written the description, and passed them on to Carmichael (Boyd et al., 1958). Carmichael’s explanation to Jefferson of the sketch and description are as follows: I also inclose…a discription of the Skeleton of an Animal discovered lately in Spanish America. I supposed these to be objects of Curiosity to you, the Latter is merely for yourself, for the Academy of Natural history here, will soon publish an account of this Animal and the person who furnishes me with the inclosed Sketch and notes desires that his Observations should not be made public. (Carmichael to Jefferson, 26 January 1789, quoted in Boyd et al., 1958, p. 501–502) 3 Of course, this does not include the six children of Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemmings, whom Jefferson may have fathered.

Figure 2. Sketch of the Madrid skeleton sent to Jefferson by William Carmichael in 1789. From the Thomas Jefferson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

We now know that the skeleton represents an extinct giant ground sloth, later named Megatherium by Georges Cuvier (Fig. 1) (Rudwick, 1997). Megatherium was a huge animal, the size of a small elephant. To the unidentified Spanish anatomist who wrote the description, there were only three animal groups to which this animal could belong: elephants, hippopotamuses, and rhinoceroses. No other groups of giant terrestrial quadrupeds were known to exist, and yet the anatomy of the skeleton did not permit it to fit comfortably into any of these groups. Within the eighteenth-century worldview of the anatomist, it was inconceivable that an entire taxonomic group of giant animals had formerly existed and was now extinct. In the light of Jefferson’s exchanges with Buffon concerning the alleged small size of New World quadrupeds, it is somewhat surprising that Jefferson did not express any excitement about the discovery of a previously unknown, elephant-size quadruped in South America. Although the dimensions (in “Spannish yards”) of individual bones were included in the written description, there was no scale on the sketch (Fig. 2). Jefferson may simply not have realized the huge size of the skeleton. He replied to Carmichael, thanking him for the “interesting papers,” but he did not specifically refer to the Madrid skeleton, either to Carmichael or anyone else, until after its likeness reappeared in a Philadelphia bookshop eight years later. Even then, Jefferson apparently did not remember receiving the sketch from Carmichael (Boyd, 1958). The anticipated published description by Brú of the Madrid skeleton was delayed. In 1794, Brú had a falling out with the museum’s administration, and he left, probably taking his unpublished engravings and descriptions of the skeleton with him. The following year, a French official named Philippe-Rose Raumé was passing through Madrid, and he somehow came into possession of Brú’s unpublished plates. Boyd (1958) has suggested that a disgruntled Brú may have given the plates to Raumé, with the understanding that they would be published

Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history in France. Raumé brought the plates to Paris, where they were taken to the newly reorganized and renamed Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, the greatest natural history museum in the world at that time (Rudwick, 1997). The task of preparing an article for publication about the Madrid skeleton fell to a young man who had just obtained a junior position at the museum as understudy to an undistinguished elderly professor of animal anatomy named Mertrud (Rudwick, 1997). The young naturalist—Georges Cuvier (1769–1832)— was twenty-six years old in 1795 when he moved to Paris from a chateau in Normandy where he had been employed as a tutor for an aristocratic family. His timing was perfect. Although Cuvier had the support of a prominent young Parisian naturalist, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), he was not well known in Paris. Just a year or two earlier, his prospects for establishing a career in science would have been dim. Prior to the revolution, positions in scientific institutions in France were obtained through a network of privilege and political patronage. However, that network was disrupted by the Reign of Terror, the most violent phase of the revolution, during which ~18,000 people were executed. The Reign of Terror ended in 1794 with the establishment of a new government that was more supportive of the sciences, and of merit-based appointments, than previous revolutionary governments had been. The old Royal Botanical Garden (Jardin du Roi) and the affiliated Royal Museum (Cabinet du Roi) were reorganized as the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, and the talented, young Cuvier was in the right place at the right time to obtain a modest position (Rudwick, 1997). Cuvier’s first publication as an employee of the museum, and his first in vertebrate paleontology, was the description and interpretation of the Madrid skeleton, which, of course, he had not personally examined. His short paper, titled (translated from the French) “Note on the Skeleton of a Very Large Species of Quadruped, Hitherto Unknown Found in Paraguay and Deposited in the Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid,” was published in 1796 in the Megasin Encyclopédique (Rudwick, 1997). Although Cuvier is listed as “editor,” more than half of the paper consists of Cuvier’s discussion of the animal’s taxonomic affinities. Brú’s name does not appear on the paper at all. Cuvier named the species represented by the skeleton Megatherium americanum. Later in 1796, Brú’s plates and description of the skeleton were published in Spain, along with a Spanish translation of Cuvier’s paper. There is no evidence that Brú felt upstaged by Cuvier. Rudwick (1997) has suggested, in fact, that Brú may have welcomed Cuvier’s contribution to the interpretation of the skeleton. Because of the extensive comparative collection of skulls and bones that Cuvier had available to him in Paris, including many from North and South America, he was perhaps uniquely prepared to recognize the taxonomic affinities of Megatherium. On the basis of its distinctive claws and teeth, he correctly placed it within the group of animals (now called xenarthrans) that includes sloths, armadillos, and anteaters. He included in his paper a figure with drawings of three skulls: one of a two-toed tree

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sloth, another of a three-toed tree sloth, and the skull of Megatherium. The similarities are striking, and they left little room for doubt that Megatherium belonged in the same group of animals as the extant species of sloths. Being certain that Megatherium americanum was extinct, Cuvier concluded his paper with the following statement about the scientific significance of the Madrid Megatherium: It adds to the numerous facts that tell us that the animals of the ancient world all differ from those we see on earth today; for it is scarcely probable that, if this animal still existed, such a remarkable species could hitherto have escaped the researches of naturalists.

GEORGES CUVIER AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE FORMER-WORLDS VIEW OF EARTH HISTORY Although the phenomenon of extinction had been widely accepted by many European naturalists at least since the 1770s, Cuvier’s short Megatherium paper, with its reference to extinct animals “of the ancient world,” marks the emergence of a comprehensive new paradigm of Earth history. There is a clear distinction between the worldview of Buffon, the greatest French naturalist of the eighteenth century, and that of Cuvier, the greatest French naturalist of the nineteenth century. Buffon accepted the view that at least one species of quadruped—the American incognitum—had become extinct, but extinction to him was a rare phenomenon. Cuvier, in contrast, saw evidence of extinction everywhere, most prominently in the strata of the Paris Basin, as documented in a landmark study he conducted with his colleague Alexandre Brongniart (1770–1847), published in 1811 (Rudwick, 2005). Also, no elements of Buffon’s views about the degeneracy of New World animals lingered on in the writings of Cuvier. He had personally witnessed the French Revolution, and in the stratigraphic record he saw evidence of revolutions in Earth history. Cuvier built his theory of Earth history on the concept that occasional catastrophes had wiped out entire “former worlds” of plants and animals. It was Cuvier, more than anyone else, whose writings on fossil quadrupeds swept away the completeness-of-nature worldview (Fig. 1) and introduced a new paradigm of Earth history in which Earth was seen to have been inhabited by a succession of strange and wonderful organisms that had become extinct. The violence and death associated with the French Revolution seemed to increase the credibility of this new view among Europeans. An early manifestation of this new Cuvierian paradigm in the Anglophone world is the 1804 publication in England of the first volume of a three-volume, popular book titled Organic Remains of a Former World by a British physician named James Parkinson (Fig. 1).4 Rudwick (2005, p. 432) has characterized Parkinson’s book as “the first substantial work on fossils in England.” 4 This is the same Parkinson who later described the “shaking palsy” that bears his name today.

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THE MEGALONYX MEMOIR: JEFFERSON’S RENEWED DEFENSE OF THE COMPLETENESS-OF-NATURE WORLDVIEW Until 1797, Jefferson had no knowledge of the work being done by Cuvier on the Madrid skeleton and other fossil quadrupeds. When Jefferson left France, Cuvier was a twenty-year-old tutor in Normandy, so they never met. From 1790 through 1793, Jefferson served as President Washington’s secretary of state, but early in Washington’s second term, which began in March of 1793, Jefferson resigned to return to private life at Monticello. “No circumstance,” Jefferson wrote to his successor Edmund Randolph, “will ever more tempt me to engage in anything public” (Jefferson to Randolph, 7 September 1794). However, his withdrawal from public life lasted less than three years; in 1796, Jefferson consented to be nominated by the Democratic-Republican Party to run for president against John Adams, the Federalist candidate. From the time Jefferson and his entourage of daughters and servants sailed from France in October of 1789 until the spring of 1796, there is no indication that he devoted much thought to fossils, extinction, or the degeneracy of New World quadrupeds. However, in May of 1796, shortly before his return to public life, he received in the post a surprise package that immediately carried him back to his debates with Buffon a decade earlier. The package had been sent by an acquaintance named John Stuart. It contained a leg bone and two foot bones of a large, mysterious animal. An accompanying letter explained that the bones had come from a cave in western Virginia that had been excavated for its saltpeter. Stuart suggested that the animal “probabelly was of the Lion kind,” not only because of the claw, but also because “a perfect figure of that animal [was] carved upon a rock near the confluence of the Great Kenawha” (Stuart to Jefferson, 11 April 1796). It is clear from Jefferson’s reply, reproduced in full below, that his slumbering interest in fossil quadrupeds was jolted awake by the package of fossil bones. SIR Monticello May 26. 96. I have great acknolegements to make you for your favor of April 11, which came to hand a few days ago with the bones you were pleased also to send, to wit the leg bone and two phalanges of the toes of the animal mentioned in your letter. One of these (the claw) was broke, but so that we could put it together. This animal is certainly hitherto unknown, and seems, from the dimensions of these bones, to have the same pre-eminence over the lion, which the big Buffalo or Mammoth has over the elephant. They furnish a victorious fact against the idle dreams of some European philosophers who pretend that animal nature in the new world is a degeneracy from that of the old. If the big buffalo [were] an Elephant, as Buffon would have us believe, it was surely an elephant improved, for it was of 4. or 5. times his size. So if his followers (in order to support their doctrine of a central heat in the earth) should chuse to consider the animal now discovered as a lion, they must admit it is a lion improved and not degenerated. I consider these bones as a great acquisition, and shall make a point of communicating the discovery and description of them to the learned on both sides of the Atlantic. I only defer it till I can learn whether a hope exists of finding any other of the bones, as I would wish that the first information should be exact and as complete as possible. Has there ever been any other remains of

this species found any where? I must look to you, Sir, to complete the knowlege of this animal for us as you have begun it, by giving me all the further information you can, and sending what other bones can be got of it, and to be so good as to inform me by letter whether any thing more may be expected, that I may decide whether I ought to delay giving an account of it. I am with great esteem Sir your most obedt. servt. TH. JEFFERSON

When Jefferson wrote this letter, Buffon had been dead for eight years, and Buffon’s last major publication had been ten years prior to his death. His Enlightenment-inspired worldview was fading away in the twilight of the eighteenth century, yet Jefferson still spoke of Buffon in the present tense, as if Jefferson was about to present him with the seven-foot-tall moose from New Hampshire. Jefferson seems to have been especially energized by the prospect of presenting a description and interpretation of the newly discovered bones to the American Philosophical Society. On 3 July 1796, he wrote a letter to society president David Rittenhouse about the bones. Rittenhouse, an astronomer, was a member of Jefferson’s “community of philosophers,” as defined by Boorstin (1948). Still imagining the bones to be those of a large predatory feline—as first suggested by Stuart—in his letter to Rittenhouse, Jefferson referred to “the bones of an animal of the family of the lion, tyger, panther &c. but as preeminent over the lion in size as the Mammoth is over the elephant.” He added, “I have now in my possession the principal bones of a leg, the claws, and other phalanges, and hope soon to receive some others.” In this last passage, Jefferson seems to have been exaggerating the number of bones he had obtained. At the time, he wrote this letter he had in his possession only the original three bones he had received in May from Stuart: one ungual (claw), one phalanx (toe bone), and a radius (which he misidentified as a tibia). I interpret this exaggeration as a measure of Jefferson’s excitement about this project, and his optimism that more bones would be forthcoming. Rittenhouse, it turned out, never read Jefferson’s letter. He had died a week before Jefferson wrote it. The response came instead from Rittenhouse’s nephew, Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton, another member of Jefferson’s “community of philosophers.” Barton was editing the fourth volume of the society’s Transactions, and he invited Jefferson to submit a description of the bones for publication in that volume. However, Jefferson preferred to wait until he had more bones, so that he could better estimate the size of the animal. Responding to Jefferson’s high level of interest, Stuart visited the cave and excavated more bones. He finally sent these off to Jefferson in mid-July of 1796. Jefferson did not acknowledge receipt of these bones until November 10, so he apparently waited for them for several months. The final collection that Jefferson had to work with consisted of twelve bones: a small fragment of a femur (but not the complete femur that Jefferson had hoped to acquire), a radius (at first misidentified by Jefferson as a tibia, but correctly identified in Jefferson’s published memoir), an ulna, three unguals (claws), and six additional phalanges and metapodials (toe and

Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history foot bones). A photograph of this assemblage of bones (minus the femur fragment) is shown in Figure 3. The femur fragment is inexplicably missing from the collection, which is now housed at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Caspar Wistar, in his report on this assemblage of bones, did not mention the “femur fragment,” but it was apparently present in the collection at that time. In 1802, Charles Willson Peale sent casts of the bones to Cuvier in Paris. Cuvier did mention the “femur fragment,” but he suggested that it may actually be a fragment of a humerus rather than of a femur (Oberg, 2002). Having no skull or teeth to work with, and no collection of identified bones from related animals to compare with the bones from the western Virginia cave, it was not a simple task for Jefferson to identify the animal and determine its size, but he obviously relished the challenge. As is often the case in vertebrate paleontology, he wished that he had more bones to work with. In his November 10th response to Stuart, Jefferson wrote the following: “My anxiety to obtain a thigh bone is such that I defer communicating what we have to the Philosophical Society in the hope of adding that bone to the collection. We should then be able to fix the stature of the animal without going into conjecture and calculation as we should possess a whole limb from the haunch bone to the claw inclusive.” However, the desired femur never turned up. Because Jefferson actually had two forelimb bones—a radius and an ulna—rather than one forelimb bone and one hind limb bone as he mistakenly thought, it was actually a humerus he would have needed to reassemble a complete leg, rather than a femur. While Jefferson was anxiously awaiting more bones from Stuart, he was also waiting to find out whether he would become the next president of the United States. Not until the first day of the new year did he finally learn that he had lost the election (Boyd, 1958). Jefferson received 68 electoral votes to Adams’s 71. The framers of the Constitution had naively attempted to avoid the conflict of political parties by creating a system by which the losing candidate became the winner’s vice president (later changed with the 12th amendment). So Jefferson became Adams’s vice president. As leader of the opposition party, Jefferson knew that he would not play a significant role in the Adams administration, so he had no great enthusiasm for the vice presidency. However, this situation presented an opportunity for the officers of the American Philosophical Society. With the death of David Rittenhouse the previous June, they had lost their president, and they had their sights on Jefferson. As soon as they learned that Mr. Jefferson would be spending a considerable amount of time in Philadelphia (the nation’s capital at the time), but that as vice president he would not have an onerous schedule of official duties, they elected him president of the society. The society’s headquarters were also in Philadelphia. Jefferson willingly accepted this position, and he valued it much more highly than he valued his position as vice president of the United States. “[T]he suffrage of a body which comprehends whatever the American world has of distinction in philosophy and science in general,” he wrote to the officers of the society, “is the most flat-

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Figure 3. The collection of bones Jefferson had to work with to describe and interpret the animal he named Megalonyx, minus a small fragment of femur or humerus, which has disappeared. The two long bones are forelimb bones: a radius (top of photo) and an ulna (bottom of photo). The short bones consist of three unguals (claws) and six metapodials and phalanges (foot and toe bones). According to Jefferson’s measurements, the ulna is 20.1 inches long and the longest claw is 7.5 inches long. The bones are housed in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Photo by Rowland.

tering incident of my life, and that to which I am most sensible” (Boyd, 1958, p. 424). Beginning in May of 1796, when he had received the first package of bones, Jefferson had discussed his intention of presenting a report about them to the American Philosophical Society. He was repeatedly invited by Barton to publish a description in the society’s Transactions, but for several months he postponed writing such a document. However, early in 1797, three factors conspired to compel Jefferson to finally sit down and begin writing. First, the presidential election had finally been resolved, and he knew that he would not be burdened with the responsibilities of the American presidency. Politically, this must have been very disappointing, but it was also a liberating turn of events. Second, he was now the president-elect of the American Philosophical Society, and was expected to preside at the upcoming meeting in March. That meeting would be the perfect opportunity for Jefferson—as the Society’s new president—to finally present a scientific paper on the exciting collection of bones that he had been telling people about for several months. Third, on 6 February 1797, he received a letter from John Stuart telling him that no more bones had been found, and no more were likely to be found (Oberg, 2002); thus, there was no longer any excuse for delaying the presentation of the description and interpretation of the bones at hand. So, with only a few weeks remaining before he would be traveling to Philadelphia to become vice president of the United States and president of the American Philosophical Society, Jefferson finally started work on the only scientific paper he would ever write: “A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia.” Before leaving Monticello for Philadelphia on February 20, he completed what he mistakenly considered to be the finished draft.

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The editors of volume 29 of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, which includes documents written during this portion of his life, concluded that Jefferson most probably began writing his memoir no earlier than February 6, when he received the disappointing news from Stuart that no more bones would be forthcoming (Oberg, 2002). If that is true, then he wrote the entire manuscript in about two weeks, while also preparing his household and plantation for his first extended absence in nearly four years. Even if he wrote portions of the manuscript during the last half of January, as suggested by Boyd (1958), there is no doubt that he wrote it quickly. Jefferson had referred to the animal as “the Great-claw,” or “Megalonyx,” as early as 3 July 1796, in his letter to Rittenhouse. He continued using this terminology—along with a masculine gender—in the memoir: “I will venture to refer to him by the name of the Great-claw, or Megalonyx,” Jefferson wrote, “to which he seems sufficiently entitled by the distinguished size of that member” (Jefferson, 1799, p. 248). The overt objective of Jefferson’s Megalonyx memoir was to describe this mysterious animal, and thus expand the knowledge of the natural history of Virginia and America, but that is not what drove Jefferson to write it. Jefferson had no formal training in anatomy, and he was certainly aware that he was not the most qualified person in America to properly describe these bones in an anatomical sense. That person was Caspar Wistar, a Philadelphia physician who taught anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania. Wistar was also a vice president of the American Philosophical Society. In fact, after Jefferson delivered his Megalonyx manuscript and bones to the society and became its president, Jefferson apparently requested Wistar to study the bones and write a separate paper about them. Wistar’s paper, which was published in the same volume (volume 4) of the American Philosophical Society Transactions as Jefferson’s (Wistar, 1799), is beautifully illustrated with detailed engravings of all of the bones (Fig. 4), while Jefferson’s memoir contains no illustrations at all. This suggests that Jefferson never considered his paper to be the definitive, formal description of the Megalonyx bones; that was Wistar’s task. George Gaylord Simpson, the most prominent American vertebrate paleontologist of the twentieth century, called Wistar’s Megalonyx paper “a model of cautious, accurate scientific description and inference, an achievement almost incredible in view of the paleontological naïvete of his associates and of the lack of comparative materials” (Simpson, 1942, p. 153). In contrast, Simpson found that Jefferson’s paper “departs from inaccurate observations and proceeds by faulty methods to an erroneous conclusion” (Simpson, 1942, p. 153). I think that this is an unfairly harsh assessment of Jefferson, but it underscores the skill and talent of Wistar. An intriguing and neglected question concerning Jefferson’s Megalonyx memoir is: Why, at this very busy time in his life, was Jefferson driven to personally write a long article about fossil bones? Why didn’t he simply carry the bones to Philadelphia and pass them along to Wistar to describe? Jefferson certainly did not need another publication to pad his résumé; among other signifi-

Figure 4. Engraving of the nine foot, toe, and claw bones of Megalonyx, as published in a paper by Caspar Wistar in volume 4 of the American Philosophical Society Transactions in 1799 (courtesy of the American Philosophical Society). A separate figure illustrated the limb bones. Jefferson’s Megalonyx paper, which had no illustrations of the bones, was published in the same volume of American Philosophical Society Transactions.

cant works, after all, he had written the Declaration of Independence! Why did he need to write a memoir about Megalonyx? The answer, I suggest, is contained within the Megalonyx memoir itself. Like the natural history chapter of Notes on the State of Virginia, the core of Jefferson’s Megalonyx memoir consists of a two-pronged argument: (1) an evidence-based argument against Buffon’s theory of the degeneracy of American quadrupeds, and (2) a philosophically based argument against the phenomenon of extinction. In the former case, Jefferson simply could not resist the urge to defend America from the ghost of Buffon and his theory of New World degeneracy. In the latter case, he felt a duty to protect his own completeness-ofnature worldview from the attack of the extinctionists. Together, these intertwining factors created a moral imperative for Jefferson. I suggest that Jefferson’s strong belief in divine providence caused him to feel the hand of the Creator in the sudden appearance of the Megalonyx bones. They had literally been delivered to him at Monticello, as if he had been chosen by God to interpret them, and he accepted the calling with missionary zeal. Wistar may have been a more skilled anatomist, but Jefferson felt a religious-patriotic obligation to personally reveal the deep significance of the Megalonyx bones. The fact that the bones appeared to represent a huge lion certainly contributed to Jefferson’s fascination with them. Lions had been the animals that had inspired Buffon’s ideas about New World degeneracy in the first place. America’s cougar, Buffon had argued, is a pathetic, maneless, degenerate form of the mighty Old World lion. What sweet justice it would have been for Jefferson to use lion bones from Virginia to destroy Buffon’s theory, once and for all! Following a brief introduction, concerning the history of the discovery of the bones, Jefferson presented his data. Buffon

Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history had published descriptions of African lions, including tables of measurements of various bones. So, near the beginning of his Megalonyx memoir, Jefferson presented a table comparing the measurements of various Megalonyx bones with the measurements of corresponding bones of the African lion, taken from Buffon’s own publication. In every case, the Megalonyx bones are much larger. The largest claw of Megalonyx, for example, is more than five times longer than the longest African lion claw; Jefferson used this difference in claw size as justification for the name “great-claw,” or “Megalonyx.” After discussing the differences in size between certain lion bones and corresponding Megalonyx bones, Jefferson ultimately concluded that “we may safely say, that he was more than three times as large as the lion: that he stood as preeminently at the head of the column of clawed animals as the Mammoth stood at that of the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus: and that he may have been as formidable an antagonist to the mammoth as the lion to the elephant” (Jefferson, 1799, p. 251). Jefferson did not use the size of the Megalonyx bones to argue that American animals are consistently larger than those of the Old World. Although he did include a patriotic statement about the superior grandeur of American natural history, he merely tried to quash the idea that they are smaller: Are we then from all this to draw a conclusion the reverse of that of Monsr. de Buffon, that Nature has formed the larger animals of America, like it’s lakes, it’s rivers and mountains on a greater and prouder scale than in the other hemisphere? Not at all. We are to conclude that she has formed some things large, and some things small on both sides of the earth for reasons which she has not enabled us to penetrate: and that we ought not to shut our eyes upon one half of her facts and build systems on the other half. (Jefferson, 1799, p. 258)

Having used the Megalonyx bones to dispatch Buffon’s degeneracy theory, as well as his general theory of Earth history, Jefferson then turned his sights on the question of extinction. “A difficult question now presents itself,” he wrote, followed by the rhetorical question: “What is become of the Great-claw?” He then proceeded with a lengthy, four-part argument against the conclusion that Megalonyx is extinct, and against extinction as a naturally occurring phenomenon. His first point is that large animals, such as “the Elephant, the Rhinoceros, the lion, the tyger,” tend not to live in country that is thickly inhabited with people. As Europeans began to inhabit Virginia, they would have driven off large animals such as the Megalonyx (Jefferson, 1799, p. 251). Next he argued that the interior of North America is very poorly known. Surely megalonyxes and mammoths could be living in the continent’s unexplored wilderness: In the present interior of our continent there is surely space and range enough for elephants and lions, if in that climate they could subsist; and for mammoths and megalonyxes who may subsist there. Our entire ignorance of the immense country to the West and North West, and of it’s contents, does not authorize us to say what it does not contain. (Jefferson, 1799, p. 252)

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Third, Jefferson related several accounts of Virginia hunters and explorers, some as early as the sixteenth century, who had reported hearing or encountering large, roaring animals. In one such story the adventurers heard “terrible roarings [in the night] of some animal unknown to them…[which] went round and round their camp…their horses were so agonized with fear that they couched down on the earth, and their dogs crept in among them, not daring to bark.” Such fearsome stories of a Megalonyxlike animal were further supported by the presence of a petroglyph “which has always been considered as a perfect figure of a lion” on a rock near the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers (Jefferson, 1799, p. 253). This, of course, was the petroglyph originally mentioned to Jefferson by John Stuart. Jefferson’s fourth and final argument against the extinction of Megalonyx is his philosophical argument against extinction generally. The argument is captured in the following passage, complete with the metaphor of a lost link in nature’s chain: In fine, the bones exist; therefore the animal has existed. The movements of nature are in a never-ending circle. The animal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still probably moving in that train. For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should evanish by piece-meal; a conclusion not warranted by the local disappearance of one or two species of animals, and opposed by the thousands and thousands of instances of the renovating power constantly exercised by nature for the reproduction of all her subjects, animal, vegetable, and mineral. If this animal then has once existed, it is probable on this general view of the movements of nature that he still exists, and rendered still more probable by the relations of honest men applicable to him and to him alone. (Jefferson, 1799, p. 255–256)

There is no difference between the worldview Jefferson defended in his Megalonyx memoir, including his arguments against Buffon’s theory of New World degeneracy, and the worldview he had presented fifteen years earlier in Notes on the State of Virginia. In Notes, he had used the American incognitum to defend his worldview, and in the Megalonyx memoir he used Megalonyx to argue the same points. Jefferson’s Unpleasant Surprise in a Philadelphia Bookshop Jefferson probably completed his Megalonyx manuscript shortly before he and his slave Jupiter departed by carriage from Monticello on 20 February 1797 with the precious bones carefully packed on board. Jupiter drove Jefferson as far as Alexandria, and Jefferson continued on to Philadelphia by himself, taking commercial coaches and staying in inns along the way. The roads and the weather were bad, he missed some connections, took an alternate route by ferry across Chesapeake Bay, and finally arrived in Philadelphia on the evening of March 2, after ten days on the road. Jefferson’s induction as president of the American Philosophical Society was scheduled for the next day, March 3. The inauguration of John Adams as president of the United States, and Jefferson as vice president, was scheduled

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for March 4. The American Philosophical Society induction took place as scheduled on March 3, but, for reasons that are not clear, Jefferson’s memoir was not read aloud on that date. The meeting was adjourned, to be reconvened a week later, on March 10 (Boyd, 1958). During that week, as the new president of the American Philosophical Society and also as the new vice president of the United States, Jefferson doubtless had a busy social schedule and some functions to perform, but he also had two encounters with large quadrupeds—one intentional and the other unintentional. The intentional encounter was with a live Indian elephant that was on display on Market Street, just around the corner from his hotel on Fourth Street; Jefferson paid fifty cents to see the elephant, and he recorded this expense in his memorandum book (Bear and Stanton, eds., 1997).5 The second encounter with a large quadruped caught Jefferson completely by surprise, and it must have hit him like a kick in the teeth. He was apparently browsing in a bookshop when he happened upon a six-month-old, September 1796 issue of a British periodical called The Monthly Magazine. The magazine contained an abstract of an article by Georges Cuvier about a skeleton of a large animal with giant claws on display in a museum in Madrid. The article was illustrated with an engraving of the skeleton (Fig. 5). Of course, this was the Megatherium skeleton that had been described and drawn in the papers Jefferson had received eight years earlier, while he was in Paris, but there is no indication that he remembered the correspondence from Carmichael about it. Upon seeing the engraving of the Madrid skeleton, Jefferson probably very quickly noticed that the limb bones and claws were strikingly similar to those of Megalonyx. However, unlike his collection of Megalonyx bones, the Madrid skeleton had a skull. Most significantly, there were no canine teeth, and no sharp teeth at all, which meant that it was not the skull of a carnivore. Jefferson’s interpretation of Megalonyx as a lion evaporated before his eyes. As observed by Boyd (1958, p. 426), “For [thousands] of years the bones of the megalonyx and the megatherium had lain unnamed and undisturbed on their separate continents. Now, within the space of a single week, they had collided on the streets of Philadelphia.” Jefferson had an embarrassing problem. The memoir that he was about to present to the American Philosophical Society was based on the assumption that Megalonyx was certainly a carnivore and probably a huge lion. His tables showed comparisons between Megalonyx and African lions. Furthermore, the core argument in his memoir—the refutation of Buffon’s theory of degeneracy of New World quadrupeds—was based on the interpretation of Megalonyx as a huge carnivore. Now Jefferson was confronted with evidence that Megalonyx was in fact a giant sloth, and not a carnivore at all. It must have been a devastating discovery, but he didn’t have much time to dwell on it. 5 This elephant was the first proboscidean to set foot on American soil since the extinction of mammoths and mastodons approximately 11,000 yr earlier.

