The development of the geological concept of “deep time” was based on the principles of historical geology first proposed by Nicolaus Steno in 1669 with the publication of De Solido . In De Solido , Steno compared his geological history of Tuscany with the biblical account of the Creation but did not acknowledge the possibility that the six-thousand-year biblical time scale might need to be expanded. Many modern commentators have suggested that the conflict between deep and biblical time represented a quandary for Steno, but evidence from the text of De Solido indicates Steno was more concerned that even the short biblical chronology would stretch the credulity of his readers. In particular, he was concerned that readers might find the preservation of fossil shells for even a few millennia implausible, and that they would be inclined to question the reliability of ancient reports that described geological change. More important threats to faith included the possibility that the world was eternal and that the biblical flood was merely a local event.

Abstract This paper concerns the Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno’s years in the service of the Medici Court and argues that his studies of the Earth in Canis cacharia dissectum caput from 1667 and De Solido intra solidum contento dissertationis prodromus from 1669 must be interpreted within this context and in relation to the epistemological approach of the historia -genre present in many early modern medical textbooks. The use of historia enabled Steno to produce knowledge that was both useful as a Medicean instrument of power and allowed him to produce a truthful geological thesis without referral to Aristotelian causes. Traditionally, Steno’s geological work has been interpreted teleologically, as a break from contemporary natural philosophy and as an example of a foresight which would not be appreciated properly until several hundred years after his death. Challenging the untenable presentist interpretation, this paper argues that Steno’s work on the transformation of the Earth must be understood as inherently connected to the Medici court and their experimental academy – the Accademia del Cimento.

Nicolaus Steno (Niels Stensen, 1638–1686) is considered to be the founder of geology as a discipline of modern science, as well as of scientific conceptions of the human glands, muscles, heart, and brain. With respect to his anatomical results, the judgment of posterity has always considered Steno to be one of the founders of modern anatomy , whereas Steno’s paternity to the methods known today of all students of geology was almost forgotten during the 130 yr from 1700 to 1830. Besides geology and anatomy, there are other important sides of Steno’s scientific contributions to be rediscovered. Steno’s general philosophy of science is one of the clearest formulated philosophies of modern science as it appeared during the seventeenth century. It includes (1) separation of scientific methods from religious arguments; (2) a principle of how to seek “demonstrative certainty” by demanding considerations from both reductionist and holist perspectives; (3) a series of purely structural (semiotic) principles developing a stringent basis for the pragmatic, historic (diachronous) sciences as opposed to the categorical, timeless (achronous) sciences; and (4) “Steno’s ladder of knowledge,” by which he formulated the leading principle of modern science, i.e., how true knowledge about deeper, hidden causes (“what we are ignorant about”) can be approached by combining analogue experiences with logic reasoning. However, Steno’s ideas and influence on the general principles of modern science are still quite unknown outside Scandinavia, Italy, France, and Germany. This unfortunate situation may be explained by the fact that most of his philosophical statements had not been translated to English until recent decades. Several Latin philologists state that Steno’s Latin language is of great beauty and poetic value, and that translations to other languages cannot give justice to Steno’s texts. Thus, translations may have seemed too difficult. Steno’s ideas on the philosophy of science appear in both his many anatomical and in his fewer geological papers, all of which, with one exception (in French), were written in Latin. A concentration of his philosophy of science was presented in his last scientific lecture “Prooemium” (1673), which was not translated from Latin to English before 1994. Therefore, after the decline of Latin as a scientific language, Steno’s philosophy of science and ideas on scientific reasoning remained quite unknown, although his ideas should be considered extremely modern and path-finding for the scientific revolution of the bio- and geosciences. Moreover, Steno’s philosophy of science is comparable to Immanuel Kant’s 80 yr younger theory on perception, Charles S. Peirce’s 230 yr younger theory on abduction, and—especially—Karl R. Popper’s 300 yr younger theory on scientific discovery by conjecture and refutation. The general outset of Steno’s philosophy of science constitutes an important step from the medieval and the Renaissance way of thinking into the seventeenth-century appearance of modern sciences and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The eighteenth-century to present-day dichotomy of science into the traditional creationistic and the new historical interpretations to some extent can be traced back to Steno and his methods.

