sketch of the progress of geology is the history of a constant
and violent struggle of new opinions against doctrines sanctioned by the
implicit faith of many generations, and supposed to rest on scriptural
authority. The inquiry, therefore, although highly interesting to one
who studies the philosophy of the human mind, is too often barren of
instruction to him who searches for truths in physical science.

_Quirini_, 1676.--Quirini, in 1676,[52] contended, in opposition to
Scilla, that the diluvian waters could not have conveyed heavy bodies to
the summit of mountains, since the agitation of the sea never (as Boyle
had demonstrated) extended to great depths;[53] and still less could
the testacea, as some pretended, have lived in these diluvian waters;
for "the duration of the flood was brief, and _the heavy rains must have
destroyed the saltness of the sea!_" He was the first writer who
ventured to maintain that the universality of the Mosaic cataclysm ought
not to be insisted upon. As to the nature of petrified shells, he
conceived that as earthy particles united in the sea to form the shells
of mollusca, the same crystallizing process might be effected on the
land; and that, in the latter case, the germs of the animals might have
been disseminated through the substance of the rocks, and afterwards
developed by virtue of humidity. Visionary as was this doctrine, it
gained many proselytes even amongst the more sober reasoners of Italy
and Germany; for it conceded that the position of fossil bodies could
not be accounted for by the diluvial theory.

_Plot--Lister_, 1678.--In the mean time, the doctrine that fossil shells
had never belonged to real animals maintained its ground in England,
where the agitation of the question began at a much later period. Dr.
Plot, in his "Natural History of Oxfordshire" (1677), attributed to a
"plastic virtue latent in the earth" the origin of fossil shells and
fishes; and Lister, to his accurate account of British shells, in 1678,
added the fossil species, under the appellation of _turbinated and
bivalve stones_. "Either," said he, "these were terriginous, or, if
otherwise, the animals they so exactly represent _have become extinct_."
This writer appears to have been the first who was aware of the
continuity over large districts of the principal groups of strata in the
British series, and who proposed the construction of regular geological
maps.[54]

_Leibnitz_, 1680.--The great math