Figure 5. Engraving of the Madrid skeleton (Megatherium americanum) from The Monthly Magazine of September 1796 (from the Library of Congress). This is the image Jefferson discovered in a Philadelphia bookshop in March of 1797.

The date that Jefferson discovered The Monthly Magazine article is not known, but it was probably just a day or two before March 10, when the American Philosophical Society was scheduled to reconvene. March 10 is the date he wrote on the postscript he appended to his memoir. First he went through the entire manuscript and made many changes. Wherever he had identified the animal as belonging to the family of “the lion, tyger, panther &c,” as he had done in his July 3 letter to David Rittenhouse, he emended the text to read “an animal of the clawed kind,” or something comparably generalized (Boyd, 1958) (Fig. 6). He then added a postscript, in which he related his discovery of The Monthly Magazine article that had cast doubt on his interpretation of Megalonyx as a giant cat. “According to analogy then,” Jefferson wrote, “[Megalonyx] probably was not carnivorous, had not the phosphoric eye, nor the lionine roar” (Jefferson, 1799, p. 259). The heavily emended and postscripted manuscript was read at the March 10th meeting of the society by one of the secretaries, while their new president listened, no doubt with some discomfort. While Jefferson was forced to equivocate about the biological affinities of his Megalonyx bones, this incident apparently did not cause him to weaken his resistance to the concept of extinction or to abandon his completeness-of-nature worldview. There is evidence, in fact, that he could not let go of the image of Megalonyx as a lion. In a letter written two months after the American Philosophical Society meeting, Jefferson continued to describe Megalonyx as “a carnivorous animal 4 or 5 times as large as the lion” (Jefferson to Louis of Parma, 23 May 1797). JEFFERSON’S INSTRUCTIONS TO MERIWETHER LEWIS Jefferson was elected president of the United States in 1800, and early in his first term, he began planning to send an expedition up the Missouri River to find a route to the Pacific Ocean

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Figure 6. The first page of Jefferson’s Megalonyx manuscript, showing an alteration in the first sentence in which Jefferson deleted his original identification of the animal as a lion, inserting in its place the words “clawed kind.” The deleted words are “family of the lion, tyger, panther, &c.” Image is from the Library of Congress Web site: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/images/vc94.jpg.

and explore the interior of the continent. Jefferson appointed his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to organize and lead this so-called “corps of discovery,” and, on 20 June 1803, he wrote a long list of instructions to Lewis, concerning the expedition. One of the instructions was to take notice of “the animals of the country generally, & especially those not known in the U.S. the remains or accounts of any which may be deemed rare or extinct.” Although Jefferson uses the word “extinct” in this instruction to Lewis, he does not concede that any species had actually suffered the fate of extinction. Earlier in 1803, in a letter to French naturalist Bernard-Germain-Étienne de Lacépède (1756–1825), Jeffer-

son had written that it is “not improbable that this voyage of discovery will procure us further information of the Mammoth, & of the Megatherium also…” Jefferson’s use of the name Megatherium here, rather than Megalonyx, reflects his acknowledgment that the two are closely related, and that Megatherium may be the appropriate name for both. Later in the same letter, he writes that there are “symptoms of [Megalonyx’s] late and present existence. The route we are exploring will perhaps bring us further evidence of it” (Jefferson to Lacépède, 24 February 1803). In the first few years of the nineteenth century, Jefferson was certainly not alone among Americans in his skepticism

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about extinction, particularly among his own generation. Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), a prominent artist and the organizer of the first natural history museum in North America—and also a member of Jefferson’s “community of philosophers”—in 1801 bought a mastodon skeleton that had been excavated in upstate New York. In harmony with Jefferson, Peale suggested that living representatives of this species might still be alive in remote regions of the continent. However, in 1803, his son Rembrandt Peale (1778–1860) published an account of the mastodon skeleton in which he matter-of-factly described it as extinct (Yochelson, 1991). Rembrandt Peale was twenty-five years old in 1803, with no deep commitment to the worldview of his father and Thomas Jefferson, so it was easy for him to accept extinction as a natural phenomenon. However, it was not just the younger generation of Americans who had accepted extinction in the early 1800s. Prominent Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), expressed an acceptance of extinction in a 1797 letter to Jefferson (Oberg, 2002, p. 284), and Robert R. Livingston, President Jefferson’s minister to France, did the same in 1801 (Oberg, 2007, p. 200, 325–326). RETURN OF THE LEWIS AND CLARK EXPEDITION AND JEFFERSON’S CONTINUED RESISTANCE TO THE CONCEPT OF EXTINCTION The return of Lewis and Clark from the North American wilderness in 1806, without having seen any proboscideans or giant ground sloths, and without having heard any descriptions of such animals from the Indians they met along the way, may have persuaded some of Jefferson’s contemporaries that these animals were truly extinct. For example, in 1807, the year after Lewis and Clark’s return, Benjamin Smith Barton (a member of Jefferson’s “community of philosophers”) reported to the Linnaean Society of Philadelphia that “the continent of NorthAmerica was formerly inhabited by several species of animals, which are now entirely unknown to us, except by their bones, and which, there is reason to believe, now no longer exist” (quoted in Greene, 1984 p. 288). But Jefferson himself continued to resist. In 1811, Brongniart and Cuvier published a colored “geognostic map” of the Paris Basin, and four years later, in 1815, English canal engineer and geologist William Smith published his now-famous colored geologic map of England and Wales. In both cases, the mapmakers had paid close attention to the distinctive fossils that occurred in each rock layer, or, in some cases, the absence of fossils (Rudwick, 2005). The documentation of distinctive faunas in various strata helped to solidify the former-worlds view of Earth history and the occurrence of episodes of extinction. After the publication of these maps, there were no Europeans or Americans writing books or articles about Earth history who did not accept extinction and the formerworlds paradigm, with the exception of biblical literalists. Jefferson, however, stubbornly clung to his completeness-of-nature

worldview. As late as 1818, Jefferson wrote the following in a letter to Dutch émigré Francis Van der Kemp: “It might be doubted whether any particular species of animals or vegetables which ever did exist, has ceased to exist” (quoted in Jackson, 1981, p. 39). This passage is reminiscent of a line from Jefferson’s Megalonyx memoir in which he wrote: “If this animal then has once existed, it is probable on this general view of the movements of nature that he still exists…” In the respect that he continued to reject extinction, even after it was widely accepted in Europe and America, Jefferson was in the camp of the biblical literalists. A biblical literalist named George Bugg, writing in the mid-1820s, rejected extinction on religious grounds. He argued that the fossils that some people interpreted to represent extinct species were actually morphological variants of extant species; he attributed their morphological differences to the effects of different climate, food, and other environmental factors over a period of four to five thousand years (Rupke, 1983). This was essentially the same interpretation proposed by Buffon nearly forty years earlier. In contrast to the biblical literalists, Jefferson was not rejecting extinction because it conflicted with scripture. It was simply not compatible with his worldview. In 1823, Jefferson finally conceded some ground to extinction. Two days before his eightieth birthday, and evidently in a philosophical mood, Jefferson wrote a long letter to John Adams, with whom he had reconciled old political differences and enjoyed a friendly correspondence. In the excerpt provided here, Jefferson eloquently describes his worldview near the end of his life: …I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in it’s parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of it’s composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their course by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the structure of our earth itself, with it’s distribution of lands, waters and atmosphere, animal and vegetable bodies, examined in all their minutest particles, insects mere atoms of life, yet as perfectly organized as man or mammoth, the mineral substances, their generation and uses, it is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms. We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in it’s course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones have come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos. (Jefferson to Adams, 11 April 1823)

Although in this letter Jefferson specifically acknowledges extinction, and he no longer employs the chain metaphor, his worldview is not significantly different from the completenessof-nature paradigm he defended decades earlier in Notes on the State of Virginia and also in his Megalonyx memoir. He certainly

Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history is not describing Cuvier’s worldview, in which extinction is a recurring natural phenomenon. There is a resonance between the following two passages: (1) from the 1823 letter to Adams: “…were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos,” and (2) from his 1797 Megalonyx manuscript: “…if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should evanish by piece-meal.” It is clear from the letter to Adams that Jefferson’s theistic religious views have not been shaken by the necessity of acknowledging that some species have become extinct, and he still views extinction as a rare, unfortunate phenomenon that requires correction by “a superintending power.” To accommodate his worldview with the annoying reality of extinction, Jefferson merely invoked the power of providence, so that extinct species and extinguished stars can be divinely replaced, like replacing broken links in a cosmic chain. Jefferson’s philosophical letter to Adams was written three years before both Jefferson and Adams died. With Jefferson’s passing, the completeness-of-nature worldview—a battered relict of the eighteenth century—itself finally slipped into extinction. THE JEFFERSONIAN WORLDVIEW OF JEAN-BAPTISTE LAMARCK

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1809, when he was sixty-five years old. In his own lifetime, Lamarck’s ideas about evolution were mostly ignored. When he died in poverty in 1829, Cuvier prepared the official eulogy for the Académie des Sciences; it was a mixture of faint praise for Lamarck’s less controversial work, and condemnation for his ideas about evolution (Burlingame, 1973). The only reason Lamarck is moderately well known today is because of the Darwinian revolution of the late nineteenth century, which prompted historians of science to examine the work of Darwin’s antecedents. So Lamarck’s view of the natural world, like Jefferson’s, was a relict of the eighteenth century. WHY WAS JEFFERSON UNABLE TO LET GO OF AN OBSOLETE WORLDVIEW? I propose three factors that collectively compelled Jefferson to cling to an eighteenth-century, completeness-of-nature paradigm, after nearly all European and American intellectuals had moved on to a very different view of the history of life on Earth: (1) cultural isolation, (2) emotional and public commitment to the old paradigm, and (3) personality traits attributable to Jefferson’s birth order and early life experiences. I briefly explore each of these three factors below. Cultural Isolation

The sole prominent nineteenth-century European naturalist who, like Jefferson, can be documented to have clung to an eighteenth-century worldview was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829). Jefferson and Lamarck were almost exact contemporaries—Jefferson was born in 1743 and Lamarck in 1744—so they steeped in the same Enlightenment juices during their most impressionable years of the mid-eighteenth century, and they embraced a very similar, Chain-of-Being–based worldview. This worldview caused both Jefferson and Lamarck to reject extinction on philosophical grounds. The similarities of the worldviews of Jefferson and Lamarck are all the more interesting because Lamarck was a protégé of Buffon, Jefferson’s nemesis. Lamarck is best known today for his pre-Darwinian theory of evolution, which involved the inheritance of acquired characters, a natural tendency toward increasing complexity in organisms, and a sentiment intérieur, or “inner feeling,” that led to the appearance of new organs. It is less well known that it was Lamarck’s philosophical aversion to extinction that drove him to develop a process by which he could imagine species gradually changing over time, rather than becoming extinct (Burlingame, 1973). Buffon’s concept of New World degeneracy does not appear in Lamarck’s writings, but Lamarck’s theory of evolution can be traced back to Buffon’s concept of the degeneration of species, such as lions and elephants, in response to environmental degradation. Lamarck’s radical ideas about evolution developed quite late in his career, when he was in his mid-fifties, and he had no significant following of younger naturalists. His major publication on this topic, Philosophie Zoologique, did not appear until

One reason for Jefferson’s stubbornness might simply be the cultural isolation of America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Industrial Revolution, which began in England in the late eighteenth century, and spread to France on the heels of the French Revolution, had a profound influence on the lives and worldviews of many early nineteenth-century Europeans. However, few Americans had their lives changed by the steam engine and attendant social upheavals until the 1830s. Jefferson, who died in 1826, never saw a train (Ambrose, 1996). The fact that America was still living in an eighteenth-century world, in terms of its culture and economy, throughout Jefferson’s lifetime helps to explain why the completeness-of-nature worldview continued to flourish in the New World a bit longer than it did in Europe. However, this explanation does not apply very well to Jefferson. He was fluent in French, and he maintained an active correspondence with European friends and colleagues. According to Bedini (2002, p. 71), Jefferson “kept abreast of scientific thought and was keenly aware of the advances being made in the arts and sciences on both sides of the Atlantic.” Furthermore, most of Jefferson’s American contemporaries for whom we have documentation of their views on this topic, including two members of his “community of philosophers” (Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Smith Barton), had accepted the concept of extinction by 1807. So, while cultural isolation may have played a minor role in Jefferson’s conservative attitude toward Earth history, it is not a compelling explanation for his protracted resistance. There must be one or more factors unique to Jefferson.

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Emotional and Public Commitment to the Chain-of-Being Worldview A second factor that helps to explain Jefferson’s embrace of an obsolete worldview comes from psychological studies of a person’s commitment to an idea. Psychologist Howard Gardner analyzed the factors that cause some people to stubbornly embrace discredited viewpoints while others do not, and he found that two important factors are emotional commitment and public commitment. “The more emotional one’s commitment to a cause or belief,” he concluded, “the more difficult [it is] to change” (Gardner, 2004, p. 57), and when the commitment has been made in the form of a public pronouncement, personal pride and the perceived importance of maintaining a consistent position “push one toward hugging the theory, however discredited” (Gardner, 2004, p. 57). As I discussed earlier in this paper, Jefferson had a deep emotional investment in his completeness-of-nature worldview; it was intertwined with his religious beliefs and also with his patriotic political agenda. Furthermore, he had strongly and publicly advocated this worldview in his widely read book Notes on the State of Virginia, and again in his Megalonyx memoir. From this psychological perspective, it is understandable that Jefferson was not able to easily abandon this worldview, even as the empirical evidence in support of it became progressively weaker. Birth Order A third factor that probably contributed to Jefferson’s resistance lies within the realm of personality psychology. I suggest that Jefferson’s birth order and early life experience predisposed him to have difficulty abandoning a cherished worldview, even in the face of evidence that it was wrong. Jefferson was the third of eight children, but he was the eldest son. His father Peter Jefferson died when Thomas was fourteen years old, at which point Thomas became the man of the family, taking on additional responsibilities (Schachner, 1951). Following an early education that was fundamentally solid but intellectually uninspired, at the age of sixteen Jefferson enrolled at the College of William and Mary. There he came under the thrall of a charismatic professor named William Small, a Scot who exposed young Jefferson to the intellectual intoxication of the European Enlightenment. In his autobiography, Jefferson wrote that Small “probably fixed the destinies of my life” (quoted in Schachner, 1951, p. 19). Jefferson spent only two years at William and Mary, but during that short interval, his intellectual trajectory—and his worldview—was set. In a study involving data on hundreds of people, Sulloway (1996) persuasively showed that birth order is a strong predictor of a person’s receptivity to radical ideas, whether political or scientific. His data show that firstborns tend to identify closely with parents and authority, resulting in distinctive personality traits, including a resistance to radical ideas. “Firstborns appear to be more similar in their personalities to other firstborns than they are

to their own younger siblings,” Sulloway concluded (Sulloway, 1996, p. 21). Laterborns, in contrast, occupy a much different family niche, which causes them to be much more receptive to new ways of looking at things. Sulloway (1996) compiled a database of 433 people with documented opinions about evolutionary theory (including preDarwinian proposals such as that of Lamarck) from 1700 to 1875. He found that prior to 1859, when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, laterborns, such as Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, were 9.7 times more likely to advocate evolutionary ideas than were firstborns, such as Charles Lyell and Louis Agassiz. After the publication of the Origin, the dynamics of the debate changed, but laterborns were still 4.4 times more likely to support Darwin’s ideas than were firstborns. “Darwinism,” Sulloway (1996, p. xvii) concluded, “[was] led by laterborns and strenuously opposed by firstborns.” With other examples, as well, Sulloway shows that birth order is a powerful predictor of one’s openness to radical scientific ideas, where laterborns are much more likely to be receptive than firstborns. Radical scientific ideas are usually wrong, so this phenomenon does not mean, of course, that laterborns are inherently better scientists than are firstborns. However, scientists who are firstborns are much more likely to make breakthroughs of a technical nature than to propose a radical new idea. James Watson and Francis Crick, for example, who received the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, were both firstborns, as was their chief rival Linus Pauling (Sulloway, 1996). Jefferson was a Watson-and-Crick-type scientist. He was very clever at inventing gadgets and improving the design of other people’s inventions, but he had no flair for bold new scientific ideas. I suggest that Jefferson’s family position, as the eldest son of a father who died when Thomas was young, contributed significantly to the development of strong firstborn personality traits, including a resistance to new scientific ideas that clashed with his religious beliefs and general worldview. Georges Cuvier, the leading proponent of the new “former worlds” paradigm, actually shared some of Jefferson’s firstborn traits. Cuvier had an older brother who died in childhood, so he, like Jefferson, was functionally a firstborn. Cuvier also had a younger brother, Frédéric Cuvier, whose scientific ideas were described by his biographer as “often audacious,” but the elder Cuvier, like Jefferson, was not especially open-minded toward new scientific ideas (Sulloway, 1996). The key difference between Jefferson and Cuvier, in terms of their views on the history of life, was when they were born. Jefferson was born in the mid-eighteenth century and was a child of the Enlightenment, whereas Cuvier was born twenty-six years later under the sway of a different suite of cultural influences. CONCLUSION Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a paradigm shift occurred in the way educated Europeans and Americans viewed Earth history. The eighteenth century completeness-of-nature worldview could not accommodate extinction as a recurring

Thomas Jefferson, extinction, and the evolving view of Earth history phenomenon; it was replaced by the former-worlds view of Earth history, which recognized the occurrence of pulses of extinction. This paradigm shift was coincident with the transition from the Age of Enlightenment to the romantic movement, and it is more than a coincidence that the new concept of extinct creatures living in mysterious former worlds of the distant past was appealing to readers of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and other romantic literature. Thomas Jefferson was a child of the Enlightenment, and he was very resistant to the concept of extinction as a recurring natural phenomenon. Jefferson never abandoned the basic elements of his completeness-of-nature worldview. His resistance to extinction was entangled with his patriotic defense of the position that New World animals were at least as large and healthy as Old World species, and also with his religious view that, since Creation, the Earth retained a stable biota created by an omnipotent, benevolent, attendant Creator. He had also publicly defended this position in two publications. Furthermore, Jefferson’s childhood experience as the oldest son of a father who died when Jefferson was young contributed to personality traits that made it difficult for him to abandon an entrenched worldview. Just as Rip Van Winkle slept through the American Revolution, Jefferson seems to have been nearly oblivious to the paradigm shift that occurred at the end of the Enlightenment. Rip made one faux pas by expressing loyalty to the King of England, but he quickly learned his lesson and happily embraced the new paradigm. It was a painless transition for Rip, in part, because he had no deep emotional commitment to the old order, and he had not publicly defended it. Washington Irving does not tell us Rip’s birth order, but, in light of the birth-order research of Sulloway (1996) and the ease in which Rip abandoned his old worldview and accepted a new one, one can guess that he was a laterborn. Jefferson, in contrast, had all of these factors pulling him in the other direction. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Ted Daeschler, Tim Erwin, Jim McClure, Gary Rosenberg, and Ken Taylor for their very helpful and insightful reviews of this paper. I particularly thank Ken Taylor for educating me about Buffon’s “environmentalist” views and other aspects of eighteenth-century science, and for suggesting the term “completeness-of-nature.” Jim McClure alerted me to obscure references to extinction that I had missed, in addition to providing much insightful advice about Jefferson. These reviewers do not necessarily agree with conclusions expressed in this paper. I thank Ted Daeschler for providing an opportunity for me to examine and photograph Jefferson’s Megalonyx bones under his care at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. I thank my University of Nevada–Las Vegas colleague Tom Wright for digging up information and images of the Madrid Megatherium for me in the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, and I thank Gary Rosenberg for inviting me to contribute to this volume, and for his patience and encouragement.

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REFERENCES CITED Ambrose, S.E., 1996, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West: New York, Touchstone, 521 p. Bear, J.A., Jr., and Stanton, L., eds., 1997, Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, Volume 2: Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1624 p. Bedini, S.A., 1986, Man of science, in Peterson, M.D., ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography: New York, Charles Scribner and Sons, p. 253–276. Bedini, S.A., 1990, Thomas Jefferson: Statesman of Science: New York, MacMillan, 616 p. Bedini, S.A., 2002, Jefferson and Science: Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 126 p. Boorstin, D.J., 1948, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson: Boston, Henry Holt and Co., 306 p. Boyd, J., 1958, The Megalonyx, the Megatherium, and Thomas Jefferson’s lapse of memory: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, v. 102, no. 5, p. 420–435. Boyd, J., Gaines, W.H., and Harrison, J.H., Jr., eds., 1958, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 14, 8 October 1788 to 26 March 1789: Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 708 p. Burlingame, L.J., 1973, Lamarck, Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de, in Gillispie, C.C., ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography: New York, Charles Scribner’s & Sons, v. VII, p. 584–594. Chinard, G., 1947, Eighteenth century theories on America as a human habitat: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, v. 91, no. 1, p. 27–57. Cohen, I.B., 1995, Science and the founding fathers: Science in the political thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison: New York and London, W.W. Norton and Company, 368 p. Gardner, H., 2004, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds: Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 244 p. Gaustad, E.S., 1986, Religion, in Peterson, M.D., ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography: New York, Charles Scribner and Sons, p. 277–293. Gerbi, A., 1955 (English translation, 1973), The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh Press, 700 p. Greene, J.C., 1984, American Science in the Age of Jefferson: Ames, Iowa, The Iowa State University Press, 484 p. Gregory, J.T., 1984, Changing concepts of the nature and significance of fossils: Journal of Geological Education, v. 32, p. 108–118. Jackson, D., 1981, Thomas Jefferson & the Stony Mountains: Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 338 p. Jefferson, T., 1787, Notes on the State of Virginia: London, John Stockdale (reprinted in Peterson, M., ed., 1984, Thomas Jefferson: Writings: New York, The Library of America, p. 123–325). Jefferson, T., 1799, A memoir on the discovery of certain bones of a quadruped of the clawed kind in the western parts of Virginia: American Philosophical Society Transactions, v. 4, p. 246–260, doi: 10.2307/1005103. Lovejoy, A.O., 1936, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea: Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 382 p. Martin, E.T., 1961, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist: New York, Collier Books, 246 p. May, H.F., 1986, The Enlightenment, in Peterson, M.D., ed., Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography: New York, Charles Scribner and Sons, p. 47–58. Oberg, B., ed., 2002, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 29, 1 March 1796 to 31 December 1797: Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 694 p. Oberg, B., ed., 2007, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 33, 17 February to 30 April 1801: Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 800 p. Rudwick, M.J.S., 1976, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology (2nd edition): New York, Science History Publications, 287 p. Rudwick, M.J.S., 1997, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 301 p. Rudwick, M.J.S., 2005, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution: Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 708 p. Rupke, N.A., 1983, The Great Chain of History: Oxford, Clarendon Press, 322 p. Sanford, C.B., 1984, The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson: Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 246 p.

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Schachner, N., 1951 (fifth printing, 1969), Thomas Jefferson: A Biography: New York, Thomas Yoseloff, 1070 p. Semonin, P., 2000, American Monster: How the Nation’s First Prehistoric Creature Became a Symbol of National Identity: New York, New York University Press, 482 p. Simpson, G.G., 1942, The beginnings of vertebrate paleontology in North America: American Philosophical Society Transactions, v. 86, p. 130– 188. Sulloway, F.J., 1996, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Ideas: New York, Pantheon, 653 p. Vaccari, E., 2006, The “classification” of mountains in eighteenth century Italy and the lithostratigraphic theory of Giovanni Arduino (1714–1795), in Vai, G.B., and Caldwell, W.G.E., eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 157–177, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(10).

