In his great work, "De Re Metallica," published in 1546, he mentions various fossil remains, and says they were produced by a certain "materia pinguis," or fatty matter, set in fermentation by heat. Some years later, Bauhin published a descriptive catalogue of the fossils he had collected in the neighborhood of Boll, in Wurtemberg.[1]
Andrew Mattioli, a distinguished botanist, adopted Agricola's notion as to the origin of organized fossils, but admitted that shells and bones might be turned into stone by being permeated by a "lapidifying juice." Falloppio, the eminent professor of anatomy at Padua, believed that fossil shells were generated by fermentation where they were found; and that the tusks of elephants, dug up near Apulia, were merely earthy concretions. Mercati, in 1574, published figures of the fossil shells preserved in the Museum of the Vatican, but expressed the opinion that they were only stones, and owed their peculiar shapes to the heavenly bodies. Olivi, of Cremona, described the fossils in the Museum at Verona, and considered them all "sports of nature."
Palissy, a French author, in 1580, opposed these views, and is said to have been the first to assert in Paris that fossil shells and fishes had once belonged to marine animals. Fabio Colonna appears to have first pointed out that some of the fossil shells found in Italy were marine and some terrestrial.
Another peculiar theory discussed in the sixteenth century deserves mention. This was the vegetation theory, especially advocated by Tournefort and Camerarius, both eminent as botanists. These writers believed that the seeds of minerals and fossils were diffused throughout the sea and the earth, and were developed into their peculiar forms by the regular increment of their particles, similar to the formation of crystals. "How could the Cornu Ammonis," Tournefort asked, which is constantly in the figure of a volute, be formed without a seed containing the same structure in the small as in the larger forms? "Who molded it so artfully, and where are the molds?" The stalactites which formed in caverns in various parts of the world were also supposed to be proofs of this vegetative growth.
Still another theory has been held at various times, and is not yet entirely forgotten, namely: that the Creator made fossil animals and plants just as they are found in the rocks, in pursuance of a plan beyond our comprehension. This theory has never prevailed among those familiar with scientific facts, and hence needs here no further consideration.
An interest in fossil remains arose in England later than on the Continent; but when attention was directed to them, the first opinions as to their origin were not less fanciful and erroneous than those to which we have already referred. Dr. Plot, in his "Natural History of Oxfordshire," published in 1677, considered the origin of fossil
- ↑ "Historia novi et admirabilis Fontis Balneique Bollensis, in Ducatu Wirtembergico." Montbéliard, 1598.
