Full title: The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth, by Alan Cutler.

This is a present from me to me, about the discovery of the earth's age in sedimentary rocks in the 1600s.

Check out the glowing reviews on Amazon.

Other books:
- The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age by Edmund Blair Bolles
- Toronto Rocks: Toronto's Geological Legacy
- The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- The Velvet Claw: A Natural History of the Carnivores by David MacDonald
- The Wisdom of Bones: In Search of Human Origins by Alan Walker
- To see what everyone has seen and think what no one has thought by Lister Sinclair

Currently reading. This is a very interesting book! Lots of scientific ferment was going on in the 1600s, along with a lot of unscientific ideas.

This was a very interesting book! I was not aware of the theories and attitudes about landscape in the 1600s. It was also interesting to read of the interplay of personalities and the adventures of Steno's idea through the succeeding sixty years as it gained evidence and adherents. But the idea that the earth has a history and is formed by natural forces; or indeed that fossil seashells were formed by living creatures, certainly did not have a smooth ride. This is worth reading for anyone interested in the history of science or of ideas or in the current debate about evolution vs. creationism. In fact, a lot of the arguments that were used and discarded 300 years ago are still being trotted out now by some writers.

Cross-posted to Science Notes.

In The Seashell on the Mountaintop, Alan Cutler recounts biographical details of Niels Stenson (known as Nicholas Steno). Steno was a Danish anatomist in the 1600s who was known for his brilliant dissections. And he solved, to his satisfaction, one of the controversies of the day: was the heart a mere pump or was it the central source of the body's heat? He examined the human heart and observed that it is made of muscle fibres exactly like those in the arms and legs. He concluded that it was not a heat engine, but a pump.

Steno was invited to Florence and spent much of his career there. Again, his acute observations and reasoning came to his aid in deciding where fossil shells came from. In those days, the whole history of the earth was considered to be brief and static: the Earth was as God had created it. Mountains were regarded with dread as ruins. Shells were thought to be stones that had formed in place.

Steno's observations of soil and water led him to three principles: that the oldest layers in a landscape are laid down first; that when sediments are laid down, they are horizontal; and that water deposits sedimentary soils as wide as the water (superposition, original horizontality, and lateral continuity). Thus he perceived that the earth had a history that required ages of time; and that changes had occurred during that history.

He never completed his Big Book on the earth's history; but he did write a preliminary sketch of his ideas, a mere 78 pages long with a few diagrams, in the 1660s. It took more than sixty years of controversy and counterclaims for his ideas to become established, but they were never entirely lost; and in 1720 another book was published by Reaumur, describing four ages in the earth's history as visible in Tuscany. Those ages are still being used. Of course, it took another 200 years to assign time scales and to firm up the mechanism; but the idea of a changing earth had taken hold, at least in some minds, with Steno.

to LotStreetWiz for his enjoyment