Walters, K.S., 1992, The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic: Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 394 p. Wills, G., 2007, Head and Heart: American Christianities: New York, Penguin, 626 p. Wistar, C , 1799, A description of the bones deposited, by the president, in the museum of the Society, and represented in the annexed plates: American Philosophical Society Transactions, v. 4, p. 526–531, doi: 10.2307/1005128. Yamada, T., 2006, Kircher and Steno on the “geocosm,” with a reassessment of the role of Gassendi’s works, in Vai, G.B., and Caldwell, W.G.E., eds., The Origins of Geology in Italy: Geological Society of America Special Paper 411, p. 65–80, doi: 10.1130/2006.2411(05). Yochelson, E.L., 1991, Peale’s 1799 theory of the earth: Earth Sciences History, v. 10, no. 1, p. 51–55. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

“Very vain is Science’ proudest boast”: The resistance to geological theory in early nineteenth-century England Noah Heringman† Department of English, University of Missouri–Columbia, Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA

ABSTRACT Resistance to theory pervaded many different kinds of geological writing ca. 1807, when the Geological Society of London institutionalized “geology” as the umbrella term for earth science. The founders of the Geological Society themselves, taking a Baconian stance, rejected Plutonism, Neptunism, and other contentious theories that had dominated thinking about Earth in the previous century. Geological critics of the society, however, pointed out its implicit prejudice in favor of Wernerian theory and claimed true independence of theory for themselves. The poet Charlotte Smith offered yet another kind of challenge to geological theory, adopting the perspective of traditional natural history. All three groups—the early Geological Society, along with geologists in France; geological outsiders, including William Smith and John Farey; and Charlotte Smith, among other women writers and naturalists—brought an active suspicion of theory to their engagement with geological questions. This essay examines that suspicion as it appears in Smith’s long poem Beachy Head (1807) and in geological writings from the former two groups, especially writings by Thomas Webster and others that address the chalk formation on England’s southeast coast, which includes Beachy Head. The resistance to theory in all these works is in part a national ideology reinforced by the ongoing war with France (1793–1815), just across the English Channel. At the same time, resistance to theory is itself a flexible theoretical stance that lends itself equally to the empirical and institutional project of the Geological Society and to the skeptical critique of scientific specialization in Smith’s Beachy Head. Keywords: Charlotte Smith, Thomas Webster, Geological Society of London, Beachy Head, history of geology, chalk. INTRODUCTION The poet and novelist Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) is today relatively little known except to literary scholars. She remained a household name in Britain for several decades after her spec†

E-mail: [email protected].

tacular entry onto the literary scene with Elegiac Sonnets (1784), a volume that went through eight continually expanding editions over the next sixteen years. A survey of her later writings readily shows that the natural world served as much more than the romantic backdrop suggested by the title of one typical poem from Elegiac Sonnets: “On being Cautioned against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea.” Many passages in Smith’s

Heringman, N., 2009, “Very vain is Science’ proudest boast”: The resistance to geological theory in early nineteenth-century England, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 247–257, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(17). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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writing, which includes didactic works on natural history, suggest that not only melancholy, but also a real commitment to empirical description and classification, led her to walk on headlands overlooking the sea. This essay concentrates on a poem devoted to one of England’s most famous headlands, Beachy Head (1807), a quotation from which provides my title. This poem has been widely discussed in recent literary scholarship and hailed as Smith’s “masterpiece” by at least one critic (Labbe, 2003, p. 138; see also Kelley, 2004; Wallace, 2002). Smith’s poem is also worth engaging in a geological context because of its complex relationship to the other geological discourse of that moment, and particularly to other writings about the chalk formation that includes Beachy Head. Charlotte Smith was not a geologist, but then there was no “geohistorical science” in England at all before the end of the Napoleonic Wars, according to Martin Rudwick’s Bursting the Limits of Time, which places the origins of the science in Revolutionary France. Even when it did appear, English geology remained centrally a literary genre until the mid-nineteenth century, as Ralph O’Connor argues in The Earth on Show (2007; see also Heringman, 2004). Nonetheless, Charlotte Smith was necessarily a less geological writer than Hugh Miller and most of the other naturalist-authors who feature in O’Connor’s book. However, unlike other Romantic poets, with their notorious distrust of science in general—embodied in Wordsworth’s lament that “we murder to dissect”— Smith was an informed practitioner of natural history. She certainly knew the term “geology” from Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791), which is cited in the notes to her Beachy Head volume (C. Smith, 1993, p. 287). Darwin repeatedly quoted John Whitehurst and James Hutton, among others, and delivered an elaborate Plutonist geogony in the “Geological Recapitulation” in the notes to his poem. Smith’s poem also adapted a hypothesis concerning the origin of the chalk from Gilbert White’s more traditional and static Natural History of Selborne (1789). No other definite sources can be cited, though there is a good chance that Smith read Jean-André de Luc’s explicitly geological essays in the Monthly Review in 1790–1791, since that periodical reviewed her own books favorably and shared her liberal principles at the time. She probably also read or heard of Humphry Davy’s successful public lectures on geology, which were given in London in 1805 while she was finishing Beachy Head in Sussex. If these connections between Charlotte Smith and geology seem tenuous, that is part of my point. My claim in this essay is that Beachy Head makes use of geological questions to critique the progress of scientific specialization. The poem openly professes ignorance concerning the origin of the chalk and its fossils. Read side by side with early Geological Society publications, however, Beachy Head illuminates the intellectual conditions that made the emergence of English geology possible: the Society’s founders, like Smith, were dedicated amateur naturalists; they were nervous, during this time of war, about the proximity to France of both their science and their southern coast; like Smith, they were skeptical about specialization; and above all, they professed a robust resistance to theory. These intellec-

tual qualities, and their literary affiliation with the genre of local history, are not less important to the history of geology than the founders’ geological competence, which was obviously greater than Smith’s. Skepticism in the early Geological Society (known as the Mineralogical Society from 1799 to 1806), coinciding with the poem’s cautionary tone, makes geology’s connection to its own past appear, in some ways, more tenuous. Smith’s poem also prompts further reflection on the political climate and the literary marketplace shared by Smith and geologists like Thomas Webster, whose field observations on the Isle of Wight were made while he was taking views for a literary work of local history by his patron, Sir Henry Englefield. THE PROBLEM OF THEORY The foundation of the Geological Society of London in 1807 illustrates some of the ways in which the relationship between scientific progress and democracy was complicated by the reactionary climate that set in after the French Revolution. The institutionalization of geology initially excluded a wide variety of geological practices and practitioners from scientific consideration. Nonetheless, the founders of the Geological Society and an array of geological “outsiders” shared a rhetorical position that was designed to liberate English naturalists from the dictates of Enlightenment philosophes and Revolutionary terrorists alike: the rejection of “theory.” Beachy Head made geology a paradigm case for the tendency toward “vague theories” and “vain dispute” in current science, advocating instead the traditional and more inclusive practices of natural history. The Geological Society’s founders drew on the same national traditions of skepticism and empiricism to portray theorizing, conversely, as an error committed by amateurs who distort their scanty local observations to support hypotheses derived from continental thinkers. Thus, a national institution was justified as an empirical research network that would check theoretical excesses. Yet Charlotte Smith’s doubts were echoed by other amateur naturalists who objected that institutions tended to marginalize women or “practical men” by appropriating their knowledge and controlling publication. The Geological Society of London thus arose within and against a broad concurrent endeavor to keep Earth legible for nonspecialists. Both the society’s founders and a wide variety of outsiders— including nature poets, women travel writers, and self-taught geological field workers—invoked their English resistance to continental “theory” as a way of reimagining democratic intellectual life in the wake of the French Revolution. These geological conflicts initially seem to contradict Gary Rosenberg’s appeal, in his introduction to this volume, for a historical framework that demonstrates a reciprocal relationship between the progress of democracy and the progress of science. Rosenberg argues that “The revolution in understanding the structure of Earth and of living things…was…integral to the emergence and growth of democracy during the Enlightenment” (Rosenberg, 2009, p. 2, this volume), and he points to the inherent accessibility of geometrically based conceptions of

“Very vain is Science’ proudest boast” the natural world as well as their increased circulation in print after 1500 (Rosenberg, 2009, this volume, ch. 1, p. 14, 22). The institutionalization that accompanied geological progress in England initially made the science less democratic, in the sense that working men and women (such as Charlotte Smith) were excluded. However, at the same time, conflicts surrounding the institution and the practice of geology kept it a matter of public debate, and thus democratic in Rosenberg’s larger sense. Moreover, the resistance to geological theorizing in particular offers suggestive parallels for the politics of science in the present-day United States. My research suggests the difficulty of distinguishing two types of resistance to theory: first, the Baconian-Newtonian refusal to frame hypotheses before adequate facts have been gathered; and second, the ideologically motivated rejection of certain scientific ideas as mere theory because they are of foreign or otherwise unsavory origin. In a time of war, such as the period treated in this paper, a wide range of investigators routinely conflated these two types of empiricism, quite often dressing up a scientifically sound suspicion of theory in nationalist garb, or vice versa. Yet in our historical moment, we face a third type of resistance to theory, the fundamentalist-creationist attack on evolutionary theory. This resurgence of anti-Darwinian sentiment, together with the scientific outcry against Bush administration policies and practices, seems to validate Rosenberg’s correlation between science and democracy. In this political context, how does one argue for properly scientific objections to intelligent design and distinguish them from the ideological suspicion that leads some conservative politicians to dismiss evolution as “just a theory”? Evolution seems more strongly than ever associated with atheism, just as theory in general was associated with Jacobin atheism in early nineteenthcentury England. Ultimately, however, Charlotte Smith, Thomas Webster, and other writers of this period contributed more nuanced positions to a public debate less heavily polarized than our own into the camps of “science” and “religion.” In the 1990s, the wave of resistance to French poststructuralist theory offered a different kind of contemporary parallel to the early nineteenth-century English suspicion of theory. This parallel was especially inviting for scholars of the Romantic period, and David Simpson captured it vividly in Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (1993). Simpson cites Arthur Young’s The Example of France a Warning to Britain as the locus classicus of English suspicion vis-à-vis “French theory.” Writing in 1793, Young claims a “constitutional abhorrence of theory” as a political position that derives, according to Simpson, from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Simpson, 1993, p. 9). Today, it seems to me, the more salient parallel—if less clear and direct—is between pre- and postDarwinian political conflicts over theory. Rampant theorizing in humanities departments, however, has contributed to the renewed visibility of “theory” as a category (Williams, 1995). Critical reflection by literary scholars also has provided insights of lasting value into the nature of theory as a genre. A characteristic observation of Paul de Man’s, that the resistance to theory is theory itself, also underscores the basic point of this essay, that the re-

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sistance to theory as a style of argument cuts across many different kinds of writing about the natural world.1 The resistance to theory is one theoretical position among others, a metadiscourse for rejecting other theoretical positions—or conjectures, or hypotheses—while implicitly promoting others. Varying shades of resistance to theory can be useful both inside and outside the scientific establishment and—to hazard a conjecture—seem to be a precondition of the scientific establishment itself. As the boundary that marked off any learned discourse from the public sphere, theory had to be negotiated as a problem before the science of geology could establish itself. BEACHY HEAD: THE LITERARY CONTEXT In 1802, William Paley advocated a form of intelligent design in his Natural Theology, a work that Darwin was required to read at Cambridge and that (on one account) “had to be overcome . . . before the theory of evolution could be established” (De Beer, 2001, p. 39). It is therefore tempting to speculate that a poem like Beachy Head would challenge modern scientific theory for the same theological reasons advanced by Paley, who was the poet’s contemporary, and by a whole string of predecessors in the genre of Miltonic descriptive poetry. However, Charlotte Smith declares her distance from natural theology on the very first page of her poem, a move that underscores the difficulty of categorizing any given instance of the resistance to theory. Smith must have been aware that readers of a 750 line descriptive meditation on an English landscape, in blank verse, would have expected the same kind of theodicy offered by her predecessors in this form and genre, especially James Thomson and William Cowper. But in choosing the setting of Beachy Head, one of the signature chalk cliffs of England’s southeast coast, Smith chose a landscape with a more troubled history than the Edenic landscapes favored by Milton’s followers. The natural history of this landscape is uncertain, and its human history is full of conflict: Beachy Head is the first land to be sighted in crossing the English Channel from Dieppe, and it was also the scene of a rare naval defeat by the French in 1690, which recalls the Battle of Hastings (1066) as well.2 The smuggling operations traditionally based there became all the more hazardous in the context of the 1806 naval blockade of Napoleonic France (Kelley, 2004, p. 290). Smuggling features prominently in the account of rural poverty that accompanies the autobiographical narrative of this poem: local tenant farmers and laborers turn to smuggling in part because the chalky soil is thin and unproductive. Yet for the same reason, many fossil shells appear on the surface. These shells prompt Smith’s indirect engagement with the transformation of mineralogy into geology (of static taxonomy into structural, historical understanding) and ultimately her return to botany in the second half of the poem. 1 More precisely: “nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance” (De Man, 1986, p. 19). 2 Beachy Head, line 158n (Smith, 1993, p. 224). This poem (Smith, 1993, p. 217–247) is cited parenthetically, by line number, in the text hereafter (as is conventional with poetry).

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As several scholars have shown, Smith gained considerable expertise in natural history by writing her Rural Walks (1795) and other didactic works in verse and prose, especially on botany.3 Smith’s rejection of geological theorizing, then, stems from her interests in botany and social ecology rather than from theological arguments. At the start of her poem, Smith locates herself atop the 530 foot (161.5 m) cliff and immediately begins to unravel the theological, geological, and political complexities of the vantage point offered by this “sublime” location. She inaugurates a pattern of geological skepticism by offering an “extravagant theory” for the origin of the Sussex coast in the first ten lines of her poem and then questioning this theory in her own footnote to the passage. In the verse, Smith bids her fancy to “go forth And represent the strange and awful hour Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent Stretch’d forth his arm, and rent the solid hills, Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between The rifted shores, and from the continent Eternally divided this green isle.4

In her note to the word “concussion,” Smith says she is “alluding to an idea that this Island was once joined to the continent of Europe, and torn from it by some convulsion of Nature. I confess I never could trace the resemblance between the two countries. Yet the cliffs about Dieppe [where Smith resided 1784–1785], resemble the chalk cliffs on the Southern coast. But Normandy has no likeness whatever to the part of England opposite to it” (6n). By questioning the theory, which goes without attribution in this passage, Smith is implicitly challenging its theological basis as well, and there are no further references to God in the poem. Smith’s turn away from natural theology is more noticeable by contrast to earlier Miltonic poetry, including her own The Emigrants (1793), which does appeal to the “omniscient goodness” of a divine designer.5 Politically, her note shows a consciousness of the French other, albeit one that is more equivocal than her expressions of national and military rivalry 3 Her other works on natural history include Rambles Farther (1796) and Conversations Introducing Poetry, chiefly on Subjects of Natural History (1804). The best scholarly account of Smith’s botany is Pascoe (1994); see also King (2003), p. 63–65. The transformation of mineralogy into geology, charted by Laudan (1987), among others, involved the integration of structural and deep historical dimensions into the taxonomy and chemical analysis that dominated the study of earth materials by older naturalists, when it was considered merely a branch of natural history. See also Rudwick (2005, p. 59–60, 456–470). 4 Beachy Head, line 4–10. Smith calls the setting “sublime” in line 1. I am borrowing “extravagant theory” from the “Apology” prefixed to Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791), a work cited by Smith elsewhere in the Beachy Head volume. 5 Book II, lines 387–430; see The Poems of Charlotte Smith, p. 162–163. Buffon’s Natural History, one of the more likely sources for Smith’s “vast concussion,” uses a naturalistic vocabulary (given here in William Smellie’s translation of 1780): “The island of Great Britain appears to have been formerly a part of the continent; and that England was once joined to France, the narrowness of the strait, and the sameness of the strata of stone and of earth on the opposite sides, are a sufficient indication” (I.489). Smith’s conflation of this conjectural natural history with the argument from design seems to underscore her dismissal of both.

elsewhere in the poem (as in her defiant recollection of Britain’s loss to the French in 1690). Geologically, Smith’s note shows an ambivalent fascination with theory, but also an attachment to the kind of contradictory evidence that seems designed to frustrate the ambitions of theory: if the coasts are symmetrical, why are the interiors so different? BEACHY HEAD: THE GEOLOGICAL CONTEXT This question, however, is political as well, informing Smith’s ambivalence here and in a later passage on the many fossils occurring in the chalk, which provoke a renewed geological skepticism. Like the poem itself, I shall defer this more complex discussion, for at this juncture, it is useful to investigate the treatment of Beachy Head and the chalk in other geological writings during the period of war with France, with special attention to the problem of French proximity, both geological and intellectual. Following an account of early efforts by the Geological Society (London), I will turn briefly to the French researchers who contributed to this discussion of the chalk and its fossils, especially Nicolas Demarest and Georges Cuvier. Many of these naturalists also made antitheoretical statements that deserve to be compared with Charlotte Smith’s, including Desmarest and Cuvier in France (where this position is arguably less bound up with nationalism) and a whole slate of practitioners in England, ranging from the gentleman geologist George Bellas Greenough to the professional surveyor and “practical geologist” William Smith. Like William Smith and his disciple, John Farey, a number of women writers on geological topics also perceived themselves as geological outsiders, and I will use their statements to usher in a reading of the fossil episode in Beachy Head when I return to the poem. All these writers shared some form of the poem’s skepticism toward theory: in some cases, the political motivation for this skepticism outweighed the scientific motive, and in others, the reverse is true, but it is difficult to separate these motives completely in any given case. The rivalry between Britain and France may not be as old as the hills, but it certainly predated the Napoleonic Wars, and it may be the reason why the earliest published argument for a geological link between the two countries was never translated into English. Desmarest’s 1751 essay on the “ancient junction” or former land bridge across the English Channel was not unknown in England, but neither Charlotte Smith nor more specialized writers explicitly cited Desmarest or any specific source for this idea.6 Even after Cuvier and Brongniart’s famous Paris Basin paper of 1808 invited more detailed correla6 Arthur Young refers to Desmarest’s work as follows: “Dissertation sur l’ancienne jonction de L’angleterre a la France. This piece carried the prize of the academy of Amiens, 12mo. 1751” (Young, 1769, p. 289). The reference in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, however, suggests that the idea was commonplace by the late eighteenth century (see note 5 herein). For a new hypothesis that explains the origin of the English Channel by way of massive flooding during the Pleistocene, see S. Gupta et al. (2007).

“Very vain is Science’ proudest boast” tion between the French and English chalk, English geologists mentioned the possibility with caution. J.F. Berger, writing in the first volume of the Transactions of the Geological Society of London, notes that “from the nearly exact correspondence of the meridians under which this formation lies in France and in England, some persons have been led to consider it as one and the same” (Berger, 1811, p. 94). Elsewhere in the volume, John MacCulloch observes that the Channel Islands may once have been attached to France, but that “any further evidence, arising from continuity or similarity of the strata, is, for the present at least, inaccessible” (MacCulloch, 1811, p. 1). MacCulloch alludes primarily to the war, which makes cross-channel fieldwork impossible, but it is striking that he mentions no earlier sources and seems tacitly to endorse Berger’s conclusion that a correlation of the chalk formations is not needed “to account for the facts” (Berger, 1811, p. 95), giving it the status of a theory. John Farey, a professional surveyor always eager to provoke the gentlemen of the Geological Society, summarized Cuvier and Brongniart’s work quite extensively in the Philosophical Magazine and challenged the Geological Society to improve on their research and reclaim their method of using guide fossils, which Farey claimed that the Frenchmen had plagiarized from William Smith. The Geological Society had failed to embrace the fieldwork of so-called “practical men” like Smith and himself, Farey complained, and “the Parisian Institute have thus lamentably been suffered to take the lead” in an area for which England provides better stratigraphic evidence (i.e., outcrops lying lower in the stratigraphic column) (Farey, 1810, p. 132). The first geologist to take up this challenge was James Parkinson. Parkinson, making sure to credit Smith, hedges his bets by citing individual genera, such as mussels, that occur only in the French chalk (Parkinson, 1811, p. 347), but he is forced to conclude that “even from the examinations which have been already made, the identity of the French and English chalk is established” (p. 354). Part of the reason for this striking difference between Parkinson and the other contributors to the Transactions is that fossils were still “peripheral” for most English geologists, as Martin Rudwick (2005, p. 466) has put it, and as Parkinson himself complained (Parkinson, 1811, p. 324). Even Thomas Webster, who made the most substantive contribution to date on the English chalk in 1814, building on Parkinson’s work, was still rather cautious about the French connection. Charlotte Smith’s pointed interest in the chalk and its fossils is all the more remarkable in this context. Desmarest’s early work on the problem was routinely avoided in all these accounts, and not only because it lacked a strong basis in fieldwork. However, Desmarest’s work on volcanism was cited repeatedly in the course of the basalt controversy, which became a more explicitly political arena during the Revolutionary era. One extreme example is Richard Joseph Sulivan’s A view of nature…with reflections on Atheistical philosophy, now exemplified in France (1794), in which Desmarest’s theories come in for considerable suspicion (vol. 2, p. 140, 143). This type of nationalist polemic disregards the

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united front presented by Desmarest, Cuvier, Farey, William Smith, and the Geological Society on the question of theory considered in a purely scientific context. Desmarest wrote in 1795 that there were already too many theories of Earth (quoted in Rudwick, 2005, p. 304), and many of the naturalists cited thus far also expressed versions of this opinion. This shared rejection of geotheory is at its most complex and contradictory in the Geological Inquiries, the first mission statement of the Geological Society, published in 1808 by Greenough and Arthur Aikin. This document puts forward a hierarchical vision of network research, declaring that geology is “a sublime and difficult science; but fortunately for its progress it is…capable of being extended by mere observation,” even when the observations are supplied by surveyors or miners rather than the “philosophers” who alone can grasp geology as a system. The Geological Society is established so “that theoretical opinions may be compared with the appearances of Nature” and applied in the national cause (Aikin and Greenough, 1808, p. 421–422). As Rudwick has recently shown, this program was heavily influenced by the rhetoric of Deodat de Dolomieu’s introductory geology lecture of 1797 (Rudwick, 2005, p. 347) and by Cuvier’s “Rapport sur André” (p. 459), among other French sources. Rudwick also notes that in France, the term “‘geology’ was less burdened by suspicion than in Britain” (p. 448), yet it was chosen by the new Geological Society partly to reclaim the science from other British practitioners, most notably James Hutton, who helped to bring it under suspicion by becoming associated with Jacobin atheism in the popular nationalist press (Dean, 1992, p. 50–57, 79–83). The Baconian program of the Geological Society, then, was at least partly motivated by a desire to purge the science of French and quasi-French theory—if not of French egalitarianism—and to conceal its own French influences, rather than by true empiricism. This strategy made the society particularly vulnerable to challenges from outsiders who had the added motive of being excluded from it (William Smith in particular had just cause for complaint in Greenough’s notorious appropriation of his national mapping project).7 Geology became such an important arena for criticism and debate in the first place because it addressed its public not only as readers of text but as readers of rocks. Middleclass provincial intellectuals such as Smith and John Whitehurst particularly stressed Earth’s accessibility, inviting readers to see in rocks a “language and characters equally intelligible to all nations” (Whitehurst, 1786, p. 257). Following in this dissenting tradition, Smith’s own writings disavow geological theory to signify his aesthetic and moral sensibility as well as his fidelity to Earth’s text: “My observations…are entirely original, and unincumbered with theories, for I have none to support: nor do I refer my reader to foreign countries…[but have] described the face of a country whose internal contents are more deeply 7 The most recent account of this episode is by Rudwick (2005, p. 466–468), who attributes it to normal scientific competition rather than class conflict. More sympathetic accounts of William Smith as a geological outsider (primarily for reasons of social class) include Knell (2000), Winchester (2001).

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explored than any other part of the earth’s surface; and in which everyone…is a critic” (W. Smith, 1817, p. vi–vii).8 An engineer named Thomas Tredgold spelled out the patriotic implications of this approach by juxtaposing Smith’s method against that of the German geognost Abraham Gottlob Werner: “the law of succession, of Werner, is purely hypothetical; that of Mr. Smith is the result of multiplied observation” (Tredgold, 1818, p. 37). Condemning the Wernerian technical terms so prominent in the Geological Society’s Transactions, Tredgold concluded that “it is too evident that the Wernerians search only for evidence to support a favourite hypothesis…How different is the course which Mr. Smith has pursued in his attempt to develop the structure of his native country!” (p. 38). Although Tredgold distorts the approach of the geognosts, he effectively points out the rejection of Smith on theoretical grounds by an establishment that claimed to be theoretically indifferent. Empowered in part by the same patriotic climate, a number of women writers also turned the geologists’ antitheoretical stance against them. Charlotte Smith is one of several women writers whose ambivalence toward the objects and the theory of geology takes shape as a conventional modesty that is ironized or undercut by the assertion of a privileged female identification with nature. Smith’s diffidence, in using verbs like “hinting” and “alluding” to describe the difference between her images and scientific theories of Earth, resembles the professed geological modesty of Ann Radcliffe, Sarah Murray Aust, and other women travel writers. At the same time, Smith’s use of geological explanations as raw material for verse—just as she uses legend and fable—suggests a skepticism toward the emerging science of geology also echoed in these writers, especially Murray Aust. In Radcliffe’s German travels of 1794 (Radcliffe, 1795, p. 259), a serious geological interest appears clearly even as she apologizes for the absence of “proper and scientific denomination” (p. 259). Conventional modesty leads Murray Aust to defer to her male geological predecessors when speculating about the origins of Fingal’s Cave, on Staffa, but at the same time, she does not desist from offering her own interpretation and even mocks these predecessors for traveling to the site with servants or being deterred by bad weather (Murray Aust, 1810, vol. 2, p. 156; cf. p. 160, 177–179). These geological asides are political gestures in the sense that they challenge the bifurcation of public and domestic spheres tacitly embraced by women writing in what became “permissible” scientific genres, mainly didactic ones. The criticism of the politics of discipline formation takes an explicitly scientific form in an 1822 debate between Maria Callcott and Greenough, then President of the Geological Society. Callcott allowed her account of an earthquake in Chile to be reprinted in the Society’s Transactions, only to have her observations and her science attacked by Greenough in a presidential lecture. Callcott responded defiantly to these criticisms: “as to 8 Smith here has just confided a poor knowledge of conchology (for which his sources are Lamarck, preferred to Linnaeus, as well as Sowerby and Parkinson). On the tradition of religious and scientific dissent or nonconformism, see Hamblyn (1994).

ignorance of the science of Geology, Mrs. Callcott confesses it; and perhaps, that circumstance, and her consequent indifference to all theories connected with it, render her unbiassed testimony of the more value” (quoted in Aldrich, 1990, p. 51). In her analysis of this episode, Martina Koelbl-Ebert notes that “Greenough was here violating his own principle of accumulating mere facts” and instead betraying his allegiance to Neptunist theory (KoelblEbert, 1999, p. 38). Geology was much more firmly established in 1822 than in 1794, but it is worth noting that a concept of “geology” was already being offered to the British public in the 1790s in the periodical essays of Genevan expatriate Jean-André de Luc (Rudwick, 2005, p. 314–334). FOSSILS IN TIME Charlotte Smith’s poem Beachy Head thus opens a gateway to many different kinds of arguments against geological theory, ranging from the political significance of the cliff itself to the geology of its formation to the class and gender politics surrounding the Geological Society. The connection is worth dwelling on because she returns to the question of Beachy Head’s origins by way of the fossil question in a passage that proves to be the turning point of the poem. Remembering the fossils she found on the Sussex Downs in younger years, Smith’s narrator entertains three possible explanations for her youthful observation that these shells seemed to be made of the same chalk that surrounded them (372–389). The first possibility, that the ocean once reached the top of the cliffs now towering above it, is rejected in the verse, leaving the possibility that fossils are sports of nature—a traditional explanation dating back to classical antiquity—and the possibility that the chalk is a seabed uplifted from its original position, closer to the more recent, historical kind of explanation. Smith gives more serious attention (and twice as much space) to the latter thesis, underscoring its imaginative and explanatory power by attributing it to Gilbert White in her footnote. A close examination of the original passage in White’s Natural History of Selborne shows that Smith has actually modified the theory considerably while retaining White’s diction, signaling a substantial intellectual investment (382n).9 Yet the preceding long note, with its labored ambiguity, seems to consign all geological explanation to a realm of vain presumption—not for religious reasons, but because it is conjectural and perhaps also inimical to the curiosity and wonder celebrated in the verse. “I have never read any of the late theories of the earth,” Smith writes, “nor was I ever satisfied with the attempts to explain many of the phenomena 9 Here is the most relevant part of Gilbert White’s description of the South Downs: “I never contemplate these mountains without thinking I perceive somewhat analogous to growth in their gentle swellings and smooth funguslike protuberances, their fluted sides, and regular hollows and slopes, that carry at once the air of vegetative dilation and expansion…Or was there ever a time when these immense masses of calcareous matter were thrown into fermentation by some adventitious moisture; were raised and leavened into such shapes by some plastic power; and so made to swell and heave their broad backs into the sky so much above the less animated clay of the weald below?” (White, 1853, p. 120–121). Thanks go to Amy King for this reference.

