How did the fish get into the rock?

Noël Journet (d. 1582)
Metz (Lorraine/France)

Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697)
Rotterdam (Netherlands)

Isaac La Peyrère, Pre-Adamitae (Men Before Adam) (1655)

Beatus Rhenanus
Selestat (Alsace/France) < Sletto

Hermann Conring
Helmstedt (Germany)

Pliny (d. A.D. 79), Natural History

• National Museum of Natural History (1840s, Smithsonian)
• American Museum of Natural History (Manhattan)

Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle (1830s)
Darwin, Origin of Species (1859/60)

Alexander von Humboldt, voyage 1799-1804
Wilhelm von Humboldt

The Meaning of Fossils

1. classification
2. semblance
3. position

Aristotelianism

• vis lapidifica
• "properties"

Neo-Platonism

• resemblances
• medicine

Girolamo Fracastorio (1622)
on Torello Sarayna (Verona, 1542)

Conrad Gessner (1555), "On stones resembling aquatic animals"

Johann Becher, Physica Subterranea, 1667

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

fossil

Marienglashöhle (Friedrichroda, Thuringian Forest)