Examining the works of Athanasius Kircher and Nicolaus Steno allows similarities and differences to be drawn between their theories of Earth. This is aided by paying particular attention to the role of the French atomist Pierre Gassendi. With his friend Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Gassendi had a significant impact on Kircher's career and his thinking, and his work was read and noted by Steno in his student years in Copenhagen. Later, in the 1667 treatise Canis , Steno also appraised Gassendi's ideas on the origin of stones. Kircher's experiences of volcanism and earthquakes, gained during his expedition into southern Italy in 1637–1638, led him to formulate his theory of Earth in the early 1640s, when his Magnes was to be published. Completion of his theorizing about Earth was delayed, however, until publication of Mundus subterraneus (1665), in which he developed his concept of the “geocosm.” Steno probably met Kircher in 1666, and they are known to have corresponded on theological topics. In his Prodromus (1669), Steno criticized Kircher's idea of the “organic” growth of mountains. Steno adopted Descartes' idea of “collapse tectonics” and the formation of strata. Kircher's influence on Steno should not be neglected, however, given Steno's substantial excerpts from Kircher's Magnes in his manuscript. In fact, although Steno rejected the idea of a plastic force in his Prodromus , he may well have used Kircher's idea on magnetism to explain the growth of mineral crystals. Thus, given the usual wide acceptance of Cartesian influence on Steno, the historiography of geosciences may be appropriately and usefully revised by considering the role of the works of such figures as Gassendi and Kircher.

Some incidents during his youth presage later research and may contribute to explain the sudden transition from anatomical to geological studies by Nicolaus Steno (1638–1686), the Danish anatomist, geologist, and later bishop, in Tuscany in 1666 as a scientist to the Grand Duke. (1) In 1659, during medical studies at Copenhagen University, Steno wrote small notes and made comprehensive excerpts from books on many subjects, the so-called Chaos manuscript. Pondering the shape of a stone in the bladder of an ox, he wrote that something was shown here about the generation of stones in living beings. When presented with the appropriate material and having the support for studies in Tuscany, he took up aspects of lithogenesis such as crystals growing by accretion in water-filled spaces of rocks in the “Prodromus on Solids” of Florence, 1669. He was able to maintain that in living beings, stones are formed likewise in the body’s so-called external water space. (2) In the “Prodromus on Solids,” Steno proposed the principle of molding as a marker for the relative age of related objects, the first of three criteria that allow reliable inferences to be drawn from present processes back to those unobservable processes of Earth in the past. The process of molding was in itself well known to Steno from his childhood, being commonplace in the family’s goldsmith workshop. It is shown here that Steno used molding in his “Dissection of a Dogfish” less than two years before he included the molding principle as a clue to relative age in past processes. (3) The study of teeth from the head of a giant shark led Steno to conclude that such teeth and glossopetrae have common origin, i.e., that fossils have a biological origin, as described in the “Carcharodon-head Dissected” (1667). Steno could have been primed by a long-held knowledge of glossopetrae learned from his teacher, Professor Thomas Bartholin, who recorded them in a manuscript that he listed as lost in a fire in 1670. Steno applied comparisons showing sufficient similarity as his second criterion for obtaining reliable information on processes of the past.