“Very vain is Science’ proudest boast” which call forth conjecture in those books I happened to have had access to on this subject” (375n).10 In the verse, she takes this insufficiency as evidence for the vanity of science in general: Ah! very vain is Science’ proudest boast, And but a little light its flame yet lends To its most ardent votaries, since from whence These fossil forms are seen, is but conjecture, Food for vague theories, or vain dispute, While to his daily task the peasant goes, Unheeding such inquiry. (390–396)

The “peasant” here suggests another kind of argument against theory: its indifference or irrelevance to socioeconomic reality. Given the timing of this poem, it seems likely that Smith is challenging the new geology’s claims of expertise and professionalism.11 On the one hand, she seems to accept the geologists’ claim to be on the cutting edge of science, its “most ardent votaries,” anticipating the substitution by which “science” later came to mean natural science exclusively. However, this metonymy proves less flattering than it seems, as she goes on to charge geology with harboring science’s vaguest theories and most vain disputes. In the note, she identifies geology with “theories of the earth,” which, as we have seen, likely vexed her more geologically minded readers. The dismissive tone of “but conjecture” (393) also reinforces the sense in her note that although geological phenomena “call forth conjecture” (375n), the conjectures are unsatisfying. The “vague theories” built on these conjectures (394) are doubly liable to Smith’s skepticism, which is amplified by a subsequent analogy between such theories and antiquarianism. Smith mocks the antiquaries who “fancy they can trace” the remains of Roman fortifications on this coast (404–410); she observes in another equivocal note that the large elephant bones found near Beachy Head have been claimed (paradoxically) both as historical evidence of Roman colonization and as prehistoric specimens or relics of the “universal deluge” (412n). Smith here suggests that she saw the fossil bones of such an animal in Paris in 1791, and she may also be remembering the so-called mammoth exhibited by Rembrandt Peale in London in 1802. Peale’s bones proved to be a specimen of the prehistoric Ohio animal, or masto10 First half of note: “Among the crumbling chalk, I have often found shells, some quite in a fossil state and hardly distinguishable from chalk. Others appeared more recent; cockles, muscles, and periwinkles, I well remember, were among the number; and some whose names I do not know. A great number were like those of small land snails. It is now many years since I made these observations.” 11 Evidence of these claims in Smith’s last years (died 1806) include Humphry Davy’s 1805 lectures on geology at the Royal Institution (the first of their kind); the founding of the Mineralogical Society in 1799 (absorbed by the Geological Society in 1807); and the work of Jean-André de Luc, who coined the term “géologie” and published frequently in the Monthly Review and British Critic in the 1790s (Rudwick, 2005, p. 324). Smith would not have known of the Geological Society itself, but the society’s incorporation the year after her death was a product of the tendency toward scientific specialization and professionalization, and Smith’s notes reflect an awareness of that trend. Based on Smith’s exposure to the term “geology” in Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, and perhaps De Luc’s essays as well, it seems fair to infer that she avoids the term deliberately in her notes to Beachy Head.

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don, as Cuvier named it in 1806.12 Smith’s Parisian recollection cannot refer to Cuvier directly, since his earliest research in the area dates from 1795, and even then, it did not become widely known in Britain before Robert Jameson’s book-length translation of 1812.13 Smith’s detailed references, including the bones, the Parisian natural history museum, and even the resistance to theory itself, all betray a curiosity about the emerging discipline of geology that contradicts her stated hostility to science in general. This ambivalence registers, in part, her unwillingness to be excluded from serious science writing on the grounds of gender, but it also participates in a long skeptical-empirical tradition. The poem at this point abandons geology and history in favor of the “more attractive study” of botany (441). “Conjecture” on the subject of fossils is only somewhat less troubling than “theory,” and Smith apparently also declines to pursue the Baconian alternative of reasoning strictly from her observations. Only when she turns to botany does she begin to privilege an empirical approach. Several critics have pursued explanations for this dramatic shift, and this is not the place to enter fully into that discussion (see, among others, Wallace, 2002; Labbe, 2003, ch. 5; Kelley, 2004). Smith’s strongly negative gesture does, I believe, have a concrete significance for the history of geology and of antitheoretical discourse. To contemplate the problem of Anglo-French proximity in 1806 is to contemplate social inequality and to compare English rural poverty with the French experiment in democracy. Smith’s quasi-geological idiom allows her to draw attention to rural poverty and develop a theme expressed in boldly political terms in her novel Desmond (1792) and her previous blank verse narrative The Emigrants (1793). In dedicating the earlier poem to William Cowper, she insisted that Miltonic blank verse is not only a moralizing, but properly a political idiom (Smith, 1993, p. 134). In The Emigrants, Smith depicts the English landscape (again via the Sussex Downs), by contrast to the French, as tranquil and safe, but safe only for the “rich master” of the flocks and not for the “hind” who tends these flocks without any hope of change (Book 2, lines 63–65). Such explicit support for the French Revolution is no longer possible by the time of Beachy Head, but Smith makes geological theorizing stand in for more political obstacles to progressive social change. The second half of the poem turns decisively from the violence of history to forms of natural knowledge untroubled by excessive ambition, a failing now associated with the wars fought on the Sussex coast as well as attempts at historical explanation either of their archaeological residue or of the geologic upheaval 12

For a superb analysis of Peale’s exhibition, see O’Connor (2007, ch. 2). Even then, as Rudwick (2005) has shown, his ideas were distorted by the pressures of wartime ideology operating on the translator and editor, Robert Jameson (p. 596–602). The interest in fossils stimulated by this English version of Cuvier, which peaked in the 1820s, thus operates at two removes from Smith’s speculations in Beachy Head. In this respect, I disagree with the emphasis on Cuvier in Wallace (2002): Far from being “hyperlegible” (p. 87), Smith’s fossils resist reading, and she is not merely being coy about the paucity of authoritative theories concerning fossils. It was only after the post-Napoleonic diffusion of Cuvier’s ideas that a “profusion” of viable theories became available—these surely did influence the poem’s later reception, but they cannot explain its argument. 13

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preceding them. The rustics who populate this landscape, whom she assertively distinguishes, earlier in the poem, from Arcadian shepherds, are equally heedless of both kinds of explanation. Instead of geological antiquarianism, Smith seems to advocate a critical use of natural history: two examples include her inventive analogy between fossils (Beachy Head 378–381) and pearls, the “toys of nature” (55) that earlier occasioned her critique of colonialism (37–74); and her demystified, quasi-ethnographic view of the local population, widely dependent on income from smuggling and “but just removed from savage life” (207, cf. 176n). Antiquarian speculation about Earth, Smith suggests, falsely conflates natural particulars with a human record that can and should be subject to a moralizing reading: “Come and behold the nothingness of all / For which you carry thro’ the oppressed Earth, / War, and its train of horrors… / All with the lapse of time have passed away” (420–422, 434). Smith deliberately conflates geology and antiquarianism. By 1807, the proximity of England and France would have been recognized by many readers as a geological problem rather than a historical one, and yet after fourteen years of war, the connotations of this problem were inevitably social and political, as were the connotations of “theory.” Both these factors strongly influenced the emergence of English geology in the early nineteenth century. SMITH AND WEBSTER: NATURAL HISTORY, HUMAN HISTORY Thomas Webster touched on several of the same themes seven years later in his geological study of the chalk formation, which includes the Sussex coast as well as the Isle of Wight. The social ecology promoted by Smith is almost entirely absent, but Webster’s diffidence about theory and his political sensitivity toward France are both reminiscent of her poem. Webster, following Cuvier and Brongniart, duly hinted at the probability of large-scale continuities between the French and English chalk, already acknowledged by James Parkinson. Webster does not argue the case strongly, in part because of national sensitivities prevailing toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars—the same sensitivity that had led Smith, at the beginning of her poem, to dismiss out of hand the hypothesis of a past connection between the two land masses (6n). Webster too neglects to cite the original French source for this idea, Nicolas Desmarest’s 1751 treatise, but his article does offer the first substantial English engagement with Cuvier, apart from Jameson’s translation. Webster cautions us that there is no English stratum to match the calcaire grossier exactly: “were we to require a perfect agreement in all the beds, we should here totally fail” (Webster, 1814, p. 202). He suspects, however, that he is dealing with the same materials “differently modified” and cites further research with the vagueness typically used for French sources: “the general correspondence between the fossil shells of Grignon and those of Hampshire, has already been pointed out by several able naturalists,” including Parkinson (p. 203). One of the central achievements of this substantial paper is a clear distinction between alluvial and older deposits,

which allows him to refute Lamarck’s thesis of general marine transport, though Lamarck is cited with the usual circumspection merely as an “eminent fossilist” (p. 242). Webster’s conclusion, notwithstanding these substantial findings, shows a surprisingly deep affinity with the scientific modesty urged by Charlotte Smith: “The origin of the calcareous matter of which the chalk formation is composed remains one of those hidden mysteries on which all the speculations of geologists have not thrown any certain light” (p. 245). Webster specifically echoes Smith’s indecision concerning the relative positions of land and sea: “the existence of the marine strata placed above the lower freshwater formation in this country, as well as in France, is a circumstance much more difficult to explain, and would seem to require either a rising of the sea or a sinking of the land in this part of the globe” (p. 251). “A change of this kind,” Webster further notes, “of which we have no parallel in the human record, it would be in vain to endeavour to account for” (p. 247). The parallels here help to show Charlotte Smith’s resistance to geological theory as a form of sympathy with the emerging discipline and not just a consequence of her stated hostility to science. Perhaps the most evocative parallel between Smith and Webster—an employee of the Geological Society rather than a paying member, and thus also a kind of outsider—lies in his dramatic description of Beachy Head, given as he surveys the various strata exposed on one side of the Isle of Wight as they continue eastward along the mainland. Webster notes the “tremendous precipices” of Beachy Head and relates an anecdote no less terrifying and sublime than any episode in Smith’s poem: “The clergyman of East Dean, who was walking near the brink of the precipice, perceived the ground to give way under him, and had the presence of mind to escape over the rent that was forming at some distance from the edge of the cliff. In a few seconds, the mass of the chalk which he had stood on, to the extent of 300 feet in length, and 70 or 80 in breadth, fell with a tremendous crash” (Webster, 1814, p. 191–192n). Smith concludes her poem with a legend of the vicar’s early eighteenth-century predecessor, Parson Darby, who did not escape with his life. Smith’s parson-turned-recluse resides in a cave under the cliff and eventually drowns while pursuing his vocation of saving drowning mariners (Beachy Head, line 674n). The parish register for East Dean records Jonathan Darby’s death in 1726, but there is no hard evidence to support Smith’s or any of the available accounts of how he died. The historical Darby did in fact install the first warning beacon for ships in “Darby’s Hole” under Beachy Head in the early eighteenth century. Smith portrays him as a weather-wise recluse who literally carves out a self-sufficient, holy life from the base of the cliff. Like the poem’s rural population, Darby depends on his local knowledge of geology and meteorology for survival, but equally for his spiritual vocation. If the “hostile,” “marble-breasted” soil, as Smith calls it (231, 254), yields at best a meager living to the shepherds and husbandmen living above on the downs, the chalk down below gives the recluse a wider range of options. However, these come at a cost. The chalk crumbles easily enough to allow him

“Very vain is Science’ proudest boast” to dig graves just above the waterline for those mariners he fails to rescue, and the cave that houses him has itself been carved out by the ocean. “Shell-fish”—the living descendants of the animals whose remains form the chalk itself—provide his food. As the ocean continues to dissolve the chalk, undermining the cliff, the shoreline becomes dangerous: “the bellowing cliffs were shook / Even to their stony base, and fragments fell / Flashing and thundering on the angry flood” (718–720). The chalk is an unnatural mother, a fossiliferous matrix more tomb-like than womb-like. As the bones of Parson Darby mingle with the bones of sailors and the shells of animals from long-gone epochs, it becomes difficult to disentangle Beachy’s natural hostility to human cultivation (and indeed that of the whole extensive chalk formation) from the long history of human hostilities encouraged by its geographic setting. The impossibility of drawing clear distinctions between social and natural history (and likewise between theory and observation) fuels the anxiety so palpable in what Anne Wallace has called the “fossil scene” of Beachy Head, in the poem’s forceful shifts from natural to historical topics and back again, and in its very choice of this locale.14 Halfway through, the narrator turns decisively away from the “human crimes” inescapably associated with antiquarian and even (via ambition) with geological speculation (440), but “human crimes” nonetheless return (690) as the source of the “outrage” that drives Parson Darby into seclusion. When geological theories based on fossil evidence did become popular in Britain, as Smith seems to have anticipated, they placed significant narrative emphasis on epic hostilities between giant prehistoric reptiles, and the struggle for survival began to assume its Darwinian shape. Before Darwin, however, the “constitutional abhorrence of theory” had a very different set of connotations: for Smith, in particular, the resistance to theory enabled her critical engagement with institutionalized science and with a broader English empiricism that had to contend with a politically fractured Europe and an increasingly fragmented intellectual life. From the beginning of her poem, Smith resists the pressure to narrate the origins of Beachy Head from her observations. In so doing, she acknowledges a growing divide between natural history and the new geology, and perhaps also between natural history and poetry (one of many potential reasons for the poem’s heavily elegiac tone). Theresa Kelley (2004) has pointed out Smith’s ambivalence concerning the kind of history that might be appropriate to what she herself termed a “local poem.” Smith sets forth a traditional, static natural history—in which fossils are or ought to be considered on the same temporal plane with living plants—partly to highlight the dynamic and troubled human history of this landscape. As we have seen, she questions natural theology—as some of the founders of geology also did—at the beginning of her poem, but if the geological evidence cannot be used to argue a divine origin, neither can it justify the newer kind of naturalistic explanation. Smith professed to know nothing about the new chronology being developed since the late 1790s 14 Wallace (2002, p. 81). Here and throughout, I am indebted to Anne Wallace for first drawing my attention to the geological importance of Beachy Head.

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by Cuvier and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in Europe, according to which fossils documented a vast history entirely prior to and separate from human civilization, and yet she nonetheless explicitly denied that the fossil evidence alone could account for the origin of Beachy Head in her later, more sustained geological meditation. Cuvier’s work on fossils has been credited by intellectual historians as a revolutionary step toward the epistemic shift from a Linnaean to a modern historical understanding of nature.15 Many organisms, Cuvier insisted, had become extinct; living species could not be found to match fossil species supposedly transported by a flood; and naturalists were suddenly confronted with a totally different order of time, what Martin Rudwick has called “nature’s own history” (Rudwick, 2005, p. 348). Smith almost surely knew little of Cuvier’s work, but she recognized that the traditional view of fossils, as represented by Gilbert White, was threatened—and she seems uncannily to anticipate the English fossil craze that followed Robert Jameson’s 1813 translation of Cuvier.16 Naturalists had viewed fossils as “documents” of former times since the seventeenth century, but before Cuvier that history had always been viewed as conterminous with human history, a history that could be traced in the human record. The concept of “deep time” as a history vastly greater than, and at best analogous to, human history was acknowledged very gradually in England—partly because of the ways in which science remained bound up with religion. However, Smith’s sharp questioning of “antiquarian” theories of fossils suggests other grounds for resistance to deep time. If fossils and their beds can now be read as documents of nature’s “own” history, any reading of a landscape runs the risk of naturalizing the social history of that landscape. Beachy Head’s insistent antipastoral attention to social inequality and war struggles against such a naturalization of social conditions. CONCLUSION The founders of the Geological Society and their English contemporaries, including Charlotte Smith, found the resistance to theory a useful idiom for responding to the paradigm shift in natural history. I hope to have demonstrated some of the peculiar national and social connotations of the resistance to theory as a rhetorical mode in early nineteenth-century England. Some mixture of these connotations, and the corresponding motives, are present in any given use of this rhetorical strategy. At the same time, strongly empirical natural history emerged long before 1800 and outside England. Nicolas Desmarest’s 1751 treatise 15 I have borrowed “epistemic shift” from Foucault (1970), where he makes this case concerning Cuvier (see, for example, p. 275 and 368–369), but, interestingly enough, Cuvier is equally the hero, and for some of the same reasons, of Rudwick’s Bursting the Limits of Time—an otherwise very different book. 16 Although a keen observer of living plants and animals, White understood fossils in the traditional way as static. When identifying a fossil bivalve found near Selborne, he does not take the possibility of extinction into account but rather identifies his specimen with a shell collected in the Indian Ocean from a living Mytilus crista galli [Ostrea carinata] (White, 1853, p. 7 [Letter III]).

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on the geographic continuity of England and France helps to illustrate the larger context of this development as well as the pre-Revolutionary history of this specific geological-antiquarian problem. Kenneth Taylor, in an essay on Desmarest’s treatise, describes this subject as a “problem [England’s former connection to the Continent] then considered to belong, first and foremost, in the domain of history and archaeology” (Taylor, 2001, p. 52). Taylor’s argument underscores the very rapid and disorienting change in outlook that must have occurred over the next halfcentury for the problem to be viewed primarily as a scientific one. Taylor emphasizes the changing professional circumstances and increased exposure to fieldwork that made Desmarest an empiricist in practice by the 1760s and led him to reject the theoretical approach more characteristic of his early treatise. The Geological Society’s empiricism ca. 1807 was informed by the parallel experience of many individual naturalists, but it was complicated by specialization and national competition as well as by the proliferation of many new theories of Earth in the second half of the eighteenth century. Charlotte Smith is one of many interested outsiders to acknowledge the sudden expansion of geology’s conceptual domain. But she also points out that even as geology has unmoored a traditionally antiquarian problem from human chronology, it has not replaced chronology with any stable framework for explanation. Like some of the best geology of her time, Smith’s Beachy Head shows a keen awareness both of the intense theoretical interest of geological questions and the limitations of geological theorizing. In so doing, the poem provides an index of the resistance early geology encountered in asserting disciplinary control over these questions. Critical thinking about Earth must call into question not only theory itself but also two rhetorical alternatives that remain prominent and, if anything, more troubling features of our cultural landscape: the claim that any theory is “just a theory” as well as the claim to have no theory at all. It is instructive today to return to a debate in which every competing antitheoretical claim is critically examined for its implicit theoretical underpinnings and neither science nor religion have exclusive sway. The defenders of geological theory, too, contributed to the complexity of this debate. In 1802, John Playfair challenged the English antitheoretical position itself: “Among the prejudices which a new theory of the earth has to overcome, is an opinion, held, or affected to be held, by many, that geological science is not yet ripe for such elevated and difficult speculations” (p. 510).17 Playfair differed geologically from Greenough and Aikin, William Smith, Thomas Webster, and the other writers cited in this essay, but his defense of theory dramatically highlights the problematic nature of any rejection of theory. The English resistance to theory thus emerges as a set of diverse and self-conscious rhetorical strategies that anchored the new geology in the larger political and literary debates of its time.

17 Playfair continues: “They would, therefore, get rid of these speculations, by moving the previous questions, and declaring that at present we ought to have no theory at all. We are not yet, they allege, sufficiently acquainted with the phenomena of geology.”

APPENDIX. CHARLOTTE SMITH, BEACHY HEAD, LINES 368–442 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431

Ah! hills so early loved! in fancy still I breathe your pure keen air; and still behold Those widely spreading views, mocking alike The Poet and the Painter’s utmost art. And still, observing objects more minute, Wondering remark the strange and foreign forms Of sea-shells; with the pale calcareous soil Mingled, and seeming of resembling substance. Tho’ surely the blue Ocean (from the heights Where the downs westward trend, but dimly seen) Here never roll’d its surge. Does Nature then Mimic, in wanton mood, fantastic shapes Of bivalves, and inwreathed volutes, that cling To the dark sea-rock of the wat’ry world? Or did this range of chalky mountains, once Form a vast bason, where the Ocean waves Swell’d fathomless? What time these fossil shells, Buoy’d on their native element, were thrown Among the imbedding calx: when the huge hill Its giant bulk heaved, and in strange ferment Grew up a guardian barrier, ‘twixt the sea And the green level of the sylvan weald. Ah! very vain is Science’ proudest boast, And but a little light its flame yet lends To its most ardent votaries; since from whence These fossil forms are seen, is but conjecture, Food for vague theories, or vain dispute, While to his daily task the peasant goes, Unheeding such inquiry; with no care But that the kindly change of sun and shower, Fit for his toil the earth he cultivates. As little recks the herdsman of the hill, Who on some turfy knoll, idly reclined, Watches his wether flock; that deep beneath Rest the remains of men, of whom is left No traces in the records of mankind, Save what these half obliterated mounds And half fill’d trenches doubtfully impart To some lone antiquary; who on times remote, Since which two thousand years have roll’d away, Loves to contemplate. He perhaps may trace, Or fancy he can trace, the oblong square Where the mail’d legions, under Claudius, rear’d The rampire, or excavated fossé delved; What time the huge unwieldy Elephant Auxiliary reluctant, hither led, From Afric’s forest glooms and tawny sands, First felt the Northern blast, and his vast frame Sunk useless; whence in after ages found, The wondering hinds, on those enormous bones Gaz’d; and in giants dwelling on the hills Believed and marvell’d—Hither, Ambition, come! Come and behold the nothingness of all For which you carry thro’ the oppressed Earth, War, and its train of horrors—see where tread The innumerous hoofs of flocks above the works By which the warrior sought to register His glory, and immortalize his name— The pirate Dane, who from his circular camp Bore in destructive robbery, fire and sword Down thro’ the vale, sleeps unremember’d here; And here, beneath the green sward, rests alike The savage native, who his acorn meal Shar’d with the herds, that ranged the pathless woods;

“Very vain is Science’ proudest boast” 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442

And the centurion, who on these wide hills Encamping, planted the Imperial Eagle. All, with the lapse of Time, have passed away, Even as the clouds, with dark and dragon shapes, Or like vast promontories crown’d with towers, Cast their broad shadows on the downs: then sail Far to the northward, and their transient gloom Is soon forgotten. But from thoughts like these, By human crimes suggested, let us turn To where a more attractive study courts The wanderer of the hills.

Smith’s extensive footnotes (eight in all for this passage) are not given here. Some of these are quoted and/or discussed extensively in this paper (see p. 252–253 and footnotes 9 and 10 herein). For a full text of the poem and notes, see http://digital.lib.ucdavis.edu/projects/bwrp/ Works/SmitCBeach.htm.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A grant from the Center for Arts and Humanities, University of Missouri–Columbia, made possible the presentation on which this paper is based (2006 Geological Society of America Annual Meeting, Philadelphia). Many thanks are also due to Sam Baker and Roger Thomas for perceptive reviews of this manuscript, and to Gary Rosenberg for his enthusiastic support. REFERENCES CITED Aikin, A., and Greenough, G.B., 1818 [1808], Geological inquiries: Philosophical Magazine, v. 20, p. 421–429. Aldrich, M.L., 1990, Women in geology, in Farnes, P., and Kass-Simon, G., eds., Women of Science: Righting the Record: Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, p. 42–71. Berger, J.F., 1811, Observations on the physical structure of Devonshire and Cornwall: Transactions of the Geological Society of London, v. 1, p. 93–184. Buffon, G.-L.L., Comte de, 1780, Natural History, General and Particular (trans. William Smellie), Volume 1: Edinburgh, William Creech, 549 p. Darwin, E., 1791, The Botanic Garden: A Poem, In Two Parts...with Philosophical Notes: London, J. Johnson, 587 p. Dean, D.R., 1992, James Hutton and the History of Geology: Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 303 p. De Beer, G., 2001, Biology before the Beagle, in Appleman, P., ed., Darwin (3rd edition): New York, Norton, p. 33–39. De Man, P., 1986, The Resistance to Theory: Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 137 p. Farey, J., 1810, Geological remarks and queries on Messrs. C & B’s Memoir... Paris: Philosophical Magazine, v. 35, p. 113–139. Foucault, M., 1970, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences: New York, Random House, 387 p. Gupta, S., Collier, J.S., Palmer-Felgate, A., and Potter, A.G., 2007, Catastrophic flooding origin of shelf valley systems in the English Channel: Nature, v. 448, p. 342–345, doi: 10.1038/nature06018. Hamblyn, R., 1994, Landscape and the Contours of Knowledge: The Literature of Travel and the Sciences of the Earth in Eighteenth-Century Britain [Ph.D. thesis]: Cambridge, University of Cambridge, 316 p. Heringman, N., 2004, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology: Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 304 p. Kelley, T.M., 2004, Romantic histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy Head: Nineteenth-Century Literature, v. 59, p. 281–314, doi: 10.1525/ ncl.2004.59.3.281. King, A.M., 2003, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel: Oxford, Oxford University Press, 265 p. Knell, S.J., 2000, The Culture of English Geology, 1815–1851: A Science Revealed through Its Collecting: Aldershot, UK, Ashgate, 377 p. Koelbl-Ebert, M., 1999, Observing orogeny—Maria Graham’s account of the earthquake in Chile in 1822: Episodes, v. 22, p. 36–40. Labbe, J., 2003, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry, and the Culture of Gender: Manchester, Manchester University Press, 180 p.

