human comprehension.



III. THE NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY

WILLIAM SMITH AND FOSSIL SHELLS

Ever since Leonardo da Vinci first recognized the
true character of fossils, there had been here and
there a man who realized that the earth's rocky crust
is one gigantic mausoleum. Here and there a dilettante
had filled his cabinets with relics from this monster
crypt; here and there a philosopher had pondered
over them--questioning whether perchance they had
once been alive, or whether they were not mere
abortive souvenirs of that time when the fertile matrix
of the earth was supposed to have

"teemed at a birth
Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms,
Limbed and full grown."

Some few of these philosophers--as Robert Hooke and
Steno in the seventeenth century, and Moro, Leibnitz,
Buffon, Whitehurst, Werner, Hutton, and others in the
eighteenth--had vaguely conceived the importance of
fossils as records of the earth's ancient history, but the
wisest of them no more suspected the full import of the
story written in the rocks than the average stroller in