Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/240

226, and by dissecting a shark from the Mediterranean, proved that its teeth were identical with some found fossil in Tuscany, He also compared the fossil shells found in Italy with existing species, and pointed out their resemblance. In the same work, Steno expressed some very important views in regard to the different kinds of strata, and their origin, and first placed on record the important fact that the oldest rocks contain no fossils.

Scilla, the Sicilian painter, published in 1670 a work on the fossils of Calabria, well illustrated. He is very severe against those who doubted the organic origin of fossils, but is inclined to consider them relics of the Mosaic deluge.

Another instance of the power of the lusus naturæ theory, even at the close of the seventeenth century, deserves mention. In the year 1696 the skeleton of a fossil elephant was dug up at Tonna, near Gotha, in Germany, and was described by William Ernest Tentzel, a teacher in the Gotha Gymnasium. He declared the bones to be the remains of an animal that had lived long before. The medical faculty in Gotha, however, considered the subject, and decided officially that this specimen was only a freak of Nature.

Besides the authors I have mentioned, there were many others who wrote about fossil remains before the close of the seventeenth century, and took part in the general discussion as to their nature and origin. During the progress of this controversy the most fantastic theories were broached and stoutly defended, and, although refuted from time to time by a few clear-headed men, continually sprang up anew, in the same or modified forms. The influence of Aristotle's views of equivocal generation, and especially the scholastic tendency to disputation, so prevalent during the middle ages, had contributed largely to the retardation of progress, and yet a real advance in knowledge had been made. The long contest in regard to the nature of fossil remains was essentially over, for the more intelligent opinion at the time now acknowledged that these objects were not mere "sports of Nature," but had once been endowed with life. At this point, therefore, the first period in the history of paleontology, as I have indicated it, may appropriately end.

It is true that, later still, the old exploded errors about the plastic force and fermentation were from time to time revived, as they have been almost to the present day; but learned men, with few exceptions, no longer seriously questioned that fossils were real organisms, as the ancients had once believed. The many collections of fossils that had been brought together, and the illustrated works that had been published about them, were a foundation for greater progress, and, with the eighteenth century, the second period in the history of paleontology began.

The main characteristic of this period was the general belief that