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Laudan, R., 1987, From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of a Science, 1650–1830: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 278 p. MacCulloch, J., 1811, Account of Guernsey, and the Other Channel Islands: Transactions of the Geological Society of London, v. 1, p. 1–22. Murray Aust, S., 1810, A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland (3rd edition), 2 volumes: London, G. and W. Nicol, 617 p. O’Connor, R.J., 2007, The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 448 p. Parkinson, J., 1811, Observations on some of the strata in the neighborhood of London, and on the fossil remains contained in them: Transactions of the Geological Society of London, v. 1, p. 324–354. Pascoe, J., 1994, Female botanists and the poetry of Charlotte Smith, in Haefner, J., and Wilson, C.S., eds., Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837: Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 193–209. Playfair, J., 1964 [1802], Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth: Mineola, New York, Dover Publications, 528 p. Radcliffe, A., 1795, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794: London, G.G. and J. Robinson, 500 p. Rosenberg, G.D., 2009, this volume, Introduction: The revolution in geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(00). Rosenberg, G.D., 2009, this volume, The measure of man and landscape in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(01). Rudwick, M.J.S., 2005, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 708 p. Simpson, D., 1993, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 243 p. Smith, C., 1793, The Emigrants, a Poem, in Two Books: London: T. Cadell, 67 p. (Reprinted in Smith, C., 1993.) Smith, C., 1795, Rural Walks: in Dialogues. Intended for the use of young persons: London, Cadell and Davies, 180 p. and 188 p. Smith, C., 1796, Rambles Farther: A Continuation of Rural Walks: in Dialogues. Intended for the use of young persons: London, Cadell and Davies, 161 p. and 157 p. Smith, C., 1804, Conversations Introducing Poetry: Chiefly on Subjects of Natural History. For the use of children and young persons: London, J. Johnson, 196 p. and 173 p. Smith, C., 2001 [1792], Desmond: Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview, 488 p. Smith, C., 1993, The Poems of Charlotte Smith: Oxford, Oxford University Press, 335 p. Smith, W., 1817, Stratigraphical System of Organized Fossils: London, E. Williams, 118 p. Sulivan, R.J., 1794, A View of Nature...with Reflections on Atheistical Philosophy, Now Exemplified in France, volume 2 of 6: London, printed for T. Becket, 468 p. Taylor, K.L., 2001, The beginnings of a geological naturalist: Desmarest, the printed word, and nature: Earth Sciences History, v. 20, p. 44–61. Tredgold, T., 1818, Remarks on the geological principles of Werner, and those of Mr. Smith: Philosophical Magazine, v. 51, p. 36–38. Wallace, A.D., 2002, Picturesque fossils, sublime geology? The crisis of authority in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head: European Romantic Review, v. 13, p. 77–93, doi: 10.1080/10509580212764. Webster, T., 1814, On the freshwater formations in the Isle of Wight, with some observations, on the strata over the chalk in the south-east part of England: Transactions of the Geological Society of London, v. 2, p. 161–254. White, G., 1853 [1789], The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne: London, Nathaniel Cooke, 342 p. Whitehurst, J., 1978 [1786], Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth (second edition): New York, Arno Press, 283 p. Williams, J.J., ed., 1995, PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy: New York, Routledge, 340 p. Winchester, S., 2001, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology: New York, Harper Collins, 329 p. Young, A., 1769, Letters Concerning the Present State of the French Nation: London, printed for W. Nicoll, 497 p. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008 Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Charles S. Peirce and the “Light of Nature” Victor R. Baker† Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721-0011, USA

ABSTRACT The American polymath and logician Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) spent much of his professional career working on geodetic measurements. Nevertheless, his very original studies of scientific inference have considerable relevance to geology. Particularly important influences on his views derive from his avid studies of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, notably the writings of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). From Kant, Peirce derived an architectonic and categorical approach to philosophy. Following the example of the Cambridge mineralogist William Whewell (1794–1866), Peirce pursued the history of science in order to uncover the logic of scientific inquiry. His original reading of Galileo revealed that scholar’s reliance upon il lume naturale (“the Light of Nature”) as a guide toward the selection of potentially productive hypotheses from among the many that might be posed in regard to scientific explanation. This principle underpins Peirce’s famous and controversial notion of abduction, or retroduction, i.e., informed guessing, as critical to scientific inquiry. The instinctive tendency of the experienced and informed scientist to “guess right” is essential to the historically demonstrated success of science. Keywords: Peirce, Galileo, pragmatism, philosophy of geology, abductive inference, hypotheses, light of nature. INTRODUCTION In a famous 1784 essay (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklarung?) the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) asked, then answered, the question: “What is enlightenment?” Enlightenment, for Kant, is the courageous use of one’s own intellect, that is, to think for one’s self and thereby to overcome the paternalism of both church and state. Thus, for Kant, enlightenment requires freedom of thought and the maturity to exercise that freedom. Of course, these are sentiments that contributed to the American Revolution, and they also underpin the development of pragmatism, which is the only branch of philosophy to have developed to its full expression in the United States. †

E-mail: [email protected].

Although pragmatism was largely popularized by William James (1842–1910), it received its first important articulation from Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). Peirce was an ardent student of writings both from Kant and from the principal scientists of the so-called “Scientific Revolution.” In a very interesting way, Peirce combined the spirit of both in developing a philosophical system that has only recently come to be fully appreciated for insights into some of the most important issues that underlie the reasoning that human beings apply to the natural world (e.g., Parker, 1998, De Waal, 2001; Misak, 2004; Short, 2007). Peirce echoes Kant’s courageous spirit of thought in his famous 1898 statement of the First Rule of Reason (Peirce Edition Project, 1998, p. 48): “…that in order to learn you must desire to learn and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you are already inclined to think.” How is it that this learning can bring

Baker, V.R., 2009, Charles S. Peirce and the “Light of Nature,” in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 259–266, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(18). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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scientists to the truth of things, a truth that is independent of the dogmas of church, state, or any other authority? As a keen historian of science, Peirce sought the answer to this problem in the work of great scientists of the past. ABDUCTIVE (RETRODUCTIVE) INFERENCE Peirce discovered from his reading of Johannes Kepler’s De Motibus Stellae Martis that philosopher John Stuart Mill’s (1846) account of Kepler’s discovery of elliptical planetary orbits was completely wrong with regard to the role of inductive reasoning in scientific discovery. Instead, in regard to the great 1850s debate over scientific reasoning (Snyder, 2006), Peirce favored the views of Mill’s adversary, the Cambridge mineralogist William Whewell (1794–1866). Whewell (1840) argued for the role of mental conceptualization in Kepler’s discovery through a process of hypothesis formulation, in which “fundamental ideas” become the explanatorily fertile premises of deductive arguments. Because Whewell invoked a mental component to reasoning prior to empirical evidence, his position was attacked by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) and by other English philosophers for introducing Kantian idealism into scientific reasoning, which they held to be a purely empirical process. However, as Peirce recognized, this criticism was misguided because Whewell’s departure from pure empiricism involved a self-activity of the mind that was not Kantian in that it was not tied to universal and necessary categories of understanding. Instead, Whewell found from his historical studies of the actual practices of scientists (Whewell, 1837) that the creative act of hypothesis formation arises when the scientist confronts a troublingly anomalous phenomenon (e.g., Kepler’s study of the orbit of Mars) and then formulates a hypothesis (e.g., that Mars’ orbit has the form of an ellipse), the adoption of which then allows the phenomenon to be deduced from that hypothesis and appropriate auxiliary premises (Yeo, 1993). Whewell somewhat confused his description of scientific method by labeling it “induction,” thereby contrasting it with Mill’s (1846) formulation of induction, which at the time was viewed, with deduction, as one of only two valid forms of logical inference. Peirce realized that Whewell was actually describing a third component of scientific inference, which he termed “abductive” or “retroductive” reasoning (Fann, 1970). Peirce came to view abduction as the process by which the scientist discovers connections in which elements that looked disparate or disconnected begin to make sense. Although he recognized that all sciences use the three forms of inference (abduction, deduction, and induction), Peirce further observed that physics mainly employs deductive inference, chemistry mainly employs inductive inference, and geology mainly employs abductive inference. Though geologists, including Gilbert (1886, 1896), Chamberlin (1890), and Davis (1926), clearly described abductive inference as part of their science’s methodology (Baker, 1996a, 1996b, 1999), the connection to Peirce’s view of logic seems not to have been formally recognized until 1982 (Von Engelhardt and Zimmerman, 1982).

Like Peirce, Whewell was a practicing scientist. Moreover, also like Peirce, he was a polymath with interests that even extended into the earth sciences and the history of science. Both Peirce and Whewell were adept at developing new terminology. Indeed, it is Whewell who coined the word “scientist.” However, some of Peirce’s terminology proved baffling to those who read his papers, thereby affording one of several sources for the misunderstanding of his views by his contemporaries and, until recently, subsequent scholars. Both Whewell and Peirce were scientists drawn to philosophy, and both believed that, in contrast to the detached logic of metaphysicians, the documented practices of scientists could provide insights, and, in many cases, more valuable insights, into scientific reasoning. It is interesting to note that it has taken philosophy of science a rather long time to come around to this realization, which can be considered to be a form of the currently prevailing philosophical “naturalism,” which uses results from the sciences to answer philosophical questions, including those in the philosophy of science itself (Godfrey-Smith, 2003). A SCIENTIST DOING PHILOSOPHY Charles Peirce was immersed in science from birth (Brent, 1998). His father, Benjamin Peirce (1809–1880), was one of the most important American scientists of his day, and he made great efforts to ensure the instillation of the scientific spirit into Charles. The elder Peirce even prevailed upon his good friend Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) to supervise the 20-yr-old Charles in a 6 mo intensive study of classifying fossils. Moreover, the one book to which he had the youthful Charles pay most particular attention was Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781). From 1855 to 1859, Charles devoted so much study to this book that he claimed to have essentially known it by heart. Though he would later come to revise many things that he learned from Kant, Charles Peirce knowingly acknowledged an immense debt to the Enlightenment’s culminating and greatest philosopher. Much of the science that Charles Peirce eventually came to do professionally would today be labeled “geophysics.” He spent many years making very precise gravity measurements for the U.S. Coast Survey. However, like both Kant and Whewell, Charles Peirce was a polymath deeply interested in a broad range of interrelated subjects. His greatest passion was for logic, which he envisioned as a normative science of how reasoning ought to proceed in general, as applicable to other sciences, among which he included metaphysics, as well as special sciences, such as physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. Peirce’s goal of bringing the attitudes of science to metaphysics is especially interesting, and he describes it as follows (Peirce, 1905; reprinted in Peirce Edition Project, 1998, p. 332): That laboratory life did not prevent the writer…from becoming interested in methods of thinking; and when he came to read metaphysics, although much of it seemed to him loosely reasoned…, yet in the writings of some philosophers, especially Kant, Berkeley, and Spinoza, he sometimes came upon strains of thought that recalled the ways of thinking in the laboratory, so that he felt that he might trust to them…

Charles S. Peirce and the “Light of Nature” Peirce’s scientific approach to philosophy seems to have commonly posed a puzzle to philosophers. However, his philosophy is so immensely complex that only highly experienced philosophers, not practicing scientists, have had the interest and background to fully attempt its comprehension. As Thomas Short observes (Short, 2007, p. xii): “…Peirce wrote philosophy ‘like a scientist,’ setting out ideas not intended as final but to be applied and developed, perhaps by others.” Thus, in addition to (1) the highly disorganized state of his papers upon his death (Houser, 1992), many of them unpublished; and (2), until relatively recently, considerable mistaken scholarship in regard to his views, there is the issue that Peirce was not doing philosophy as a philosopher, but rather as a scientist. This leads philosophers to such paradoxical recognitions as the following: that to get beyond Peirce philosophically, they have to first catch up to him, but, surprisingly, that to catch up to him, they have also to strive intellectually to go past him (Colapietro, 2007). KANTIAN INFLUENCES The project of Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) was to save the universality and certainty of knowledge from the skepticism to which pure empiricism had been shown to lead by the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). Kant achieved this by developing what he called a “transcendental” view of knowledge, referring to the human ability to know how objects are possible before they are experienced with the senses. The latter constitutes “a priori” knowledge, or “synthetic a priori judgments” about how it is possible to experience objects such that experience is partly constituted by the self-activity of the human mind. Kant employed formal logic to deduce a “phenomenology” consisting of “categories of thought” that are essential qualities of phenomena abstracted from their particular manifestations. These categories of thought are then applicable to and necessary for all possible objects of thought. Kant developed his categories around the entities of (1) quantity (including unity, plurality, and totality), (2) quality (including reality, negation, and limitation), (3) relation (including substance/accident, causality/ dependence, and interaction), and (4) modality (including possibility/impossibility, existence/ nonexistence, and necessity/contingency). Peirce followed Kant in developing his own philosophy, but he did so from his own view of logic as a theory of right reasoning. (Indeed, he was motivated to advance the philosophy of logic in order to overcome difficulties that Kant encountered by applying inappropriate syllogistic arguments.) From Kant, Peirce developed (1) a broad and classic view of what constitutes “science,” (2) an architectonic approach to philosophy (a foundational structure of systematic inquiry, underpinned by logic), (3) a conviction that there are a small number of concepts (categories of thought) that structure experience (but Peirce developed his own non-Kantian phenomenology, which he called “phaneroscopy”), and (4) a view that while metaphysics seemed to be in a sorry state, it was too important to be dismissed as meaning-

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less (something that the logical positivist philosophers of science were later to do in the early twentieth century). Peirce also realized that Kant employed a pragmatic (versus “truth”) criterion for knowledge, such that one could believe in “pure ideas” or “a priori notions” because of their regulative function for promoting inquiry. Peirce developed the idea of pragmatism into a major element of his philosophy, basing it on a criterion of meaning that he first presented in 1878 (Peirce, 1878) and later restated (Peirce, 1907, unpublished manuscript “Pragmatism”; reprinted in Hartshorne and Weiss, 1934, p. 6) as follows: In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

Peirce made several very important modifications to Kant’s original scheme. The most important of these derived from his scientific instinct not to accept Kant’s rejection of the human ability to know what Kant called das Ding an sich (“the thing in itself”). Kant had gone through immense pains to argue a distinction between phenomena (which we could know via mediation through the categories of thought) and noumena (which we cannot know). This was the logical price that Kant paid for achieving the certainty of knowledge that was made possible by the certainty of his synthetic a priori judgments. Thus, Kant espoused a transcendental idealism, meaning that percepts (the objects of experience) are not the real things of the world, but only the signs of those things. This notion of signs, Peirce realized, was nominalistic, and he retraced the medieval debate over nominalism versus realism in order to resurrect a concept of realism that could replace Kant’s idealism. In this way, Peirce was led to another branch of his philosophy, that of a theory of signs, that is a semiotics (which he variously spelled “semeiotics,” “semeiotic,” or “semiotic”). Peirce would later rename key portions of his philosophy of pragmatism “critical common-sensism.” In the article “Issues of Pragmaticism,” Peirce (1905, p. 481) wrote: Critical Common-Sensism may fairly…claim…to be called Critical from the fact that it is but a modification of Kantism. The present writer was a pure Kantist until he was forced by successive steps into Pragmaticism. The Kantist has only to abjure from the bottom of his heart the proposition that a thing-in-itself can, however indirectly, be conceived; and then correct the details of Kant’s doctrine, and he will find himself to have become a Critical Common-Sensist.

PEIRCE, GALILEO, AND IL LUME NATURALE In addition to phenomenology (which Peirce called “phaneroscopy”), pragmatism, and semiotics, or “semeiotics” (all with elements in Kant), Peirce’s philosophy also included (1) a theory of continuity (which he called “synechism”), and (2) the view of scientific inquiry as consisting of three modes or methods of reasoning: abduction, deduction, and induction. My own interest in Peirce emerged from the latter, and particularly the fact that

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geology was largely a science of abduction (Von Engelhardt and Zimmerman, 1982). In the course of preparing a paper on the role of hypotheses in geomorphological reasoning (Baker, 1996b), I made a careful study of Peirce’s famous concept of abductive inference. I found that Peirce came to the remarkable conclusion that the ultimate success of science depends upon an instinctive ability to reason to fruitful or productive hypotheses, that is, to guess right (formulate the correct abductive inference). Peirce stated this many times, including this passage from his Cambridge lectures of 1898 (Peirce Edition Project, 1998, p. 54–55): The only end of science, as such, is to learn the lesson that the universe has to teach it. In Induction it simply surrenders itself to the force of facts. But it finds, at once,—I am partially inverting the historical order, in order to state the process in its logical order,—it finds I say that this is not enough. It is driven in desperation to call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale.

Peirce believed that he found a particularly keen insight from the work of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), to which he devoted extensive historical study (Eisele, 1979). From Galileo’s writing, Peirce concluded that the latter’s appeal to the “light of nature” was a key to his remarkable success in scientific discovery. Peirce (1891; reprinted in Houser and Kloesel, 1992, p. 287) wrote: A modern physicist on examining Galileo’s works is surprised to find how little experiment had to do with the establishment of the foundations of mechanics. His principal appeal is to common sense and il lume naturale. He always assumes that true theory will be found to be a simple and natural one.

In working notes for his Lowell lectures of 1892, Peirce made the following specific reference to Galileo in the context of the logic of science (reprinted in Eisele, 1985, p. 275–276): Galileo began modern experimental physics—the physics which has changed the face of the globe, by its method of experimentation under the guidance of mathematical reasoning…he appeals to the Light of Nature…his theory is that man’s intellect, though very fallible, contains a revelation of divine truth, at least in the matter of mechanics.

I cited these references in the manuscript of my paper on hypotheses in geomorphology (Baker, 1996b). However, the formal review of that manuscript contained the following criticisms by a prominent philosopher of science (who chose to review anonymously): I know Galileo’s writings fairly well, along with a good bit of the scholarly literature. I cannot think of any place where such a notion appears, let alone plays a prominent role. A review of several relevant texts has not provided me with any evidence that such a notion played an important role in Galileo’s understanding of science.

Because I knew Peirce to be meticulous in his inquiries into Galileo’s methodology, I was very puzzled by these comments and therefore became motivated to check much more thoroughly into the issue.

Historical Scholarship and Galileo Galileo is one of the folk-heroes of modern science. His confrontation with the Catholic Church is regularly cited by scientists (largely unaware of recent historical scholarship on the matter) as an example of the unavoidable conflict of science and religion, in short, “a glorious episode in the battle of scientific light against religious darkness” (Shea and Artigas, 2003). The actual details of the confrontation are much more complex and nuanced than what is portrayed in the popular myth (Finoccharo, 1989; McMullin, 2005). Galileo is also portrayed as the heroic proponent of employing both mathematics and experiment for the advancement of science against the dogmatic literalists of medieval Aristotelian scholasticism. His methodology of science is commonly held up as an exemplar in introductory college physics courses. The idea that science historians commonly make heroes out of some scientists to reinforce exemplars for the younger generation is well established (e.g., Kuhn, 1962). Galileo is portrayed as a leader in rejecting the authoritarian dogma of Aristotelian scholars and replacing it with the modern methodology of science. In contrast to the myth, however, modern scholars were surprised to find that Galileo commonly invokes reasoning ex suppositione (hypothesizing from effects to causes). In his writing on such reasoning, Galileo clearly follows Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions in logic. Scholars such as Wisan (1978, p. 47) are puzzled because, “…today, of course, everyone knows that one cannot argue rigorously from effects to causes…” (This is what logicians call “affirming the consequent.”) Philosopher Paul Feyerabend (1975) famously invoked examples from Galileo’s arguments in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems to demonstrate how a creative scientist can seemingly ignore rules of scientific inquiry that are somewhat righteously espoused as normative by such philosophers of science as Carl Hempel, Karl Popper, and Imre Lakatos. Peter Godfrey-Smith (2003) termed this “the argument from history that haunts philosophy.” Galileo, like many modern scientists, seems not to have been so interested in rigorous argument as he was in making creative discoveries about the natural world. His remarkable success in the latter is what undoubtedly drew Peirce to the careful analysis of his writings. Some modern scholars now recognize that Galileo was espousing a kind of Peircean abductive inference (McMullin, 1978), and that he also developed much of the logical basis of his thought from the Aristotelian tradition (Wallace, 1981). There are at least two reasons that “il lume naturale” is not familiar to many Galileo scholars. The first is simply one of bad translation. Silliman Drake (1974), in his well-known English version of I Due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo (Discourse Upon Two New Sciences), translates “il lume naturale” as “my good sense.” The second reason has to do with adherence to the “myth of Galileo,” which is such that Galileo’s Logic Treatises (Wallace, 1992a), which contain many references to “il lume naturale,” were not included in Le Opere die Galileo Galilei because of the antiAristotelian bias of many Galilean scholars (Wallace, 1992b).

Charles S. Peirce and the “Light of Nature” After a long search of the Harvard libraries, to which some of Peirce’s personal books were eventually deposited after his death, Jaime Nubiola (2004) apparently located Peirce’s longlost copy of the fifteen-volume edition of Le Opere di Galileo Galilei (Firenze edition). In volume XIII, Dialoghi delle Nuove Scienze, he found what seems to be Peirce’s underlining of the words “il lume naturale.” Phaedrus’ Paradox Why is Peirce so interested in Galileo’s occasional references to “il lume naturale,” and why should this be threatening to the conventional views of science, views which the philosopher of science Philip Kitcher (1993) collectively labeled “The Legend”? Peirce is trying to respond to a fundamental problem in the logic of scientific inquiry of which scientists themselves are strangely unaware. This problem can be labeled Phaedrus’ paradox because of its exposition in a passage from Robert M. Pirsig’s very popular 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In the book, the narrator has an alter-ego, whom he names Phaedrus after a character in a Platonic dialogue. Phaedrus is an intellectual who becomes fascinated with the power of scientific reasoning, only to be disillusioned by what he thinks to be its fundamental flaw. In the course of his laboratory work, Phaedrus discovers that this activity leads him to think up continuously new hypotheses. Moreover, the very procedure of testing hypotheses brings in a flood of additional hypotheses. Phaedrus even formulates a law to describe this effect (Pirsig, 1974, p. 100): “The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite”…If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is…a catastrophic disproof of the general validity of all scientific method! If the purpose of the scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and the number of hypotheses grows faster than the experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested…then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.

Peirce, as one might imagine, recognized the Phaedrus paradox long before Pirsig did, providing the following statement of it in his 1901 unpublished manuscript entitled “Hume on Miracles” (reprinted in Hartshorne and Weiss, 1935, p. 361–362): …the number of possible hypotheses concerning the truth or falsity of which we know nothing, or next to nothing, may be very great. In questions of physics there is sometimes an infinite multitude of such possible hypotheses. The question of economy is clearly a very grave one.

How does Peirce resolve this paradox? What kind of economy can he apply to it? Peirce (in Hartshorne and Weiss, 1935, p. 361–362) continues as follows: In very many questions, the situation before us is this: We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truth, however urgent may be our need of ascertaining it, unless we can trust to the human mind’s having such a power of guessing right that before very many

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hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to the one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined.

Thus, Peirce combines what he later terms our “mysterious guessing powers” with an economy of research (see Peirce Edition Project, 1998, p. 107–114). These provide what he terms “an instinctive scent for the truth” (see also Houser, 2005). The whole procedure in regard to abduction can be considered to be a strategy such that, “…rules of inquiry are justified by their propensity to lead the inquirer to new truths when consistently pursued as a general policy” (Hintikka, 1998, p. 514). It is justified by (1) evolution (the human mind having naturally evolved to think this way), (2) demonstrated success (humans would not have survived unless they had this mental capacity), and (3) desperation (Kapitan, 1997). Thus, Peirce claims, first, that what makes success possible in scientific inquiry, humankind’s inner “light of nature,” derives from evolutionary heritage of human beings. However, Peirce came to see that evolution in very different ways than how it is commonly perceived today, as will be discussed in the next section. Peirce’s second claim for abduction and il lume naturale, according to Kapitan (1997), involves its survival value. Like the evolution argument, this places abduction in the natural, instinctive capacities of humans to reason, which Peirce equated to the scholastic concept of a logica utens (the everyday working logic of reasoning). This is distinct from the formal versions of logic that concern philosophers of science, which the scholastics termed the logica docens (the improved logic obtained from rules and principles of rigorous reasoning). Peirce’s unique view of logic thus allowed him to conceive of abduction as a form of reasoning, whereas the basis of logic presumed by many philosophers of science leads them to exclude abduction (the creative framing of hypotheses) from consideration as a form of logical inference. For Peirce, with his experience as a scientist, it was inconceivable so to exclude a mode of reasoning that he knew to be so fundamental to the methodology of science. The third claim for il lume naturale involves Peirce’s distinctive view of scientific truth. It derives from what Kapitan (1997) describes as a kind of desperation in that its power provides the only hope for achieving truth in the long run. For Peirce, science is not so much concerned with truth per se as it is with the unremitting striving after truth—the active pursuit of truth by the community of inquirers totally dedicated to the task. The truth that would eventually be found by this community, should inquiry be pursued until the settlement of all doubt, is a kind of final opinion that will correspond to what is real in the world. It might seem that this would require endless inquiry, never converging, much as noted already for the Phaedrus paradox. However, Peirce realized that the issue at stake here involves the metaphysics of reality, not the endless philosophical arguments over the nature of truth. As noted by De Waal (2001, p. 41), “…it is because something is real (and only then) that it will become an object of the final opinion provided inquiry into it continues long enough.”

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This means that Peirce’s “final opinion” in regard to truth is a regulative principle for inquiry, not an actual attainable goal in science. Unfortunately, a nearly universal presumption about reality called “nominalism” interferes with the effective reasoning that Peirce sees to be essential for science. NOMINALISM It is interesting that Peirce’s concept of il lume naturale as a basis of scientific knowledge resurrects medieval scholastic debates not normally considered to be relevant to philosophy of science. In late medieval theology, various criticisms emerged to the idea of Augustinian illumination, that is, the seeing of things in the light of God, whose mind was conceived, in a Platonic manner, to be aligned with the universal forms of goodness (Copleston, 1985). St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), for example, advocated a role for human mental faculties in knowing the things of Earth, as opposed to things of Heaven. This idea threatened the Augustinian tradition that was then championed by the Franciscan order. A Franciscan friar, William of Ockham (also spelled “Occam”) (1288–1348), resolved the debate by employing his logical principle of simplicity (do not multiply entities beyond necessity) to claim as superfluous the formal entities and universal forms with which God’s mind was presumably ordered. Ockham’s new viewpoint, made possible by his logical principle (now called “Ockham’s razor”), focused knowledge, not on universals, but on particular things in nature. Because the universals were not real, according to this doctrine, they were reduced to mere names, and the doctrine became known as “nominalism” (Latin nomina, “names”), which is almost universally presumed (without recognition as such) by much of modern logic and science. The traditional view of nominalism places it in the scholastic context of the debate over universals. Thus, the term “human” does not involve any essence of human nature. There are individual human beings, but there is only a name, not a reality, to “human.” Peirce realized (1) that modern logic and science both involved the unstated presumption of nominalism, and (2) that nominalism is not so much about universals as it is about the metaphysical nature of reality. Basically, the nominalist restricts reality to things that actually exist in the world. Because modern logic and science both involve the unstated presumption of nominalism, this restriction also severely restricts the viewpoint of science, which Peirce viewed as the search for the ultimate correspondence of our conceptions of the world with reality. Peirce’s broader concept or reality led him to a broader concept of science. Reality, as he defines it, is that which is independent of what anyone in particular might think it to be. This view derived from yet another giant of scholastic philosophy, Duns Scotus (1266–1308). Thus, for Peirce, reality is not restricted to that which exists in the here and now. Instead, it also can include anything for which an inquiry can be pursued by a community of inquirers appropriately dedicated to the ultimate settling of all doubt in the matter. That community Peirce held to be coincident with the community of those scientists dedicated to the pursuit of truth.

PEIRCEAN EVOLUTION For Peirce, the physical universe to which natural science has access is not exhausted by the reality of things that have actual existence. Those who would so restrict science are espousing metaphysical nominalism. Peirce rejects this presumption, asserting instead that a Scotian view of realism includes, in addition to actualities, two other components to the “three Universes of experience.” These are (1) possibilities and (2) the tendencies of nature to take habits (which we loosely call “laws of nature”). Moreover, nature is not a mindless, brute actuality, as the materialistic forms of nominalism would claim. By incorporating all three elements of reality, Peirce was able to envision a growth and extension of scientific thought that was coextensive with the reality of the universe. His cosmology conceived of the growth and evolution of this thought in “concrete reasonableness” toward an ultimate summum bonum (Latin for “highest good”). While a fully satisfying exposition of Peirce’s mature thought on science would greatly exceed the limitations imposed by this short essay, I hope enough has been conveyed to show that Peirce’s notion of the human mind aligned with a purposive element of growth and evolution in nature is not merely a means to answer a paradox in science. It is the statement of a completely different metaphysics from that which is otherwise and arbitrarily presumed in much of modern science. This also leads to a very different kind of naturalism than what is presumed in modern philosophy of science. Instead of evolutionary epistemologies that model scientific development on the natural selection process (e.g., Hull, 1988; Kantorovich, 1993), Peirce hypothesizes that nature is something containing processes that are analogous to what we consider to be our human reasoning. He justifies this hypothesis with the historically documented successes of science. Further, he went so far in his 1903 Harvard lectures on pragmatism (Peirce Edition Project, 1998, p. 193) to claim: “…there is a degree of baseness in denying our birthright as children of God and in shamefacedly slinking away from anthropomorphic conceptions of the universe.” Though Peirce’s ideas on religion are immensely complex and nuanced (Raposa, 1989), his unique form of naturalism leads to such interpretations as the following (Nubiola, 2004): Peirce firmly believes that human mind has “a natural bent in accordance with nature’s”…but this naturalism is not the usual form of that doctrine…it does not exclude God…It is important to realize that this does not mean that when doing science God illuminates mystically human minds through grace and inspiration, but on the contrary that human being is naturally oriented to perceive the lessons which God, through the three Universes of experience, is continually teaching…

One can, of course, almost hear the shrill cries of modern defenders of scientific naturalism (materialism) in denouncing this. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most eloquent of these defenders, distinguishes the good from the bad in poetic science (Dawkins, 1998). While the latter uses metaphor to mislead, the former uses its literary grace to advance the kind of scientific metaphysics

Charles S. Peirce and the “Light of Nature” favored by the defenders. As an example of “laudable toughmindedness in the debunking of cosmic sentiment,” Dawkins (1998, p. ix) provides the following quote from Atkins (1984): We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe.

