Natural History >> Theory of the Earth

The Meaning of Fossils

Aristotelianism
vis lapidifica

Johann Becher, Physica Subterranea, 1667

• terra fluida (mercury)
• terra lapida (salt)
• terra pinguis (sulphur)

Neo-Platonism
resemblances
medicine

Girolamo Fracastorio (1622)

fossil

Marienglashöhle (Friedrichroda, Thuringian Forest)

Nicholas Steno (1666)
solids encased in solids
Natterzungen

Leibniz, Protogaea (1694)

Time / evolution

trilobite

Oceans & Mountains

George-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-88)
Epochs of Nature (1749)
"actualism" vs. "catastrophism"

Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817)
"Neptunism" (aqueous causes)

James Hutton (1726-97)
"Vulcanism" (igneous causes)
actualism
stratigraphy
unconformity

Species

• Carl Linnaeus (1707-78)
  • Systema natura (10th ed., 1758)
• Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)
  • extinction
• Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)
  • transmutation

Charles Darwin, Autobiography (1876) on Thomas Malthus, Essay on Population (1798)
"In October 1838, ... fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work."

• more young produced than can survive
• siblings compete for limited resources
• variations produce some individuals with greater chance for survival

Charles Darwin,

• Voyage of the Beagle (1839), voyage 1831-36
• Origin of Species (1859)
  • "natural selection"