“The Anatomy of the Earth”—A Seventeenth-century Cosmogony

Extract

THE theories of earth-formation and earth-structure of which the seventeenth century was so prolific, are illustrated in the works of Woodward and Burnett, of Ray and Steno, and others who are usually cited when the history of geology is being discussed, but occasionally one meets with a cosmogony that seems to have remained unnoticed by subsequent writers. In such cases the neglect is, no doubt, to be attributed to the fact that some of the views put forward were too preposterous to command serious consideration even in days when speculation and credulity were more rife than observation and common sense: and if a book was not discussed by contemporary writers it would, in all probability soon join the limbo of things forgotten. This seems to have been the fate of a little pamphlet entitled The Anatomy of the Earth, written by Thomas Robinson, Rector of Ousby, in Cumberland, and “printed for J. Newton, at the Three Pigeons in Fleet Street” in 1694.