Peirce already prepared his reply to such materialist musings, and it is one that deflates their metaphysical pretensions (Peirce Edition Project, 1998, p. 193): I hear you say: “All that is not fact; it is poetry.” Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for.

CONCLUSION In a revealing metaphor, Charles Peirce once surmised that philosophy and science somehow had their names mixed up at birth. While it was the continuing passionate concern of philosophers to establish either a foundational system or systems that would assure that knowledge (Latin “scientia”) be universal, necessary, and certain, it was equally the passionate concern of scientists to be so loving (Greek “philos”) of wisdom (Greek “sophia”) that they dedicated themselves to a never-ending inquiry into the truth of things (which Peirce conceived as “the final opinion”). Extending this view a bit, one can see that the infatuation of philosophers with science (Gjertsen, 1989) came from a hope of uncovering foundational reasons for what they believed to be historically demonstrated successes of science in achieving the kinds of knowledge to which philosophy traditionally aspired, but had also failed to establish on purely metaphysical grounds. Charles Peirce, from his scientific perspective, understood that a reality composed of spontaneity, actuality, and a purposive idealistic evolution could not be successfully explored on the basis of a foundational metaphysics, such as that attempted by Kant and others. Applying a geological metaphor, Peirce (in a 1908 manuscript reprinted in Peirce Edition Project, 1998, p. 444) claimed that the “bedrock of logical truth” consists in this fact, “…that man’s mind must have been attuned to the truth of things in order to discover what he has discovered.” This instinct for guessing right in regard to the interpretation of nature’s habits Peirce equated to Galileo’s reference to il lume naturale, and here is how he described it on 21 February 1898, in Lecture 4 (entitled “The First Rule of Logic”) of the Cambridge Conference lecture series on “Reasoning and the Logic of Things” (Peirce Edition Project, 1998, p. 54–55): The only end of science, as such, is to learn the lesson that the universe has to teach it. In Induction it simply surrenders itself to the force of facts. But it finds, at once…that this is not enough. It is

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driven in desperation to call upon its inward sympathy with nature, its instinct for aid, just as we find Galileo at the dawn of modern science making his appeal to il lume naturale. But insofar as it does this, the solid ground of fact fails it…It must then find confirmations… Even if it does…they are only partial. It is still not standing on the bedrock of fact…Moreover, in all its progress, science vaguely feels that it is only learning a lesson. The value of facts to it, lies only in this, that they belong to Nature; and Nature is something great, and beautiful, and sacred, and eternal, and real,—the object of its worship and its aspiration.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Joseph Brent and Nathan Houser for conversations that encouraged my studies of Charles Peirce. The manuscript greatly benefited from insightful review comments by Andre De Tienne and Jens Morten Hansen. This essay is Arizona University Meta-scientific Inquiries (AUMIN) contribution 22. REFERENCES CITED Atkins, P.W., 1984, The Second Law: New York, Scientific American Books, 230 p. Baker, V.R., 1996a, The pragmatic roots of American Quaternary geology and geomorphology: Geomorphology, v. 16, p. 197–215, doi: 10.1016/ S0169-555X(96)80001-8. Baker, V.R., 1996b, Hypotheses and geomorphological reasoning, in Rhodes, B.L., and Thorn, C.E., eds., The Scientific Nature of Geomorphology: New York, Wiley, p. 57–85. Baker, V.R., 1999, Geosemiosis: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 111, p. 633–645, doi: 10.1130/0016-7606(1999)111<0633:G>2.3.CO;2. Brent, J., 1998, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life: Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 412 p. Chamberlin, T.C., 1890, The method of multiple working hypotheses: Science, v. 15, p. 92–96, doi: 10.1126/science.ns-15.366.92. Colapietro, V., 2007, C.S. Peirce’s rhetorical turn: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, v. 43, p. 16–52. Copleston, F., 1985, A History of Philosophy, Book One: New York, Doubleday, 479 p. Davis, W.M., 1926, The value of outrageous geological hypotheses: Science, v. 63, p. 463–468, doi: 10.1126/science.63.1636.463. Dawkins, R., 1998, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder: Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 337 p. De Waal, C., 2001, On Peirce: Belmont, California, Wadsworth, 91 p. Drake, S., 1974, Galileo Galilei: Two New Sciences: Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 323 p. Eisele, C., 1979, The influence of Galileo on Peirce, in Martin, R.M., ed., Studies in the Scientific and Mathematical Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce: Essays by Carolyn Eisele: The Hague, Mouton, p. 169–176. Eisele, C., 1985, Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science, 2 volumes: Berlin, Mouton, 1131 p. Fann, K.T., 1970, Peirce’s Theory of Abduction: The Hague, Martinas Nijhoff, 62 p. Feyerabend, P., 1975, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge: London, Verso, 279 p. Finocchiaro, M., 1989, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History: Berkeley, University of California Press, 382 p. Gilbert, G.K., 1886, The inculcation of scientific method by example: American Journal of Science, v. 31, p. 284–299. Gilbert, G.K., 1896, The origin of hypotheses illustrated by the discussion of a topographic problem: Science, v. 3, p. 1–13, doi: 10.1126/science.3.53.1. Gjertsen, D., 1989, Science and Philosophy: London, Penguin, 296 p. Godfrey-Smith, P., 2003, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 272 p. Hartshorne, C., and Weiss, P., eds., 1934, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volume V, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism: Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 437 p.

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Hartshorne, C., and Weiss, P., eds., 1935, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Volume VI, Scientific Metaphysics: Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 462 p. Hintikka, J., 1998, What is abduction? The fundamental problem of contemporary epistemology: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, v. 19, p. 503–534. Houser, N., 1992, The fortunes and misfortunes of the Peirce papers, in Balat, M., and Deledall-Rhodes, J., eds., Signs of Humanity, Volume 3: Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, p. 1259–1268. Houser, N., 2005, The scent of truth: Semiotica, v. 151, no. 1/4, p. 455–466, doi: 10.1515/semi.2005.2005.153-1-4.455. Houser, N., and Kloesel, C.J.W., eds., 1992, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 1 (1867–1893): Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 399 p. Hull, D., 1988, Science as a Process: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 586 p. Kantorovich, A., 1993, Scientific Discovery: Logic and Tinkering: Albany, State University of New York Press, 281 p. Kapitan, T., 1997, Peirce and the structure of abductive inference, in Houser, N., Roberts, D.D., and Van Evra, J., eds., Studies in the Logic of Charles S. Peirce: Bloomington, Indiana University Press, p. 477–496. Kitcher, P., 1993, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions: Oxford, Oxford University Press, 421 p. Kuhn, T., 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 210 p. McMullin, E., 1978, The conception of science in Galileo’s work, in Butts, R.E., and Pitts, J.C., eds., New Perspectives on Galileo: Dordrecht, Reidel, p. 209–257. McMullin, E., 2005, The Church and Galileo: Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame Press, 391 p. Mill, J.S., 1846, A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive: London, Longmans and Green, 860 p. Misak, C., ed., 2004, The Cambridge Companion to Peirce: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 362 p. Nubiola, J., 2004, Il lume naturale: Abduction and God: Simiotiche, v. I/2, p. 91–102 (http://www.unav.es/users/LumeNaturale.html; last accessed 11 January 2009).

Parker, K., 1998, The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought: Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 268 p. Peirce, C.S., 1878, How to make our ideas clear: Popular Science Monthly, v. 13, p. 286–302. Peirce, C.S., 1891, The architecture of theories: The Monist, v. 1, p. 161–176. Peirce, C.S., 1905, What pragmatism is: The Monist, v. 15, p. 161–181. Peirce Edition Project, ed., 1998, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893–1913): Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 584 p. Pirsig, R.M., 1974, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: New York, Bantam, 373 p. Raposa, M.L., 1989, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion: Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 180 p. Shea, W.R., and Artigas, M., 2003, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius: New York, Oxford University Press, 226 p. Short, T.L., 2007, Peirce’s Theory of Signs: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 374 p. Snyder, L.J., 2006, Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society: Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 386 p. Von Engelhardt, W., and Zimmerman, J., 1982, Theorie der Geowissenschaft: Paderborn, Ferdinand Schoningh (published in English in 1988 as Theory of Earth Science: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 381 p.). Wallace, W.A., 1981, Prelude to Galileo: Dordrecht, Reidel, 369 p. Wallace, W.A., 1992a, Galileo’s Logical Treatises: Dordrecht, Reidel, 239 p. Wallace, W.A., 1992b, Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof: Dordrecht, Reidel, 323 p. Whewell, W., 1837, History of the Inductive Sciences: London, Cass, 556 p. Whewell, W., 1840, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History: London, Cass, 1245 p. Wisan, W.L., 1978, Galileo’s scientific method: A reexamination, in Butts, R.E., and Pitts, J.C., eds., New Perspectives on Galileo: Dordrecht, Reidel, p. 1–57. Yeo, R., 1993, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Victorian England: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 294 p. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Theory choice in the historical sciences: Geology as a philosophical case study William L. Vanderburgh† Department of Philosophy, 1845 N. Fairmount Street, Campus Box 74, Wichita, Kansas 67260-0074, USA

ABSTRACT Theory choice, the problem of accepting/rejecting scientific theories, is philosophically interesting in part because it involves appeal to nonempirical factors that can only be justified by philosophical considerations. The emphasis in this paper is on the historical as opposed to the experimental sciences—including astronomy, evolutionary biology, and especially historical geology—with examples taken from seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. The fact that evidential reasoning inherently requires a choice of philosophical/methodological principles is demonstrated through reference both to historical cases and to general philosophical considerations. This paper argues that methodological principles play a crucial role in turning empirical data into evidence for/against theories, and it outlines some of the particular evidential and methodological difficulties faced in the historical sciences. Choices of methodological principles depend on nonempirical factors, and because definitive arguments can rarely be found, they are largely a matter of judgment. “Scientific” debates are thus sometimes really disputes over philosophical taste and judgment. Moreover, it is often the case that clear judgments about the incorrectness/correctness of a methodological principle used in a specific context can only be made retrospectively. In part by looking at connections among Isaac Newton, David Hume, and Charles Lyell, and in part by examining Lyell’s own arguments, I argue that it was reasonable for Lyell to adopt uniformitarianism as a central methodological principle. Through arguments and historical examples, I also show that there are limits to the acceptability of the uniformitarian position. Keywords: theory choice, evidence, scientific method, uniformitarianism, Charles Lyell. INTRODUCTION When philosophers of science talk about “the problem of theory choice,” they have in mind questions about the methods, processes, evidence, reasons, assumptions, and arguments involved in deciding which scientific theories to accept or reject. †

E-mail: [email protected].

This paper discusses theory choice using historical geology and other historical sciences such as astronomy and evolutionary biology as illustrations. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 1 outlines some of the philosophical considerations arising in theory choice in general. Section 2 elaborates on some details of the role of evidence in theory choice and discusses evidential and methodological problems special to the so-called historical sciences. Section 3

Vanderburgh, W.L., 2009, Theory choice in the historical sciences: Geology as a philosophical case study, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 267–276, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(19). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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focuses on the role of methodological principles in theory choice, with special emphasis on the principle of uniformitarianism in historical geology. Section 4 continues the discussion of uniformitarianism and also considers other principles of method that have been important in the history of the discipline of geology. ON CHOOSING THEORIES: SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS Investigations into the problem of theory choice ask questions such as these: 1. How do we get from facts to theories? 2. Faced with competing theories, how do we decide between them? 3. What justifies the principles that we do in fact use to make theory choices? When considering questions such as these, it is important to be aware of the sense in which the questions are asked. If they are asked in a descriptive sense, the answers will have to do with actual practices, either contemporary or historical. If they are asked in a prescriptive (or normative) sense, the answers will tell us what “ought” to be the case, i.e., what the correct thing to do is. As is all too common with human endeavors, what is the case is not necessarily the same as what ought to be the case. It is important to be clear about the two different senses in which theory choice questions can be asked because it is never logically correct to infer an “ought-statement” from an “is-statement” (or vice versa). Take the question, “How do we decide between competing theories?” There are at least two general categories of answers to consider. One has to do with empirical adequacy, that is, with whether or not the competing theories have equivalent predictive and/or explanatory success. A theory can be described as “empirically adequate” when its predictions agree with the available observations to within the margin of error in the data. Two theories that meet this condition can be described as “empirically equivalent.” When a theory fails to be empirically adequate, there are two possible responses: either reject the theory outright, or modify the theoretical background (including background assumptions, descriptions of initial conditions, or parts of the theory itself) so as to make the theory become empirically adequate. The second category of answers to the question about deciding between competing theories has to do with the methodological features of the competing theories. Most often, explicit discussion of the methodological features of theories as a ground for theory choice occurs when faced with competing theories that are exactly or nearly empirically equivalent. In such cases, theorists will often consider which of the empirically equivalent theories is to be preferred on nonempirical grounds. It is in response to such situations that criteria including simplicity, elegance, explanatory power, consistency with the rest of accepted theory, etc., are most often invoked. Note, however, that while methodological criteria are often applied comparatively, sometimes single theories with

no empirically close rivals will be rejected on methodological grounds—for example, when they are thought to be overly complex, inconsistent with the body of accepted theory, inelegant, and so on. Theory choice is, thus, partly a matter of empirical accuracy and partly a matter of methodological adequacy. To some extent, the relative importance of a particular methodological principle is determined by the reasons for theorizing in the first place. Where one theorizes in order to provide afterthe-fact explanations, explanatory power and consistency with other disciplines could be prioritized. Where one theorizes with the aim of making accurate predictions about future observations, simplicity and predictive accuracy could be treated as more important. There are often trade-offs between competing methodological principles, and there is no unique way to “correctly” balance them—this is one of the places where philosophical considerations can have an important bearing on scientific inquiry. Note that adopting some position or other on methodological/ philosophical questions is unavoidable when making theory choices. Most of the time these philosophical commitments are tacit, but without methodological principles, it is impossible to even get started in the basic scientific task of generalizing from finite observed data to unobserved cases. Even a conclusion as simple as “All ravens are black” does not follow immediately from “All observed ravens are black.” The leap from the observed to the unobserved must be mediated by a rule for reasoning, a methodological principle, that constrains the possible conclusions that are to be taken to “follow” from the available information. (There is only an imaginary boundary between science and philosophy.) Although scientists and philosophers often suffer from the illusion that there is a uniquely correct logic of empirical inference, really there are an indefinite number of possible inference rules. Choosing between them—choosing methodological principles—is one of the key functions of the philosophical part of the endeavor to understand the nature of the world in its totality. It is possible to have an inference rule that says, “If all observed cardinals are red, then conclude that all unobserved cardinals are blue.” We reject this rule out of hand, but the rejection is rooted in a tacit philosophical position regarding what the correct rule of inference is. Making explicit the philosophical commitments implicit in scientific thinking is one of the useful functions of philosophy of science, in part because it allows the possibility of analyzing whether or not current practices are truly the ideal practices. Here are some examples of methodological principles of theory choice that should be kept in mind throughout the rest of the discussion. Assuming empirical adequacy, we generally think it is better if a theory is also: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

simple (as possible; or, simpler than competitors), fruitful, broad, unified, explanatorily powerful,

Theory choice in the historical sciences: Geology as a philosophical case study 6. able to make successful novel predictions, 7. consistent with other parts of science, 8. etc. These and similar methodological principles are the ones normally discussed in the context of the problem of theory choice. Most scientists and philosophers agree that principles such as these are the ones actually used to help guide theory choices. However, is current practice maximally correct? If these are the right principles, then employing them correctly will lead to correct theory choices—but why should we think these are really the right principles? How can we justify each of those principles/ reasons for preferring theories? (Note that I am not seriously doubting that these are the correct principles; I am inquiring into their justification.) In choosing principles of theory choice, we are ultimately led to ask, “What principles can we use for choosing our principles of theory choice?” This is obviously a difficult question, in part because of the infinite regress of principles it implies (we would need principles for choosing our principles for choosing…our principles of theory choice). It is difficult also because it is a “metascience” question: While the answer determines how to deal with empirical evidence, the question itself cannot be answered by appeal to empirical facts. (It is interesting that methodological principles are, strictly speaking, not based on empirical evidence, yet it is impossible to do evidential reasoning without them.) We might look to examples from the history of science for guidance about which methodological principles have been successful in previous cases, but successful outcomes in the past are no guarantee of the correctness of the principles used in the past—the past successes might have been the result of an accidental correlation, a selection effect, or some other sort of evidential illusion. Arguing for or against various possible methodological principles must take place not at the level of empirical claims but at some other (philosophical) level. It is possible, then, to distinguish three different though related levels of analysis when it comes to the issue of theory choice. (1) Science uses methodological principles to make decisions about how to treat evidence and how to evaluate/accept/reject theories. (2) History and sociology of science are interested in the descriptive issue of the rules of theory choice scientists do in fact use, and how those practices have changed over time. (3) Philosophy of science is interested in exploring the prescriptive/ normative issue of which methodological principles should be used, and how they ought to be interpreted and applied. Of course, these three levels of analysis need not be isolated, and, in fact, some apparently “scientific” debate is actually normative (that is, philosophical) debate about which methodological principles are appropriate to a given problem. One kind of contribution to that sort of debate is appeal to historical “ideal examples” of scientific theory choice—the narrow sense of a Kuhnian paradigm—as exemplars to guide future practice. Thus, while it is possible to distinguish these three levels of analysis, it would be a mistake to think that they should only, or even can be, pursued independently.

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Before moving on, it should be noted that there is disagreement in current scholarship about the possibility of ever successfully addressing the philosophical problems of theory choice. The “logical empiricist” approach to philosophy of science that was the received view for the first half of the twentieth century collapsed under pressure from several directions, including its persistent failure to meet its own standards and research goals. No replacement consensus has yet emerged. This is, thus, a time of ferment in fields related to philosophy of science. An example of the failure of the logical empiricist framework is a persistent inability to find a convincing rational justification of induction; one result of this failure is that we are left with the problem of underdetermination, which says that there will always be an indefinite number of alternative theories available that the empirical evidence will be unable to decide between. (Underdetermination will be mentioned again at the end of this paper; it is one of the central philosophical problems of theory choice.) If no evidential or rational reason for preferring some theories over their rivals exists, the objectivity and rationality of science are called into question. One response to the failure of the logical empiricist program has been pessimism: Social scientists, including some historians but most especially sociologists of knowledge, have given up on the project of coming to a rational understanding of and justification for scientific decision making. They propose, instead, that science is largely irrational and driven almost entirely by sociological and political pressures. This leads to a radical form of relativism. Despite the lack of a consensus about how to replace the logical empiricist framework, many philosophers have remained reluctant to follow this relativist path. However difficult it may be to solve the problems of induction, confirmation, theory choice, and so on, many philosophers prefer to try find new ways to pursue the study of the foundations of science that assume that science is largely objective, rational, and evidentially driven (while recognizing that sociological, political, and other irrational factors nevertheless sometimes play an important role). The current paper falls into this latter category. EVIDENCE AND THEORY CHOICE IN THE HISTORICAL SCIENCES In the broadest sense of the term, science is inductive. That is, from limited observed facts, science draws conclusions about unobserved facts. For example, from (present, observed) stratigraphic features, geologists infer the (absent, unobserved) causes of those features. The conclusion of an inductive argument may be a particular or a general claim (e.g., “this feature was formed by this process” or “all features of this type are formed by this type of process”). Inductive conclusions are never certain, only probable (ideally, but not always, highly probable). Any inferential method that draws conclusions that go beyond the data in the premises is inductive in this general sense; I do not intend to limit my claims to enumerative induction. (I should mention here that, following the majority of contemporary philosophers of science and logicians, I include “abduction”—also known as “explanatory inference” or “inference to the best explanation”; see Lipton

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[2004]—as a variety of induction. Abductive inferences are inductive in the general sense in that their conclusions make claims that go beyond the information contained in the premises.) There has long been debate about which particular inductive methods are appropriate to science; the best answer may be that different methods are appropriate to different kinds of needs. Examples of inductive methods include: 1. enumerative induction, which gathers many similar instances and infers the truth of a universal generalization; 2. eliminative induction, which falsifies all but one of the possible alternative hypotheses and concludes that the remaining one must be true; 3. the method of hypotheses, which infers that a hypothesis is true, or probable, because it is consistent with the available evidence; 4. the method of vera causa (real causes), which restricts the method of hypotheses to causes that are known to really exist; and 5. abduction (inference to the best explanation), which considers the possible explanations of some observed facts and concludes that the “best” explanation is the correct hypothesis. For a discussion of these and some of the many other possible inductive methods, as treated in the context of geology, see Laudan (1982). Science uses evidence and inductive reasoning to help decide three sorts of questions: 1. What is possible? 2. What is plausible? 3. What is likely? However, in each kind of case, we can ask what, exactly, is the evidence supposed to be evidence for? In geological development as in biological evolution, it is useful to distinguish: (1) the fact of change over time; (2) the path of change over time; and (3) the mechanism of change over time. Michael Ruse uses this tripartite distinction to good effect in his discussion of the evidence for evolution and the debate with biblical creationists (Ruse, 2001, p. 12–32). Applied to historical geology, this distinction yields three questions: 1. Fact Question: Was Earth different in form in earlier ages? 2. Path Question: What was the sequence of states from earlier ages to the present? 3. Mechanism Question: What were the processes driving the sequence of changes? Note that these are separate questions, requiring different kinds of evidence for their answers. Also, answers at one level do not necessarily determine answers at other levels. For each kind of question, different kinds of evidence can tell us what is impossible/ possible, implausible/plausible and unlikely/likely.

It is clear that different sciences have different kinds of evidence available to them, and that they make different uses of that evidence. A common distinction (somewhat artificial, but useful) is between the “historical” (e.g., cosmology, evolutionary biology) as compared to the “experimental” sciences (e.g., chemistry, population genetics). The difference between historical and experimental sciences is in the kinds of information available from the world. The direct, manipulative studies that are possible in perceptual psychology or high-energy physics are not possible in historical geology or cosmology. The historical sciences have no direct access to their objects of study (past states of a system or set of systems) and hence must infer past states from present traces. Similarly, no direct experiments are possible. Contrast the historical sciences on this score with the physics of falling bodies near Earth, or biological experiments on fruit flies. That said, “natural experiments” are sometimes possible. Geologists study current volcanic activity in part in order to understand ancient volcanic activity and the structures it created; biologists watch what happens to current populations subject to radical changes of environment in order to learn about long-dead populations. Finally, indirect manipulative studies are sometimes possible in the historical sciences: that is, direct manipulative studies can be performed on systems that are thought to be analogous to the one of interest. Establishing the degree and the strength of the analogy is crucial to being able to get useful, accurate information from these indirect experiments. For example, we can study stars via the behavior of plasma under artificial conditions on Earth, or we can study natural diamond formation via artificial experiments at high temperatures and pressures. The strength of the evidence obtained by these methods about stars and diamonds depends on the similarities and differences between the objects of interest and the objects actually studied. Buffon attempted such an indirect experiment when he estimated the age of Earth by comparing its rate of cooling to the rate of cooling of a cannonball (see Gohau, 1990). Buffon reasoned that if Earth started as a molten mass, it must have been impossible for it to have sustained life until it had cooled below a certain temperature. He compared the length of time it took for cannonballs of known mass and volume to cool to room temperature from a white hot state, and on that basis calculated the age of Earth at around 75,000 years. This sort of analogical reasoning involves uniformitarian assumptions in two ways: 1. uniformity of Earth’s cooling (constant rate over time, etc.), and 2. uniformity of type between Earth and a cannonball. Unfortunately, both of Buffon’s assumptions failed, and hence his estimate of the age of the universe turned out to be wildly inaccurate. (The main problem with Buffon’s analogy is that, unbeknownst to him or the rest of science for a long time, radioactivity inside Earth keeps the Earth hotter than it would other-

Theory choice in the historical sciences: Geology as a philosophical case study wise be.) Despite its failure (or perhaps because of it), this case illustrates well both the structure of indirect experimental evidence in the historical sciences, and the importance of establishing that the experimental system is appropriately analogous to the historical system about which conclusions are being drawn. Note that whatever the source of the evidence—whether direct or indirect, experimental or otherwise—the observed data (the quantities and qualities observed) must be turned into evidence. In this process, data are mediated by several factors, including theory, background information, background assumptions (including metaphysical claims about the regularity of nature that are not subject to test), and methodological principles (including a preference for simpler theories, etc.). The process of turning data into evidence can be illustrated by examples from the history of science. Charles Lyell himself asserts the analogy between astronomy and geology, both with regard to the disadvantageous evidential position and the sameness of the methodological tools employed to overcome that disadvantage. It is only by becoming sensible of our natural disadvantages that we shall be roused to exertion, and prompted to seek out opportunities of discovering the operations now in progress, such as do not present themselves readily to view. We are called upon, in our researches into the state of the earth, as in our endeavours to comprehend the mechanism of the heavens, to invent means for overcoming the limited range of our vision. We are perpetually required to bring, as far as possible, within the sphere of observation, things to which the eye, unassisted by art, could never obtain access. (Lyell, 1830, p. 83)

The need to invent new technology—a “geological telescope,” if you will, to bring the unseen world into clearer view—is only part of Lyell’s meaning here. In astronomy, as exemplified by Newton’s great work, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, new technology only supplied new data. That data had to be manipulated, and Newton’s great achievement was in showing how to turn that data (more precise planetary positions, catalogued over time) into evidence about the structure of the solar system and the laws governing gravitational interactions in general. Newton’s achievement was partly mathematical, but it was most significantly methodological. In many respects, Newton’s methodology became the scientific ideal; with it, he was able to bring into view things such as orbits and mutual attractions that would otherwise never have been visible to the eye—or to the telescope. Lyell is in part proposing a similar recipe for geology: Find those instruments and techniques, including principles of method, which can reliably and plausibly reveal to us the unseen processes that shaped Earth. To further illustrate some of the methodological issues common to the historical sciences, consider two cases from post-Newtonian astronomy. In 1781, William Herschel (father of John Herschel) discovered a planet beyond Saturn that came to be called Uranus. By 1820, a persistent discrepancy between the Newtonian predictions for and the actual observations of Uranus’s position over time was well known. In short, it was

