The founders of geology Author:Archibald Geikie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Scientific Cosmogonists—Descartes, Leibnitz. Speculations of De Maillet and Buffbn. Early illustrated works on fossil plants and animals—Lang, Sch... more »euchzer, Knorr, Walch, Beringer. From the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century there appeared at intervals on the Continent a series of cosmogonists of a very different stamp from those alluded to in the last chapter. They were men who took a broad view of the world and endeavoured to trace its origin and progress in the light of what was then known of the laws of Nature. The earliest of these illustrious writers was the distinguished philosopher Descartes (1596-1650) who, in his Philosophiae Princifia, published in 1644, gave an exposition of what he conceived to have been the origin and history of our globe. He supposed the various planetary bodies to have been originally glowing masses like our sun. The earth in his view consists of three distinct regions. In its centre lies a nucleus consisting of incandescent self-luminous matter, like that of the sun. The middle zone is composed of an opaque solid substance which was at first very liquid. The outer region, comprising all the materials of which we have actual cognisance, consistsof the debris of the clouds or spots which, like those of the sun, gathered on the surface of the globe while still an intensely hot body. These spots were no doubt again and again melted down as they formed, until the whole globe had cooled sufficiently to allow them to aggregate into a solid external crust. The outer region of the planet, as the earth drew towards the sun, separated into different portions that arranged themselves one above another, according to their relative densities, the atmosphere being uppermost, then the water, while below these the mor...« less