![]() ![]() Yet Hooke was perhaps the single greatest experimental scientist of the seventeenth century. His name is somewhat obscure today, due in part to the enmity of his famous, influential, and extremely vindictive colleague, Sir Isaac Newton. Robert Hooke (1635-1703) No portrait survives of Robert Hooke. Steno's contemporary Athanasius Kircher, for example, attributed fossils to a "lapidifying virtue diffused through the whole body of the geocosm." Steno, however, argued that glossopetrae looked like shark teeth because they were shark teeth, that had come from the mouths of once-living sharks, and come to be buried in mud or sand that was now dry land. Others were of the opinion, also going back to ancient times, that fossils naturally grew in the rocks. ![]() Ancient authorities, such as the Roman author Pliny the Elder, had suggested that these stones fell from the sky or from the moon. Nicola Steno – Fossils While examining the teeth of the shark, Steno was struck by their resemblance to certain stony objects, called glossopetrae or "tongue stones," that were found in certain rocks. Steno's principle of original horizontality states that rock layers form in the horizontal position, and any deviations from this position are due to the rocks being disturbed later. In 1677, he became a titular bishop, and spent the rest of his life ministering to the minority Roman Catholic populations in northern Germany, Denmark, and Norway. Steno essentially abandoned science after his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1667, much to the dismay of some of his scientific colleagues. It is Steno's most famous contribution to geology. Steno’s Laws Steno's law of superposition: layers of rock are arranged in a time sequence, with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on the top, unless later processes disturb this arrangement. ![]() ![]() Nicola Steno – 1638 - 1686 1669-Niels Stensen (Steno) publishes Forerunner, showing diagrammatic sections of the Tuscany area geology, making the important point that sediments are deposited in horizontal layers. ![]()
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