before the French Academy a century and a half later,
"that a potter who knew neither Latin nor Greek dared, toward the
end of the sixteenth century, to say in Paris, and in the presence
of all the doctors, that fossil shells were veritable shells
deposited at some time by the sea in the places where they were
then found; that the animals had given to the figured stones all
their different shapes, and that he boldly defied all the school of
Aristotle to attack his proofs."[63]

Then succeeded, at the end of the seventeenth century, the forerunners
of modern geology: Steno (1669), Leibnitz (1683), Ray (1692), Woodward
(1695), Vallisneri (1721), while Moro published his views in 1745. In
the eighteenth century Reaumur[64] (1720) presented a paper on the
fossil shells of Touraine.

Cuvier[65] thus pays his respects, in at least an unsympathetic way, to
the geological essayists and compilers of the seventeenth century:

"The end of the seventeenth century lived to see the birth of a new
science, which took, in its infancy, the high-sounding name of
'Theory of the Earth.' Starting from a small number of facts, badly
observed, connecting them by fantastic suppositions, it pretended to
go back to the origin of worlds, to, as it were, play with them, and
to create their history. Its arbitrary methods, its pompous
language, altogether seemed to render it foreign to the other
sciences, and, indeed, the professional savants for a long time cast
it out of the circle of their studies."

Their views, often premature, composed of half-truths, were mingled with
glaring errors and fantastic misconceptions, but were none the less
germinal. Leibnitz was the first to propose the nebular hypothesis,
which was more fully elaborated by Kant and Laplace. Buffon, influenced
by the writing of Leibnitz, in his _Theorie de la Terre_, published in
1749, adopted his notion of an original volcanic nucleus and a universal
ocean, the latter as he thought leaving the land dry by draining into
subterranean caverns. He also dimly saw, or gathered from his reading,
that the mountains and valleys were due to secondary causes; that
fossiliferous strata had been deposited by ocean currents, and that
rivers had transported materials from the highlands to the lowlands. He
also states that many of the fossil shells which occur in Europe do not
live in the adjacent seas, and that there are remains of fishes and of
plants not n