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impossible to describe a Newtonian orbit that incorporated both the post-Herschel observations of Uranus and the “prediscovery” observations that had been found in various older stellar catalogs (in which the planet’s position had been unknowingly recorded as if it were a star). Two possible resolutions of this empirical discrepancy existed. In each case, the “data” are the amount and direction of the discrepancy between the Newtonian predictions and the observed predictions, considered over time. First, via the assumption that Newton’s theory of universal gravity is correct, the data become evidence for the existence of a previously unknown mass (John Couch Adams, Urbain LeVerrier). Via the assumption that the known bodies in the solar system are the only gravitationally significant masses, the data become evidence that gravity obeys a non-Newtonian force law at the distance of Uranus (George Biddell Airy, the Astronomer Royal at the time). A case involving the planet Mercury is an instructive comparison here: The discrepancy in Mercury’s motion (also discovered by LeVerrier, in 1843) was of an identical kind, and again both “modification of gravity” and “new matter” solutions were possible. Whereas in the case of the Uranus discrepancy, the correct solution was to predict the existence of Neptune, in the case of the Mercury discrepancy, the correct solution was to develop Einstein’s non-Newtonian theory of gravitation. The divergent resolutions of these two exactly analogous empirical discrepancies indicate the difficulty of knowing in advance which of the possible solutions consistent with the data is the correct one. To put the point another way, it is difficult to decide in advance which hypothesis the data are really evidence for. A similar case can be found in the history of geology. “As early as 1821, Constant Prévost had observed ‘a mixture of marine and fluvial shells in the same layers’ in the hills of the Paris Basin” (Gohau, 1990, p. 140; quoting Prévost, 1821). These data can be construed as evidence for three different possible explanations: 1. the occurrence of marine invasions at that location, 2. reworking, or 3. the deposits were formed in an estuary. Although point 1 is the correct interpretation, Prévost applied the principle of uniformitarianism to deny marine invasions and instead advocated the estuary hypothesis. Note, then, that with a different set of background assumptions (perhaps including different methodological principles), the very same data can be taken to be evidence for different hypotheses. This illustration points out one respect in which science is not purely empirical, as popular accounts too often pretend it is. THE ROLE OF METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES IN GEOLOGY: THE PRINCIPLE OF UNIFORMITARIANISM It is clear that the principle of uniformitarianism plays a central role in geology today, and in the history of the discipline. What is the foundation or justification of uniformitarianism

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as a methodological principle? Three sorts of answers can be attempted; none is perfectly satisfactory. First, we can look for direct evidence indicating that in the past the same processes were operating that are observed to operate now. This sort of direct evidence of uniformity is rare at best, not least because of the problems of turning data into evidence mentioned already. Second, uniformity can be entailed by an accepted account of the metaphysics of the universe. The trouble here is that it simply pushes the question of justification back one level: Why that account of metaphysics instead of some other? Third, and perhaps most commonly, uniformitarianism can be invoked for reasons of epistemic and/or methodological safety. That is, the uniformitarian principle can be invoked in the absence of reasons to apply a different principle because it is the one most likely to yield results close to the truth (or because no other principle is likely to do better, or it is the principle that is going to stray least often from the truth, or stray by a smaller amount on average, etc.). Of the three available reasons for adopting uniformitarianism, this third one is perhaps the most convincing. Note that this route is still not easy: Some reason for preferring the principle needs to be articulated clearly and needs to be shown to provide adequate justification for accepting the principle. However, examples of the failure of uniformitarianism in astronomy and geology reveal the limits of a good idea. An example of the failure of uniformitarianism in astronomy is the attempt to solve a discrepancy in the orbit of Mercury that was exactly analogous to the Uranus discrepancy. As in the case of Uranus, matter hypotheses were formulated in the attempt to make Mercury’s Newtonian predictions match observation. One after another, these matter hypotheses were shown to fail, either because the matter hypothesized should have been observable but was not, or because the matter hypothesized should have caused additional motions in the orbits of other solar system bodies that were not in fact observed. Ultimately, the Mercury discrepancy was resolved by abandoning the uniformitarian assumption that gravity acts always and everywhere according to the Newtonian description. Instead, Einstein’s general theory of relativity successfully accounts for the motion of Mercury without needing to postulate unseen matter, and it shows that Newton’s theory of universal gravity is really only accurate when the velocities involved are much less than the speed of light and the gravitational fields involved are weak. At the distance of Mercury, the Sun’s gravitational field is strong enough that relativistic effects are important. In other words, the evidence available to Newton (all of it low-velocity, weak-field evidence) does not justify the absolutely universal claim Newton made on that basis: the action of gravity is not “uniform” in the way Newton thought, after all. In the history of Earth, various examples of the failure of uniformitarianism can also be found. One is the case of the extinction of the dinosaurs; the best explanation available, one that accounts for the pattern of extinction plus the iridium layer at the K-T boundary, is a cometary impact. Of course, that is a very unusual event in present times, one that could not be fairly described as a “normal” event (though we expect that such impacts

have happened many times in the past, and that they were much more frequent in the past). Examples of the failure of respectable methodological principles raise the question: Under what conditions is it appropriate to abandon the assumption of uniformity (or whatever other methodological principles one might care to consider)? To put this sort of question into specific scientific contexts: 1. When is it acceptable to revise a well-confirmed theory of gravity? 2. When is it acceptable to invoke an unusual or unique event in an explanation (e.g., postulating a comet impact to explain a mass extinction)? 3. When and why did it become acceptable to abandon steady-state cosmology? In more general terms: 1. What constrains nonuniformitarian hypotheses? 2. What makes nonuniformitarian hypotheses reasonable when, most of the time, uniformitarian hypotheses are thought to be methodologically superior? In order to answer these two general questions, several factors need to be considered. The relative empirical success of the best hypotheses constructed under the respective competing methodological principles is crucial. Also, the elegance and simplicity of the explanations derived from the two hypotheses can be important. The only acceptable hypotheses are those consistent with (at least the majority of) other known facts and well-supported theories across the disciplines (chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, etc.). It would be best if uniformitarian assumptions are abandoned only after several well-constructed hypotheses built on that foundation are shown to be failures. Of course, it is not possible to exhaustively eliminate every possible hypothesis built on the uniformitarian assumption, but a persistent inability to formulate a viable hypothesis within that framework will, generally speaking, make the scientific community more accepting of attempts to adopt a new methodological foundation. (A discussion of Kuhnian “paradigm shifts”—in which old theories and methodological principles are overturned and replaced by new ones—is beyond the scope of this paper.) Should geology assume uniformitarianism? In general, the answer is yes. The principle is backed by good sense. Often, there is no better principle available, and some principle or other is needed. In addition, theories built on that principle are normally successful. However, principles such as uniformitarianism can be difficult to interpret and apply to real cases. As Stephan Jay Gould has shown, Lyell’s version of uniformitarianism has several parts— uniformity of law, rate, cause, and process—some of which are good and some not. Sometimes, such principles lead us astray (we look in vain for matter solutions to the Mercury discrepancy, say), and, occasionally, despite our initial thoughts, the principles

Theory choice in the historical sciences: Geology as a philosophical case study simply do not apply to the cases in which we are interested. This means that there will sometimes arise situations in which it is a mistake to adopt (or persist in) the uniformitarian perspective. Unfortunately, no general rules exist for determining when it is appropriate to give up strongly held and normally successful methodological principles. Case-by-case analyses, with attention to instructive examples from the history of science, can make us sensitive to the sorts of issues that surround theory choice. The ways in which scientists wrestle with these issues is one of the respects in which science is philosophically interesting. Buffon’s landmark investigation into the structural properties of wood makes an excellent study of the limits of reasoning and the limits of the extrapolation of experimental results to as-yet-unobserved situations. In his study, Buffon showed that structural properties of large pieces of wood (beams, etc.) cannot be predicted merely from the structural properties of smaller pieces of the same type of wood. Buffon recognized the failure of the uniformitarian assumption in this case because he was able to test each of the small-scale and large-scale systems. In the case of the cooling of Earth, on the other hand, Buffon had no choice but to apply the principle of uniformitarianism since he could not actually compare the (unobserved) rate of cooling of Earth to the (observed) rate of cooling of the cannonball. Is it unreasonable to assume inductive uniformitarianism? David Hume famously showed that induction cannot be rationally justified (Hume, 1999, p. 108–118). Far from rejecting induction on that basis, however, he argued that human beings are psychologically compelled to reason inductively—we are essentially inductive machines, and we cannot change our natures. Moreover, even though he thought it impossible to completely rationally justify induction, he was nevertheless sure that it was appropriate to judge various examples of inductive reasoning as comparatively better or worse (see Vanderburgh, 2005). Taking an evolutionary perspective, one can easily see why animals would end up with the sort of psychological compulsion that Hume supposes we have. If the laws of nature are unchanging over the lifetimes of individuals, projecting past experience into the future is a key to survival (do eat this, do not eat that, avoid this predator, etc.): only individuals who tend to take the past as a guide to the future are likely to survive and reproduce, and hence the inductive tendency will have increasingly high frequency in successive generations. (If the laws of nature are not unchanging over the lifetime individuals, no strategy for making predictions about the future is likely to be successful.) The upshot is that, even if we cannot fully justify using the principle of inductive uniformity, in the absence of explicit evidence to the contrary, it is both the best available inference rule and we have a strong psychological tendency to employ it. Put it this way: If there is no evidence leading to the conclusion that the uniformitarian assumption is false in a given instance, there is no better (more effective, more reliable) assumption that could be made. This is analogous to the reasoning employed in probability theory and statistics regarding the so-called principle of indifference: In the absence of evidence to the contrary, all pos-

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sible outcomes are to be treated as indifferently (that is, equally) probable. (Unless there is some reason to think the die is unfair, treat each number as equally likely to come up on a given roll.) Does the assumption of uniformitarianism make it impossible to admit nonuniform causes into science? Not at all. Cosmologists recognize that we can project the current laws of nature backward in time only so far: In the conditions of temperature and pressure thought to be present in the earliest moments of the big bang, our current understanding of particle physics and gravitation breaks down. Similarly, geologists can reach the conclusion that in the earliest phases of Earth’s development, the intensity of geological processes, if not the kinds of geological processes acting, could have been different. Similarly, nonuniform events such as comet impacts can be accepted as occurring in the past. It is true, however, that claims about unusual events require extraordinary evidence. The methodological assumption of inductive uniformity can reasonably be put aside only when the evidential situation demands it. MORE METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES IN GEOLOGY One of the problems with the geological record is that its archives are “defective”: they are incomplete, incompletely known, faulty, biased, etc. This is a feature of the available evidence that is paralleled in astronomy, evolutionary biology, and other historical sciences. Lyell in many places uses the word “monuments” to refer to geological features that are interpreted as records of ancient geological processes. The analogy to human historical monuments is deliberate, and interesting. Human monuments are not identical with the events they memorialize, but they “stand for” and record those events. When someone comes across a historical marker (especially when archaeologists encounter them), a great deal of interpretation is normally required in order to make the monument “speak.” The information gleaned from such monuments is sometimes biased, faulty, incomplete, or otherwise problematic. The reliability of these interpretations and extrapolations is improved when a greater amount of historical context is known, and when multiple, independent markers provide the same information. Clearly, all of these ideas apply to inferences made from geological monuments too. One of Lyell’s main methodological thoughts about the interpretation of geological monuments is that “a considerable part of the ancient memorials of nature were written in a living language” (Lyell, 1830, p. 73); this is to say that contemporary evidence about geological and biological systems is relevant to constraining interpretations of ancient geological events and helps to make those interpretations reliable. (As a referee for this paper pointed out, one difference between typical historical monuments and the geological record, of course, is that historical monuments are not usually the direct result of the events they memorialize, whereas the geological record is directly and genetically related to the specific processes that caused the record. See Baker [1999] for more on the “semiotic” interpretation of geological

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reasoning. The methodological point I want to make stands despite the fact that Lyell’s analogy is imperfect in this way.) Other methodological principles have been important in the history of the discipline of geology. Nicolas Steno (1638–1686) is famous for his laws of stratigraphy; they are principles that govern and constrain the “allowable” inferences from observed geological data to theoretical generalizations about the formation of geological structures. The principle of superposition demands that strata be interpreted in such a way that younger strata are always originally formed above older strata. The principle of initial horizontality, similarly, governs theorizing about the formation of structures that are not now horizontal. The principle of strata continuity allows one to assume that strata continue laterally far from where they presently end. The principle of crosscutting relationships says that something that crosscuts a layer is younger than that layer (Steno, 1968 [1669]). Note that these principles, which now seem so natural to geologists, needed to be accepted before inferences from geological data could even begin. Some of the methodological principles that have been attributed to James Hutton (1726–1797) include: geological time is limitless; the present is the key to the past; the internal heat of Earth drives geological processes; the lifecycle of continents involves erosion, deposition, and elevation; geological structures are built from a succession of small events over long periods, not by sudden, brief events/catastrophes; geology should be integrated with the other sciences. “Some areas of substantive agreement [between mythical foes Hutton, a Plutonist, and Werner, a Neptunist] were much wider than one would imagine, but differences of scientific method, of the proper scope and aim of geological science and of the relationship between fact and theory, made it difficult for the antagonists (or indeed the mediators) to achieve anything like consensus” (Greene, 1982, p. 29). This is to say, then, that the debate between the Huttonians and the Neptunists was at least in large part a debate over which methodological principles were the best ones to apply in geological theorizing. One might even say that the debate was philosophical rather than geological. Charles Lyell (1797–1875) critiqued Hutton’s reliance on internal heat and his catastrophic theory of upheaval. This could only have been a philosophical difference at the time, since Earth’s internal heat was not then well understood, and since the actual history of Earth is even now a matter of inference and speculation rather than something directly observable (that is, Lyell could not have claimed that we have direct empirical evidence that catastrophes have never occurred). Philosophical debate is not the only way in which methodological disputes get resolved. Sociological and historical factors often play important roles as well. For example, Lyell’s methodology came to dominance in part because Charles Darwin read Lyell’s Principles on the Beagle—the success of Darwin’s theory of evolution conferred after-the-fact credibility on Lyell later. Similarly, the popularity of Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) as a teacher was in large measure responsible for the ascendancy of his Neptunist views, despite evidence

contradicting some his most significant claims about geological facts and their causes. Lyell bemoaned this “retrograde movement” in the discipline of geology, and used the opportunity of discussing it to advance his own uniformitarian methodology against that of Werner’s Neptunian disciples. His theory was opposed, in a two-fold sense, to the doctrine of uniformity in the course of nature; for not only did he introduce, without scruple, many imaginary causes supposed to have once effected great revolutions in the earth, and then to have become extinct, but new ones also were feigned to have come into play in modern times; and, above all, that most violent instrument of change, the agency of subterranean fire. (Lyell, 1830, p. 58)

One of the key things to notice about this debate, as characterized by Lyell, is that it is fundamentally a methodological debate. It is not that the evidence itself proves or disproves any of Werner’s hypotheses—to use one of Lyell’s examples (Lyell, 1830, p. 60), Werner’s hypothesis that obsidian is an aqueous precipitate. Rather, the best interpretation of the evidence—the best methodological stance toward the evidence—gives reasons for or against the hypotheses. In particular, Werner’s school adopts a methodological principle for interpreting geological data (namely, that all ancient rocks have a sedimentary origin) that Lyell rejects. Lyell rejects it because it leads to conclusions that violate the principles of good analogical reasoning. When Lyell calls Werner’s theory of the origin of trap rocks “one of the most unphilosophical [theories] ever advanced in any science” (Lyell, 1830, p. 59), he means that accepting that theory involves bad judgment, in particular bad judgment about which methodological principles to adopt. One of Lyell’s arguments in favor of adopting the uniformitarian framework is this: We have seen that, during the progress of geology, there have been great fluctuations of opinion respecting the nature of the causes to which all former changes of the earth’s surface are referrible. The first observers conceived that the monuments which the geologist endeavours to decipher, relate to a period when the physical constitution of the earth differed entirely from the present, and that, even after the creation of living beings, there have been causes in action distinct in kind or degree from those now forming part of the economy of nature. These views have been gradually modified, and some of them entirely abandoned in proportion as observations have been multiplied, and the signs of former mutations more skilfully [sic] interpreted. Many appearances, which for a long time were regarded as indicating mysterious and extraordinary agency, are finally recognized as the necessary result of the laws now governing the material world; and the discovery of this unlooked for conformity has induced some geologists to infer that there has never been any interruption to the same uniform order of physical events. The same assemblage of general causes, they conceive, may have been sufficient to produce, by their various combinations, the endless diversity of effects, of which the shell of the earth has preserved the memorials, and, consistently with these principles, the recurrence of analogous changes is expected by them in time to come. (Lyell, 1830, p. 75)

Lyell’s initial claim here about the history of the discipline of geology is more or less uncontroversial: many early geologists did invoke causes that are not analogous to any causes currently acting (for example, global deluges and conflagrations). A skeptical

Theory choice in the historical sciences: Geology as a philosophical case study reader might, however, doubt his claim that the natural progression of the discipline led to the recognition that the geological evidence was more consistent with uniformity than catastrophe. That claim has the flavor of a rhetorical maneuver to support his own uniformitarian view by stating it as if geologists in general arrived at that view by examining the geological evidence itself. There are other, better, arguments for uniformitarianism, however. For example, Lyell asks us to consider how the monuments in Egypt would have been interpreted had we held the belief that Egypt had never been occupied by humans until modern times, in the same way that some people held that Earth was never populated by living beings until the continents were in their present positions. He points out that as new discoveries were made in Egypt, the myths needed to explain them on this hypothesis would have become more and more fanciful (“visionary” as in seeing a vision, an illusion): Each new invention would violate a greater number of known analogies; for if a theory be required to embrace some false principle, it becomes more visionary in proportion as facts are multiplied, as would be the case if geometers were now required to form an astronomical system on the assumption of the immobility of the earth. (Lyell, 1830, p. 77)

In short, the greater the number of disparate facts known, the wilder are the ad hoc maneuvers needed to maintain a theory founded on a false assumption. The good sense of the scientist will in such circumstances judge that the best route is to reject the assumption that makes the ad hoc modifications necessary and replace that assumption with another that makes the system of beliefs more harmonious. Lyell here argues, then, that the best interpretation of the evidence comes when we reject the assumption that life has only recently arrived on Earth. Note that the date of the origin of life is not something about which Lyell has direct evidence. The whole business depends on making “reasonable” judgments about the methodological principles to adopt in a given evidential context. As Pierre Duhem, W.V.O. Quine, and other philosophers have shown, there is no unique way to do this; it will normally be possible to come up with several different sets of initial assumptions, where each set is equally empirically good at explaining the known data. This is called the “underdetermination of theory by evidence” (see Laudan, 1990, and Laudan and Leplin, 1991). Lyell proposes that his own methodological principles, including uniformitarianism, make the most reasonable story out of the data. What recommends the Lyellian principles, he believes, is that they allow us to form a less fanciful, more consistent picture. Although there may be disagreement about the methodological principles that lead to the most coherent and least ad hoc story, even today, consistency (internal to the theory, and across theories) remains the fundamental standard for assessing theories in the historical sciences. Pierre Duhem (1982 [1914]) said that such assessments must be left to the “good sense” of the experienced scientist. Although many philosophers have been dissatisfied with this conclusion and have hoped to come up with objective, rational principles for deciding

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which scientific judgments are actually well founded and which are not, such principles have remained elusive. So far, the best we can say is that in careful case-by-case analyses of instances in the history of science, there often does seem to be retrospective scientific and philosophical consensus about which judgments are good and which are not. Whether or not the lessons of history will be a useful guide in current scientific theorizing remains to be seen. CONCLUSION Methodological principles such as parsimony, explanatory power, unifying power, etc., play a crucial but rarely acknowledged role in all scientific theory choice problems. This is so in part because methodological principles are used as tools for getting around gaps and errors in the evidence, and in part simply because every problem of inductive reasoning is (by nature) unavoidably underdetermined by the evidence. An important consideration, then, is how to choose and evaluate methodological principles. It has been argued here that reason and argument can provide grounds for choosing and evaluating methodological principles, but that, since it is rare to find definitive reasons in this area, much remains a matter of philosophical taste and judgment. One of the useful functions of philosophy of science is revealing and providing a context for discussing these issues in science. Historical examples from geology and other so-called historical sciences may be used to illustrate the ways in which methodological principles come into scientific theory choice and the difficulties surrounding this. Given the focus of this volume on the rise of scientific geology, emphasis was given to Charles Lyell’s use of methodological principles, particularly his uniformitarianism. Examples and arguments show that while the uniformitarian hypothesis has good grounds, it is not always the correct principle to apply. Again, this means that philosophical taste and judgment play a crucial role. This, in turn, helps to explain some of the cases of radical theory change observed in the history of science (some paradigm shifts are the result of shifts of philosophical taste), and it also helps to explain why some “scientific” debates (e.g., Plutonists v. Neptunists) are so acrimonious: The antagonists disagree about deeply felt but difficult to defend philosophical principles. Consensus on these topics is normally only found retrospectively. It is important to point out that Lyell makes a point that is very similar to the point being made today by scientists and philosophers who disagree with intelligent design theory. Features of the world having origins that we cannot at present understand should not automatically be attributed to the agency of a supernatural power. “God did it,” is not an explanation at all, let alone a scientific explanation. Rather, we should notice that we have had good success in finding explanations within the framework of known science for facts that were previously not understood. It is, thus, methodologically better to assume that the next time we encounter some fact that we cannot explain, its explanation will eventually be found within known science, without the need to appeal to unknown singular causes or changing laws. This might turn out to be mistaken, but it is the best place to start.

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During the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, discussion of methodological principles and correct procedures for acquiring knowledge was at the forefront. We see this as much in philosophers such as Descartes and Hume as in scientists such as Newton, Lyell, and others. It is true of science as a whole as well as for particular sciences. These writers recognized that acquiring knowledge through empirical inquiry requires making decisions about methodology. Through a long period of ferment up through the Enlightenment, consensus was reached on the core of what is now called the scientific method. We now accept, for example, that theories ought to be predictively successful, explanatorily powerful, parsimonious, testable, falsifiable, and so on. At the frontiers of new science, there is less consensus about method, and the details of how to conduct science are still debated. This includes ideas about what kinds of things count as evidence, and about the kind of weight different evidence has in theory choices. These issues will eventually be resolved by making philosophical/methodological choices, in short, judgment. An awareness of the philosophical issues surrounding theory choice, and of historical examples of theory choice, could well contribute to future scientific progress. It has certainly done so in the past. REFERENCES CITED Baker, V.R., 1999, Geosemiosis: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 111, p. 633–645, doi: 10.1130/0016-7606(1999)111<0633:G>2.3.CO;2.

Duhem, P., 1982 [1914], The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (trans. Philip P. Wiener from the second French edition): Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 344 p. Gohau, G., 1990, A History of Geology: New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 276 p. Greene, M.T., 1982, Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World: Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 328 p. Hume, D., 1999 [1748], An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Beauchamp, T.L., ed.): Oxford, Oxford University Press, 456 p. Laudan, L., 1990, Demystifying underdetermination, in Wade Savage, C., ed., Scientific Theories: Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, v. 14, 433 p. Laudan, L., and Leplin, J., 1991, Empirical equivalence and underdetermination: The Journal of Philosophy, v. 88, p. 449–472, doi: 10.2307/2026601. Laudan, R., 1982, The role of methodology in Lyell’s science: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, v. 13, p. 215–249, doi: 10.1016/ 0039-3681(82)90009-7. Lipton, P., 2004, Inference to the Best Explanation (2nd edition): London, Routledge, 240 p. Lyell, C., 1830, Principles of Geology, Volumes 1–3: London, John Murray, 460 p. Available at http://www.esp.org/books/lyell/principles/facsimile/ title3.html (last accessed 7 May 2008). (Electronic Scholarly Publishing, prepared by R. Robbins.) Prevost, Constant, 1821, Sur un nouvel exemple de la reunion de coquilles marines et de coquilles fluviatiles dans les memes couches: Journal de Physique, v. 92, p. 418–428. Ruse, M., 2001, Can a Darwinian be a Christian?: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 254 p. Steno, N., 1968 [1669], The Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno’s Dissertation Concerning a Solid Body Enclosed by Process of Nature within a Solid (trans. J.G. Winter, with notes): New York, Hafner Publishing Company, 203 p. Vanderburgh, W.L., 2005, Of Miracles and Evidential Probability: Hume’s ‘Abject Failure’ Vindicated: Human Studies, v. 31, p. 37–61. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

Printed in the USA

The Geological Society of America Memoir 203 2009

Natural theology, design and law Michael T. Ghiselin† Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, California Academy of Sciences, 55 Music Concourse Drive, San Francisco, California 94118, USA

ABSTRACT It is widely recognized that Darwin discredited the argument from design for the existence of God. Less well known is the history of a related notion, the argument from law, according to which there cannot be a law without a legislator. Both rested upon the more fundamental assumption that we can interpret the world on the basis of privileged knowledge of God, supposedly an anthropomorphic one. Given that the same being both created the universe and ordained the laws of nature that govern it, viewing geological history and the fossil record as teleological is much easier. PreDarwinian scientists invoked both design and law in explaining the history of the world. In either case, the result was a tendency to view the fossil record as if it were, like a developing embryo, headed in a particular direction. Those who have attempted to salvage that view in the face of Darwin’s contribution have generally put more of a causal burden upon laws of nature. Even though that may seem more “scientific,” both arguments are grounded in mysticism. Keywords: Charles Darwin, Naturphilosophie, alchemy, Lorenz Oken, Richard Owen, William Whewell. INTRODUCTION When Charles Darwin was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, he was required to read William Paley’s Natural Theology. That book presents one of the traditional arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design. Suppose we find a watch. Does that not imply the existence of a watchmaker? Likewise, watches are designed, and there cannot be design without a designer. We find living organisms all around us, with their “contrivances” such as eyes. There has to have been a contriver, namely God. The young Darwin was much pleased by the reasoning, and it was only some years later that he came to question the premises. In The Origin of Species, Darwin of course revealed that the mode of reasoning in Natural Theology was flawed. †

E-mail: [email protected].

Although there cannot be design without a designer, there can be the appearance of design without a designer. Darwin’s next book, On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, was a satire on natural theology (Darwin, 1862; Ghiselin, 1969). Later, in his Autobiography, Darwin (Barlow, 1958, p. 87) wrote: “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.” Darwin did more than just pull the rug out from under an argument for the existence of God, or show that in biology He is an unnecessary hypothesis. Nor is it adequate to say that he discredited teleological ways of thinking—of course he did—but he also discredited something more general. This is the notion or practice of deriving our knowledge of the world from privileged assumptions about the nature of the Deity (Ghiselin, 2005a). Sometimes the term “theosophy” is used for such intellectual

Ghiselin, M.T., 2009, Natural theology, design and law, in Rosenberg, G.D., ed., The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: Geological Society of America Memoir 203, p. 277–283, doi: 10.1130/2009.1203(20). For permission to copy, contact [email protected]. ©2009 The Geological Society of America. All rights reserved.

