[226c]
But the greatest champion appeared in England. We have already
seen how, near the close of the seventeenth century, Thomas
Burnet prepared the way in his _Sacred Theory of the Earth_ by
rejecting the discoveries of Newton, and showing how sin led to
the breaking up of the "foundations of the great deep" "and we
have also seen how Whiston, in his _New Theory of the Earth_,
while yielding a little and accepting the discoveries of Newton,
brought in a comet to aid in producing the Deluge; but far more
important than these in permanent influence was John Woodward,
professor at Gresham College, a leader in scientific thought at
the University of Cambridge, and, as a patient collector of
fossils and an earnest investigator of their meaning, deserving
of the highest respect. In 1695 he published his _Natural History
of the Earth_, and rendered one great service to science, for he
yielded another point, and thus destroyed the foundations for
the old theory of fossils. He showed that they were not "sports
of Nature," or "models inserted by the Creator in the strata
for some inscrutable purpose," but that they were really remains
of living beings, as Xenophanes had asserted two thousand years
before him.
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