Abstract The Pliocene fossiliferous succession of the Volterra hill, a prominent place in Tuscany, Italy and, since the Renaissance, the site of important archaeological finds of the ancient Etruscan civilization, has formed the object of enquiry over six centuries of research on the inner nature of the Earth system. The works of Restoro d'Arezzo, Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolaus Steno, Giovanni Targioni, Nicolas Desmarest, Giambattista Brocchi, Alexandre Brongniart and Charles Lyell testify to the early recognition through fieldwork that those strata with seashells had formed at the bottom of the sea. This interpretation served different approaches to knowledge. Restoro, Leonardo and Steno, spanning nearly four centuries in the history of science (1282–1669), including the ‘Copernican Revolution’ and the start of the Modern Age, relied also on textual sources and trusted a speculative model of the Earth's interior, so that at Volterra they focused on vertical movements of the earth–water system. The authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries abandoned pre-built young-Earth models and emphasized the geography of ancient Tuscany. Brocchi, Brongniart and Lyell promoted the taxonomic use of seashells to correlate rocks across Europe. This place deserves higher standards of valorization to promote understanding of the history and sociology of ideas.

Abstract The Theories of the Earth formulated by the English scholars Thomas Burnet, William Whiston and John Woodward at the end of the seventeenth century circulated widely within the continent of Europe during the first decades of the eighteenth century. These theories established a sequence of physical conditions of the Earth according to the chronology outlined in the Book of Genesis, emphasizing two main stages: the Creation and the Deluge. Although the authority of the Biblical account of the age and early history of the Earth was normally accepted at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the continental reception of English Theories of the Earth varied. This was due to the complexity of the European context which since the 1660s had produced the theories of René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Athanasius Kircher, as well as Nicolaus Steno’s dynamic view on the development of the Earth’s surface. Steno emphasized the importance of the interpretation of rock strata in the field for reconstruction of the Earth’s history. He also carefully avoided contradicting the Biblical account and associated the Deluge with one of the geological stages identified in his history. Nevertheless, the Stenonian heritage stimulated some Italian scientists – such as Antonio Vallisneri, Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, and later Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti and Giovanni Arduino – to presuppose, within the results of their researches, an indefinitely great antiquity of the Earth. Theoretical models linked to Biblical chronology included those of Emanuel Swedenborg in Sweden and Johann Jakob Scheuchzer in Switzerland, while in France, Benok De Maillet proposed a Theory of the Earth which was censured by the Church because of its possible implications regarding the eternity of matter. Among European scholars of the first decades of the eighteenth century, the Stenonian heritage (notably the necessity of fieldwork in a regional context) and the global Theories of the Earth were equally influential.

ABSTRACT Art about ancient life chronicles the human condition, less evidently but potentially as significantly, as it depicts life through geologic time. Selected examples surveyed here reveal human aspirations, values, conceits, sensibilities, and foibles and suggest that further in-depth study would be warranted. Greek bronzes embellished with griffins (625–575 B.C.E.) may represent ceratopsian fossils mythologized and commodified for their proximity to gold deposits. Encelius’ anthropomorphized drawing (1557) of a fossil bivalve exemplifies a conservative deference to outdated paradigms about nature; inversely, Nicolaus Steno prized geometry—then offering a new perspective on nature—and realized in 1667 that a drawing of “tongue stones” depicted not, as commonly held, simulacra of snake tongues molded by vital forces within the Earth but fossilized teeth of a once living shark; Beringer’s “lying stones” (1726) show how human conceit can bias the interpretation of “fossils.” Artworks since the mid-twentieth century record a growing recognition that ancient life and its habitats evolved together and therefore that art about ancient life has lessons for contemporary environmentalism: Rudolph Zallinger’s diachronous murals (mid-1940s) and the Milwaukee Public Museum’s diachronous dioramas (installed in 2001) display progressions of ancient and contemporary habitats; Alexis Rockman’s dystopian landscapes use ancient and extant life to critique human responsibility for degrading environments and endangering species. We conclude that studies of art about ancient life can deepen our understanding of the human condition and the cultural context in which it is created.