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practice. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who is notorious for the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds, is sometimes given as an example. Back in the seventeenth century, a close connection between theological and scientific reasoning was often quite obtrusive (Breidbach and Ghiselin, 2002). Later, especially during the Enlightenment, the connections were more subtle and often implicit rather than explicit. There was less mysticism, and God was supposed to have achieved His ends less through miracles and more through laws of nature. The goal of the present essay is to provide an example of how biology and geology were affected by such metaphysics. The period of interest is the sixty years or so prior to the publication of The Origin of Species and the decade that followed it, in other words, the beginnings of the Darwinian Revolution. What is said here is nonetheless quite relevant to our understanding of what went on earlier, and a few comments on contemporary literature will be made at the end of this essay. Explaining what happened when an intellectual tradition collapsed largely of its own weight is one way to cast some light upon its earlier history. Therefore, I begin with German Naturphilosophie and the kind of idealism that went along with it. Next, I consider what happened when such notions were transported across the English Channel. NATURPHILOSOPHIE The kind of evolutionism (or quasi-evolutionism) that was advocated by Erasmus Darwin and the Chevalier de Lamarck was a product of Enlightenment rationalism. With the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, there was an English reaction, such that evolutionary ideas were considered politically dangerous and corruptive of society. In Germany, which was weak because of disunity and struggling to develop its own culture, Enlightenment rationalism gave way to Romanticism and the idealism that generally accompanied it. German Naturphilosophie played a major role in the development of biology in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, and its advocates speculated about what is sometimes called evolution. Among biologists, the most famous, or notorious, Naturphilosoph was Lorenz Oken (1779–1851), who was a follower of the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling (1775–1854). Both briefly taught at Jena University, though not at the same time, and both interacted with the poet Goethe (1749–1832), who profoundly influenced the idealistic tradition in morphology (Breidbach, 2006). Oken and Goethe had a notorious priority dispute over the vertebral theory of the skull. Oken carried Naturphilosophie about as far as one can imagine. For that reason, the views that he advocated and the kind of idealistic mentality that he represents can be seen in very pure form. Milder and less obtrusive versions of idealism are then easier to understand. Oken’s most famous book, the Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, makes him look more like a medieval occult metaphysician than a modern naturalist. It is full of theology, mysticism, numerology, and latter-day alchemy (Ghiselin, 2005b). The fact that Oken was an alchemist has largely been ignored, one might

even say suppressed, in the recent literature on the history of biology (Ghiselin, 2000). There has been considerable resistance to Newton and Goethe having been alchemists as well (Dobbs, 1991). Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1859) was quite forthright in finding a connection between alchemy and Naturphilosophie, though he did not call Oken himself an alchemist. Where Geoffroy got his information is not obvious, but his father, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, knew Oken personally. Interestingly the younger Geoffroy said that Linnaeus also often used alchemical language. If the impression that one ought to get from familiarity with the genre is not enough, I draw attention to the fact that there were other alchemists in the nineteenth century, and they recognized Oken as one of them. A good example is Mary Anne South Atwood (1817–1910), whose anonymous book of 1850 was reissued in 1910 and 1960 (Atwood, 1960). One of her goals was to rationalize a synthesis of spiritual alchemy with mesmerism. In fact, Oken is a representative of the so-called “Hermetic tradition,” which goes back to antiquity (Yates, 1979). He adopted many of its ideas and applied them to biology. Among these ideas is the notion of an analogy between the human body (the microcosm) and the universe as a whole (macrocosm). The human body, and everything else in the world as well, had been created in God’s image. Therefore, one could find mystical correspondences between the parts of the human body and everything else. Oken produced classifications based upon such correspondences. Consider, for example, his classification of colors (Oken, 1831, p. 69): Red Blue Green Yellow

Fire Air Water Earth

Love Faith Hope Vice

God the Father God the Son God the Holy Ghost Satan

This insight allowed him to decide which plants are the highest: obviously those with red flowers. As mentioned earlier, and as will be considered again, Oken is largely responsible for the vertebral theory of the skull. According to that theory, the skull is made up of a series of vertebrae, but it is problematic how many such units there are. Oken’s solution was based upon an understanding of the senses. There are five senses, of which four are located in the head, whereas one is distributed throughout the body. Therefore, the skull consists of four vertebrae, each corresponding to one of these senses. The senses can then be ranked in a scale from lower to higher, and every taxonomic group can be mapped onto the organs of sense and their functions. For human races we get the following: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Caucasian Mongol American Malay Black

eye ear nose tongue skin

vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

The racism here is obvious, but some other features need to be explicated. Five is a mystic number. The numerology is important because God, the perfect being, expresses himself in the

Natural theology, design and law perfect language, which is mathematics. The eye is a sphere, which is the perfect three-dimensional figure. The eye is also a symbol of God. Oken was a pantheist. He believed that God and the world are one and the same thing. He denied the distinction between subject and object, and therefore between himself and the world, and indeed between his own mind and God’s Mind. Given such assumptions, it stands to reason that he could access the underlying causal reality of the world through a kind of mind-reading. Because the human mind, although less perfect than the divine mind, is fundamentally similar, and in an esoteric sense even identical, to God’s mind, there is implied a very close parallelism or harmony between the conceptual world and the physical one. That kind of parallelism is something that Oken shared with idealists in general. It was not peculiar to the somewhat idiosyncratic version of Neoplatonism that he espoused. His theology helps to explain what he was trying to accomplish in his research. He knew that God’s language is mathematics, but it was an empirical task to determine where there were threes, where fives, and where sevens. His pantheism was not a necessary condition for an idealistic approach to science, but it shows one way of justifying a close connection between the conceptual order and the structure of the material universe. It is sometimes said that Oken and other Naturphilosophen were evolutionists. Examination of the original texts renders such a claim dubious at best. They often discussed embryological development, and it is easy to see how readers might confuse the two. What looks like evolution often turns out to be spontaneous generation, a belief that was facilitated by the notion that all matter is alive (hylozoism). Purely formal arrangements, including those influenced by the traditional scala naturae, from lower to higher, were not necessarily historical, although they might be reinterpreted that way. Furthermore, what is sometimes called “evolution” may have very little in common with evolution in the sense that modern biologists use that term. For all such reasons, it is rather difficult to interpret the works of transitional figures. OWEN AND WHEWELL Richard Owen (1804–1892) is a case in point. Owen is largely remembered for his running battles with Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley, and he has widely been treated as a creationist. However, revisionist historians have argued quite forcefully that this is just “Whig” history (reflecting the views of Darwin’s followers), and Owen was an evolutionist after all (Rupke, 1993, 1994). This interpretation makes a great deal of sense, but there are some problems with it. For one thing, Owen never bothered to tell Darwin that he was favorable toward evolution. For another, his statements about a world changing through time could be reconciled with successive creations along lines advocated by Louis Agassiz and others, or as spontaneous generation along lines suggested by Oken. It would seem that Owen straddled the fence, making statements that might be interpreted as evolutionary or not, in one sense or another. When Lamarck-

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ism achieved a considerable amount of popular attention because of the anonymous book entitled Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chambers, 1844), Owen wrote the author an encouraging letter in early January of 1845 (Owen and Sherborn, 1894, v. 1, p. 249–252), and yet when Owen’s friend William Whewell wrote to him on 30 January, asking for his opinion as to the truth of transmutation, Owen responded on 3 February without giving a definite answer to the question. Owen seems, at least in public, to have taken the position that transmutation was one possibility but not the most likely one. Even granting that Owen was an evolutionist, the kind of “evolutionism” that Owen advocated is really a watered-down version of creationism, given the role that God is supposed to have played. Rather than get bogged down in semantics, it seems better to explain the metaphysical rationale of his undertaking, which makes him look like even less of an evolutionist than Lamarck. Owen was definitely a great fan of Oken and is perhaps better called the British Oken than the British Cuvier (Breidbach and Ghiselin, 2002). He met Oken during a visit to Paris and was instrumental in arranging for the publication of the English translation by Tulk of the third edition of Oken’s Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie (Oken, 1843, 1847). The negative reaction to the publication of that book got Owen into a lot of trouble, and he later published disclaimers about Oken’s occult metaphysics. Owen, however, was a notorious hypocrite. Nonetheless, he praised Oken mostly for the vertebral theory of the skull, which he himself advocated. He evidently was inspired by Oken’s essay Über die Bedeutung der Schädelknochen (Oken, 1807). There is an obvious allusion to the title of that essay in Owen’s On the Nature of Limbs (Owen, 1849). Owen explicates the term Bedeutung as follows: The ‘Bedeutung,’ or signification of a part in an animal body, may be explained as the essential nature of such part—as being that essentiality which it retains under every modification of size and form, and for whatever office such modifications may adapt it. I have used therefore the word ‘Nature’ in the sense of the German ‘Bedeutung,’ as signifying that essential character of a part which belongs to it in its relation to a predetermined pattern, answering to the “idea” of the Archetypal World in the Platonic cosmogony, which archetype or primal pattern is the basis supporting all the modifications of such part for specific powers and actions in all animals possessing it, and to which archetypal form we come, in the course of our comparison of those modifications, finally to reduce their subject. (Owen, 1849, p. 1–2)

Owen’s equating of the archetype to a Platonic Idea has been interpreted as mere window-dressing (Camardi, 2001). Plato would never have treated the beginnings of a series as the ideal form of either an organ or an organism (Rupke, 1993, 1994), but it makes perfectly good sense as Neoplatonism in the Hermetic tradition, where the scala naturae has been combined with Christian mysticism. Where Owen got his ideas about philosophy is not known, but very likely, he was like many other scientists who got them from miscellaneous sources, including conversation, and in garbled form. Owen (1849, p. 86) was quite explicit in his belief that the entity in question had been brought into being

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by God: “For the Divine mind which planned the Archetype also foreknew all its modifications.” Owen also makes it clear that the changes that have taken place in the fossil record are the result of divine guidance of one sort or another: To what natural laws or secondary causes the orderly succession and progression of such organic phenomena may have been committed we as yet are ignorant. But if, without derogation of the Divine Power, we may conceive of the existence of such ministers, and personify them by the term ‘Nature,’ we learn from the past history of our globe that she has advanced with slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light, amidst the wreck of worlds, from the first embodiment of the Vertebrate idea under its old Ichthyic vestment, until it became arrayed in the glorious garb of the Human form. (Owen, 1849, p. 86)

“Archetypal light” is mystical jargon for “God,” and it is clear that He was causally responsible for what had gone on through geological time, though He may have asserted His Will, not by means of miracles, but laws of nature. Obviously, it was a mixture of the two, and he shifted away from miracles toward laws in the course of his career. Already, Owen (1849, p. 83) was reasoning by analogy that since, for example, the laws of light should be the same on Jupiter as they are here, eyes should be similar on both planets, and the animals on Jupiter might be vertebrates. In his book on paleontology, Owen says the following about the overall trend in the fossil record of the fishes: those species, such as the nutritious cod, the savoury herring, the richflavoured salmon, and the succulent turbot, have greatly predominated at the period immediately preceding and accompanying the advent of man; and that they have superseded species which, to judge by the bony Garpikes (Lepidosteus), were much less fitted to afford mankind a sapid and wholesome food. (Owen, 1860, p. 151)

Later, Owen (1868, p. 795) makes a similar suggestion that the horse was “predestined and prepared for Man.” Again, A purposive route of development and change, of correlation and interdependence, manifesting intelligent Will, is as determinable in the succession of races as in the development and organization of the individual. Generations do not vary accidentally, in any and every direction; but in preordained, definite, and correlated courses. (Owen, 1868, p. 808)

This orthogenetic version of “evolution,” however, was based on unknown laws of nature, and replaced an earlier one in which everything had been there potentially in the ancestral creature. Owen said that his position had shifted from preformation to epigenesis. What seems to us remarkable is the amount of work that laws of nature were supposed to do, in this case, providing for the evolution of an entire biota teleologically adjusted to the needs of the human species. Given his strong connections with Oken and Naturphilosophie, it is interesting to consider the assessment of Owen’s contribution by one of the leading philosophers of science of the day.

William Whewell (1794–1866), a grammar-school classmate of Owen, became a Cambridge undergraduate and remained at that institution for the rest of his very productive and influential career. He was a prolific writer on theological topics and author of one of the Bridgewater Treatises on natural theology (Whewell, 1852). His scientific reputation largely rested on his work on mineralogy and the tides (Ruse, 1991). Among philosophers, he is largely remembered for his argument with John Stuart Mill about induction. His main concern in philosophy was epistemology, and he had views that have been described as Kantian. An anthology of his works with a useful introduction has been published by Butts (1968). Darwin quoted him at the beginning of The Origin of Species, but Whewell was not supportive of Darwin’s theory. Among Whewell’s most important works, at least for the problem that interests us here, are his massive History of the Inductive Sciences and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. The first editions of these works appeared in 1837 and 1840. Herein, we cite later editions of these two works (respectively, Whewell [1873] and Whewell [1847]), which contain relevant revisions. His epistemological goal in these two works was to justify inductive scientific methodology, while at the same time providing an appropriate place for reason and the creative imagination. In his model of the scientific method, classification was thought to play an important role. It got the materials into preliminary shape, which then provided the basis for generalization. He referred to this as the colligation of facts. As science progressed, larger connections were discovered among various areas. Unexpected agreement between diverse areas of knowledge was considered an important basis for justifying such inductions. This he called the consilience of inductions. Whewell’s view of the history of science was a progressive one. His narrative account of it naturally illustrates his conception of what science is all about. He did not think very highly of ancient and medieval science, with their loose reasoning, indistinct ideas, and collections of opinions. He strongly criticized the medieval philosophers for their mysticism, including magic, numerology, astrology, and alchemy, all of which he considered antithetical to science. (Whewell, 1873, v. 1, p. 211–227; 1847, v. 1. p. 184–188). He treated the notions of polarity advocated by Schelling and Hegel as vague and mystical (Whewell, 1847, v. 1, p. 371–375). Both Oken and Owen, we should note, invoked such polarities. Whewell was highly critical of Goethe’s Farbenlehre (Whewell, 1873, v. 2, p. 64). On the other hand, he was quite supportive of both plant and animal morphology, including the vertebral theory of the skull. He thought that morphology involved important laws of nature (Whewell, 1873, v. 2, p. 468–469). Furthermore, he endorsed many of Owen’s views, citing with approbation his books on the vertebrate archetype (Whewell, 1873, v. 2, p. 539, 634) and limbs (Whewell, 1873, v. 2, p. 642). This may seem odd, but given the affinity between the views of Owen and those of Oken and other Naturphilosophen, one can make a great deal of sense out of it. Owen was obviously one of Whewell’s main informants about biology and its history. This is hardly surprising, consid-

Natural theology, design and law ering that they first got to know each other as grammar school students in Lancaster, where both were born, and that they saw much of each other later in life. Whewell sent Owen proofs of his History of the Inductive Sciences (Owen and Sherborn, 1894). Another important source for Whewell was Georges Cuvier, especially the historical sketch that accompanied his work on fishes (Cuvier, 1828, 1995). As is well known, Cuvier’s comparative anatomy was largely functional anatomy, and he explained much of organic structure in terms of physiological necessity. Although Cuvier referred to “causes finales,” he largely had in mind what Aristotle called conditional necessity. It was quite different from the sort of naïve teleology that involves purposefulness. However, in those days, the term “teleological” was applied to that kind of anatomy and was contrasted with the sort of formalistic anatomy, or morphology, that was advocated by the Naturphilosophen and by others such as the elder and the younger Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. The denial of “teleology” by the formal morphologists was repugnant to Whewell. Although Owen denied the sufficiency of what he called “teleology,” he was very good at the kind of physiological reasoning that Cuvier had applied to the reconstruction of fossil vertebrates. Whewell found that very attractive, for he believed that it salvaged his metaphysical commitment to purposefulness (Whewell, 1873, v. 2, p. 643). Furthermore, the formal cause became for Whewell a pillar of support for his theological view of the world. He writes: There is another aspect of the doctrine of the Archetypal Unity of Composition of Animals, by which it points to an Intelligence from which the frame of nature proceeds; namely this:—that the Archetype of the Animal structure being of the nature of an Idea, implies a mind in which this Idea existed; and that thus Homology itself points the way to the Divine Mind. (Whewell, 1873, v. 2, p. 644)

Whewell thus endorsed a kind of Platonism, in spite of his having rejected the positions of certain Platonizing philosophers, and his conception of the archetype and its relationship to the fossil record was very much like Owen’s. The theological-metaphysical basis of Whewell’s views on comparative anatomy is particularly evident in one of his later works, Of the Plurality of Worlds, especially in the “excised pages,” which have been published in a reissue of that work, originally published in 1853, by Michael Ruse (Whewell, 2001). The book addressed the question of whether there is life on other planets, something of obvious theological interest, but we may treat this as a side-issue here and try to explain Whewell’s basic metaphysical suppositions. It is worth noting, however, that he opposes the notion of the plurality of worlds to that of the unity of the world. That brings Whewell close to the position of the Naturphilosophen. He discusses the argument from design at considerable length, but, although he makes it clear that adaptation means design, and design means a designer, he faces up to the point that having all vertebrates share a common “plan” limits the explanatory value of design. General laws, and a more general fitness of the world as a whole, are made to fill in for that. The laws of nature that are responsible for crystalline form produce

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symmetrical objects. Whewell (2001, p. 239) explains: “because there is rule, there is regularity, and regularity assumes the form of beauty.” Whewell (2001, p. 241) asks, “To what purpose are the host of splendid circles which decorate the tail of the peacock, more beautiful, each of them, than Saturn with his rings?” (As an aside we may note that Darwin soon had a very good answer to that one!) Living things are beautiful because “He delights in producing beauty…” (Whewell, 2001, p. 240). The notion of God as aesthete is not original with Whewell, and it underscores the anthropomorphism that underlies the argument from design. He makes a quite straightforward statement of his basic premise: In the first place, the Earth, as the abode of man, the intellectual creature, contains a being, whose mind is, in some measure, of the same nature as the Divine Mind of the Creator. The Laws which man discovers in the creation must be Laws known to God. (Whewell, 2001, p. 248)

He then invokes archetypal ideas having existed before the Creation, and goes on to quote Owen on limbs in support. Next, he invokes the argument from law, saying: “Law implies a Lawgiver, even when we do not see the object of the Law; even as Design implies a Designer, when we do not see the object of the Design” (Whewell, 2001, p. 250). Given such intuitions, we get a statement of our ultimate nature: For if man, when he attains to a knowledge of such Laws, is really admitted, in some degree, to the view with which the Creator himself holds his creation;—if we can gather, from the conditions of such knowledge, that his intellect partakes of the Supreme Intellect;—if his Mind, in its clearest and largest contemplations, harmonizes with the Divine Mind;—we have, in this, a reason which may well seem to us very powerful, why, even if the Earth alone be the habitation of intelligent beings, still, the great work of Creation is not wasted. (Whewell, 2001, p. 252–253)

And so forth. He then goes on to say (Whewell, 2001, p. 254– 255): “Man is subject to a Moral Law: and this Moral Law is a Law of which God is the Legislator.” Now, the confusion between juridical law and the laws of nature is a mistake that has often been made. Whewell brings German philosophy into the (unpublished until recently) discussion, but he carefully rejects pantheism on the grounds that God and His creation are not one and the same thing (Whewell, 2001, p. 297–298), and otherwise manages to distance himself somewhat from other idealists. Yet in spite of such disclaimers, Whewell’s position was in many respects very much like that of the Naturphilosophen. Even if God and the world were not one and the same thing, they were nonetheless very intimately connected, and connected in a manner that had similar consequences. There was a very close parallel between the intellectual order and the physical one. That justified a conception of science that could be conceived of as a kind of mind-reading. Science was able to transcend the boundaries of physics and venture into a kind of occult metaphysics, however attenuated it might be. Therefore, the appeal of Oken to Owen, and Owen to Whewell makes very good sense. At a

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very deep metaphysical level, they were all trying to do the same thing. Once we appreciate the metaphysical implications of natural selection, it should become obvious that laws of nature cannot play the role that Owen and Whewell wanted them to. In modern jargon, taxa are individuals, there are no laws of nature for them, and the human species is the product of historical contingency (Ghiselin, 1997). Laws of nature do exist in evolutionary biology, but they are generalizations about classes of populations and cannot provide for the diagnostic features of taxonomic groups. It was one thing for Owen to say that if there are creatures with eyes on distant planets, their features would be consistent with the laws of optics. It was another for Owen to suggest that the organisms would be vertebrates. Nonetheless, it is hardly surprising that a major theme in the anti-Darwinian literature has been the effort to replace natural selection with mysterious laws of nature, and ones that have never been specified in a way that would allow the scientific community to test them in the laboratory, the field, the museum, or even the library. Michael Ruse (1977) made the very good point that Whewell’s natural theology was somewhat paradoxical. If laws of nature are strictly necessary, then even God himself is bound by them. That limits His omnipotence. If everything happens according to the laws of nature, then nothing happens that is contrary to them. That creates serious problems for the ability of God to work miracles, for the efficacy of prayer, and all sorts of other theological niceties. Natural selection then might come in as a lawful process that generates adaptation, but that position again is not what people like Whewell were looking for. CONCLUDING REMARKS We should not view such metaphysical exercises as something that was worked up from scratch and derived from first principles. If we look back at Whewell’s historical predecessors, we can see a gradual process of old ways of thought giving way to the advances of science and yet persisting as something like vestigial organs. We start out with a system of metaphysics in which a conception of an anthropomorphic deity with a great deal of accompanying baggage plays an explicit role. With the passage of time, the metaphysical presuppositions cease to be explicit, but are merely implicit, and finally they become unconscious. I mean unconscious in the sense that the persons who embrace such metaphysics may be quite unaware of the premises from which they are reasoning, let alone the full implications. To make the point, we need only take a look at the contemporary scene. Consider, if you will, the dispute between Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris. Gould (1989) attempted to make a case for the history of life being pure contingency and not progressive, whereas Conway Morris (2003) in response tried to argue, on the basis of convergent evolution, that humanoids might be considered inevitable. In Gould’s last book, he attempted to justify his version of macroevolutionary theory (Gould, 2002). His metaphysical justification of that theory, expounded over more than a hundred pages, is that species are individuals, and

yet he failed to carry that metaphysical thesis through to its full implication, which is that all taxa are individuals and that life is the product of historical contingency all the way down to the molecular level. He tried to treat the genome as something in which an archetype, one might almost say a Platonic Idea, is incarnated. Likewise, we find Conway Morris treating organic evolution as the product of laws, and then using that as justification for his religious faith, very much in the tradition, and the spirit, of Whewell. Occult metaphysics is still very much with us, and not just in the astrology columns of our daily newspapers. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Oral versions of this paper were given at Indiana University and the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. I thank my audiences, especially William R. Newman and Michele Aldrich, who also advised me on the manuscript. REFERENCES CITED Atwood, M.A., 1960, Hermetic Philosophy and Alchemy: A Suggestive Inquiry into “the Hermetic Mystery” with a Dissertation on the More Celebrated of the Alchemical Philosophers: New York, The Julian Press, 688 p. Barlow, N., 1958, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882 with Original Omissions Restored: New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 253 p. Breidbach, O., 2006, Goethes Metamophosenlehre: München, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 334 p. Breidbach, O., and Ghiselin, M.T., 2002, Lorenz Oken and Naturphilosophie in Jena, Paris and London: History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, v. 24, p. 219–247, doi: 10.1080/03919710210001714393. Butts, R.E., 1968, William Whewell’s Theory of Scientific Method: Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 368 p. Camardi, G., 2001, Richard Owen, morphology and evolution: Journal of the History of Biology, v. 34, p. 481–515, doi: 10.1023/A:1012946930695. Chambers, R. (Anonymous), 1844, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation: London, John Churchill, 396 p. Conway Morris, S., 2003, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 485 p. Cuvier, G., 1828 [1995], Historical Portrait of the Progress of Ichthyology, From Its Origins to Our Own Time: Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 380 p. Darwin, C., 1862, On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing: London, John Murray, 371 p. Dobbs, B.J.T., 1991, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 371 p. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, I., 1859, Histoire Naturelle Générale des Règnes Organiques, Principalement Étudiée Chez l’Homme et les Animaux, Volume 2: Paris, Victor Masson et Fils, 523 p. Ghiselin, M.T., 1969, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method: Berkeley, University of California Press, 297 p. Ghiselin, M.T., 1997, Metaphysics and the Origin of Species: Albany, State University of New York Press, 388 p. Ghiselin, M.T., 2000, The founders of morphology as alchemists, in Ghiselin, M.T., and Leviton, A.E., eds., Cultures and Institutions of Natural History: San Francisco, California Academy of Sciences, p. 39–49. Ghiselin, M.T., 2005a, The Darwinian revolution as viewed by a philosophical biologist: Journal of the History of Biology, v. 38, p. 123–126, doi: 10.1007/s10739-004-6513-2. Ghiselin, M.T., 2005b, Lorenz Oken, in Bach, T., and Breidbach, O., eds., Naturphilosophie nach Schelling: Stuttgart, Fromann-Holzboog, p. 433– 457. Gould, S.J., 1989, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History: New York, Norton, 347 p.

Natural theology, design and law Gould, S.J., 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory: Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1455 p. Oken, L., 1807, Über die Bedeutung der Schädelknochen: Bamberg, Göbhardt, 46 p. Oken, L., 1831, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie: Jena, Friedrich Fromann, 511 p. Oken, L., 1843, Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie: Zürich, Friedrich Schulthess, 535 p. Oken, L., 1847, Elements of Physiophilosophy: London, Ray Society, 695 p. Owen, R., 1849, On the Nature of Limbs: London, John van Voorst, 121 p. Owen, R., 1860, Palæontology or a Systematic Survey of Extinct Animals and Their Geological Relations: Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black, 436 p. Owen, R., 1868, On the Anatomy of Vertebrates; Volume 3. Mammals: London, Longmans, Green, 925 p. Owen, R.S., and Sherborn, C.D., 1894, The Life of Richard Owen, 2 volumes: London, John Murray, 825 p. Rupke, N.A., 1993, Richard Owen’s vertebrate archetype: Isis, v. 84, p. 231– 251, doi: 10.1086/356461. Rupke, N.A., 1994, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist: New Haven, Yale University Press, 480 p. Ruse, M., 1977, William Whewell and the Argument from Design: The Monist, v. 60, p. 244–268.

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Ruse, M., 1991, William Whewell: Omniscientist, in Fisch, M., and Schaffner, S., eds., William Whewell: A Composite Portrait: Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 87–116. Whewell, W., 1847, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded upon Their History, 2 volumes: London, John W. Parker, 1433 p. Whewell, W., 1852, Astronomy and General Physics, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology: New York, Harper Brothers, 248 p. Whewell, W., 1873, History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time (3rd edition, 2 volumes): New York, D. Appleton, 1214 p. (London, 3 volumes, 1858–1860). Whewell, W., 2001, Of the Plurality of Worlds (a facsimile of the first edition of 1853 plus previously unpublished material excised by the author just before the book went to press, and Whewell’s dialogue rebutting his critics, reprinted from the second edition, edited and with a new introduction by Michael Ruse): Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 510 p. Yates, F., 1979, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age: London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 267 p. MANUSCRIPT ACCEPTED BY THE SOCIETY 1 OCTOBER 2008

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