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Show 40 LEIDNITZ.-CELSIUS. m· ma1o ·n g 11 ·1 sc ollection of fossils ' publi.s he,,d afterw. ards, i.n .1 7~4, the first part of his " Moses's Princ~p1a, wherem he ridiCuled woodward's hypothesis. He and h.1s numerous follm;ers were accus to rne d to declaim loudly acb ramst •h uman learmng•, and tl maintained that the Hebrew scriptures, when rightly t ~e!slated comprised a perfect system of natural philosophy, foIra which 'r eason they objected to the Newtom•a n t 11 eory of gra-vitation. Leibnitz, the great mathematician, published his " Protocrrea'' in 1680. He imagined this planet to have been originally a burning lnminous mass, and ~hat e;cr since its creation it has been undergoing gradual refngerat10n. Nearly all the matter of the earth was at first encompassed by fire. When the outer crust had at length cooled down sufficiently to allow the vapours to be condensed, they fell and formed a universal ocean, investing the globe, and covering the loftiest mountains. Further consolidation produced rents, vacuities, and subterra- 11ean caverns, and the ocean, rushing in to fill them, was gradually lowered. 'l'he principal feature of this theory, the gradual diminution of the original heat, and of an ancient universal ocean, were adopted by Buffon and De Luc, and entered, under different modifications, into a great number of succeeding systems. Andrea Celsius, the Swedish astronomer, published, about this time, his remarks on the gradual diminution of the waters in the Baltic, which sea, he imagined, had been sinking from time immemorial at the rate of forty-five inches in a century. His opinions gave rise to a controversy which· has lasted even to our own days, and to which we are indebted for correct observations of a variety of facts concerning the gradu~l filling up of the Baltic by fluviatile and marine sediment. Linnreus • favoured the views of Celsius, because they fell in with his own notions concerning a Paradise, where all the animals were created, and from whence they passed into all other parts of the earth, as these became dry in succession. In Germany, in the mean time, Scheuchzer laboured to prove, in a work entitled the " Complaint of the Fishes,'' (1708,) that the earth had been remodelled at the deluge. • Do Tclluris habitabilis Incremento, 1743, ITALIAN GEOLOGISTS-VALLISNERI. 41 Pluche also, in 173~, wrote to the same effect, while Holbach, in 1753, after considering the various attempts to refer all the ancient formations to the Noachian flood, exposed the insufficiency of the cause. We return with pleasure to the geologists of Italy, who preceded, as we before saw, the naturalists of other countries in their investigations into the ancient history of the earth, and who still maintained a decided pre-eminence. 'l'hey refuted and ridiculed the physico-theological systems of Burnet, Whiston, and 'Vood ward*, while Vallisneri 1-, in his comments on the Woodwardian theory, remarked how much the interests of religion as well as those of sound philosophy had suffered, by perpetually mixing up the sacred writings with questions in physical science. The works of this author were rich in original observations. He attempted the first general sketch of the marine deposits of Italy, their geographical extent and most characteristic organic remains. In his treatise " On the Origin of Springs," he explained their dependence on the order, and often on the dislocations of the strata, and reasoned philosophically against the opinions of those who regarued the disordered state of the earth's crust as exhibiting signs of the wrath of God for the sins of man. He found himself under the necessity of contending in his preliminary chapter against St. Jerome, and four other principal interpreters of scripture, besides several professors of divinity, " that springs did not flow by subterranean syphons and cavities from the sea upwards, losing their saltness in the passage," for this theory had been made to rest on the infallible testimony of Holy Writ. Although reluctant to generalize on the rich materials accumulated in his travels, Vallisneri had been so much struck with the remarkable continuity of the more recent marine strata, from one end of Italy to the other, that he came to the conclusion that the ocean formerly extended over the whole earth, and abode there for a long time, This opinion, how- • Ramazzini oven asserted, that the ideas of Burnet were mainly borrowed from a dialogue of one Patrizio ; but Brocchi, after reading that dialogue, assures us, that there was scarcely any other correspondence between these systems, except that both were equally whimsical. t Dei Corpi mat·ini, Lcttere critichc, &c. 1721. |
