The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth

Front Cover
Random House, 2003 - 228 pages
Dubbed the founder of modern geology by Stephen Jay Gould, the 17th-century Danish scientist Nicolaus Steno was the first man to discover deep time: to suggest that the existence of fossils, particularly those far away from where the animals of which they are the remains would have lived (the seashell on the mountaintop) demanded a much longer history for the Earth than the roughly 6000 years suggested by the Bible. Steno's work was ignored for over a century: he himself dropped his geological studies without completing a university dissertation; he converted to Catholicism and later became a bishop; in 1988 he was beatified by Pope John Paul I.

From inside the book

Contents

PROLOGUE Pilgrims
1
CHAPTER TWO Chaos
17
CHAPTER THREE The Anatomist
33
Copyright

9 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information