The Meaning of Fossils

1. classification
2. semblance
3. position

Girolamo Fracastorio (1622) on Torello Sarayna (1542)
Conrad Gessner (1555), "On stones resembling aquatic animals"
Athanasius Kircher, S.J., Mundus Subterraneus, 1665
Johann Becher, Physica Subterranea, 1667

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

Aristotelianism
vis lapidifica
"properties"

Neo-Platonism

• resemblances
  • macrocosm / microcosm
• medicine

fossil

Marienglashöhle (Friedrichroda, Thuringian Forest)

Protogaea

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)
polymath

• law
• mathematics
  • Christian Huygens (1629-95)
  • René Descartes (1596-1650)
• philosophy
  • natural
  • metaphysics
• mechanics
  • mining
• history

Theory of the Earth

• Descartes
  • Le monde (1633)
  • Principia philosophiae (1644)
• Isaac Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687)
• Thomas Burnet, Telluris theoria sacra (1681)
• Nicolas Steno (1638-86)
  • De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus (1669)
  • glossopetrae / Natterzungen

Vulcanism
Neptunism

ichthyomorphic
"nature stands in place of history"

the universal in the local

• Alexander von Humboldt
• Charles Darwin