Abstract As Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society of London, Robert Hooke (1635–1703) was too busy to have been considered a ‘geological traveller’. Yet he made fundamental geological observations whenever he did travel. He set these observations in a series of lectures he gave at the Royal Society over a period of some thirty years. These lectures were published posthumously by Richard Waller in 1705 as Lectures and Discourses of Earthquakes and Subterraneous Eruptions . Although his contemporary Nicolaus Stenonis, or Steno, has been recognized as the founder of geology, Hooke's more profound and compelling observations and explanations have been largely ignored by the geological community. There is also evidence that Hutton benefited considerably from Hooke's ideas. Hooke's writings show that he derived many of his geological hypotheses from his intimate knowledge of the processes taking place on the shores of his birthplace, the Isle of Wight. This paper presents what Hooke observed and described and is illustrated with photos taken by the author on the shores of the Isle of Wight.

During the eighteenth century, scientific literature devoted to the earth sciences documented a significant increase in the study of the composition and formation of mountains and above all their stratigraphical sequence. The diverse and widely ranging philosophical theories of the late seventeenth century on the origin of Earth were gradually replaced by new concepts based on field research on both a local and regional scale. This new approach analyzed the lithology and the fossil content of the rocks, the geomorphology of the area, and in some cases helped to determine the chronological sequence of mountain formation. Nicolaus Steno's idea of superimposition of strata (1667–1669) was followed by most of the late eighteenth-century scholars in earth sciences, who developed subdivisions of mountains from the point of view of their formation and also included a classification of the rocks. These subdivisions supported the idea of relative chronology of the formation sequence of the studied strata: the most recent or the most ancient formation could be deduced from its position in the sequence as well as from its external lithological features. In this context, the role of scientific terminology, which was gradually established in eighteenth-century geological science, became very important: the terms “primary” (or “primitive”), “secondary,” and “tertiary” were used for indicating the categories of mountains as well as for stratigraphic units. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the work of Giovanni Arduino contributed decisively to the development of basic lithostratigraphic “classification” of rocks and mountain building. His lithological studies, a result of twenty years of fieldwork in the mountains and hills of the Venetian and Tuscan regions, were also supported by a specialized knowledge of mining. The new “classification” into four basic units called “ordini” (1760) was based only on lithology (without using paleontological indicators) and included different rock types, which formed three kinds of mountains and one kind of plain, in a regular chronological order: “primary” (underlain by “primeval” schist considered by Arduino to be the oldest rock type), “secondary,” and “tertiary”; the “fourth” and younger chronolithological unit included only alluvial deposits. Arduino's system is still regarded by the geological world as being one of the starting points for modern stratigraphy.

Abstract The 17th and 18th centuries were periods when all the sciences began to develop and men of science showed an interest in what began later to grow into significant ways of looking at the Earth, the composition of its crust and the life forms inhabiting it. The political, social, economic and religious events of those times acted as helping influences on the way that all knowledge grew and developed, but also provided some limitations on the ways that scientific knowledge was pursued. The 18th century became widely known as ‘the Age of Enlightenment’, as it marked the ending of ignorance and darkness, but there were developments in 17th century European culture and knowledge that foreshadowed this. This paper concentrates on the work of two men of 17th century science who assisted the rise of interest in those evidences of the past life on our planet that would later become the sciences of Palaeontology and Palaeobotany. Robert Plot and Edward Lhwyd were the first custodians of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and their work demonstrates that such institutions did much to advance our scientific knowledge. Although three of their contemporaries, Robert Hooke, Nicolaus Steno and John Woodward, firmly believed that fossils were of organic origin, both Plot and Lhwyd opposed these views and developed their own explanations, yet, nevertheless, produced some accurate descriptions of fossils from both animal and plant sources. Lhwyd, in particular, was very hardworking and successful in his early attempts at classification. Later in the 18th century, Richard Brookes, MD used much of their work in a highly successful compilation of current knowledge, a six-volume work on Natural History. In this he was assisted by one of the literary geniuses of his time, Oliver Goldsmith. This was an important advance in the popularization of Natural Science