Inspect The Seashell On The Mountaintop: A Story Of Science, Sainthood, And The Humble Genius Who Discovered A New History Of The Earth Depicted By Alan Cutler Released As Ebook

the climbers inplanted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out.
Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock, This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth, If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt.
Everest is marine limestone. ”
John McPhee, Annals of the Former World


This book recounts the life and times of Nicholas Steno, who is often considered the father of modern geology.
The age he lived in was one of great scientific progress constrained by strong religious boundaries, This was long before anyone could claim to pursue science for sciences stake discoveries in Catholic countries had to be submitted to Church censors before they could be published, and the church backed up its position with the threat of the Inquisition.


The situation was made more complicated by the dual nature of scientific understanding, For example, already in Galileos time many educated people inside and outside the Church understood Copernican theory and knew that the earth revolved around the sun, not vice versa, but because the Bible implied that the earth was fixed Joshua made the sun stand still, not the earth, this was the official position.
As Galileo learned to his cost, saying otherwise could get a person in serious trouble E pur si muove!, A modern example of this way of thinking can be found in China, It is perhaps the most rapaciously capitalist country in the world, but it suits the ideology of the leadership to maintain the fiction that it is communist and not just a totalitarian government with a fancy ideology.
Anyone who says otherwise will regret it,

Steno was one of the most brilliant scholars of his time, He began as an anatomist, and astonished his peers with this skills at dissection, He was the first to locate and identify the salivary and lachrymal glands, and he examined a cows heart and determined that it was a pump, not a furnace to warm the blood as had previously been believed.
His skills were so advanced that he raised the jealousy of teachers and fellow anatomists, and he frequently had to move, He would eventually go to Italy, convert to Catholicism, and become a priest, then finally a bishop, and was famous for his piety and charity, even selling his bishops ring and crosier to help the poor.


He was a close observer of nature, with an ability to develop theories to connect multiple observations into a single overarching view.
Among other things, he founded the science of crystallography, and his key discovery is still known as Stenos Law, which says that the angles between corresponding faces of crystals are always the same.
If you shatter a quartz crystal, for example, all of the fragments have faces at the same angles as the original,

Steno made a number of keen observations of fossils that helped pave the way for modern paleontology, and wrote a book theorizing how one thing a fossil, crystal, or different type of rock could be completely enclosed in another, and though he was not the first to say that fossils had once been living creatures, his position was nevertheless at odds with most of his peers.
He had observed that marine fossils could be found far from the ocean, and even on mountain tops, At the time it was assumed that this was the result of the Noachian flood, and indeed, a great many people today still believe that.
Steno argued that the evidence showed that land masses rose and fell, though he, perhaps deliberately, did not extend this idea to its logical conclusion that the earth must be vastly older than theyears a literal reading of the Bible would suggest.


He is best known today for his work in geology, Hisbook Dissertationis prodromus laid down the principles of stratigraphy, which examined the conditions under which layers form in rocks, and how to determine which layers are part of the same strata, even if they are physically discontinuous.
He had to couch his words carefully to avoid antagonizing the Church, saying that "sediment could have formed rocks in such a way, though everyone knew the creation story to be true.
" That one sentence encapsulates the dangers of allowing religion to override science: it forces the scientists to dissimulate, and it helps keep the antiintellectual darkness of religious thinking in place.


Steno would eventually abandon science to devote himself full time to his religious studies, another loss for science and progress, He has, however, been placed on the path to sainthood, and is currently beatified, step three of four in the process, He was a complicated man, brilliant and possessed of acute powers of observation, His piety was genuine and set a standard which few others in the Church hierarchy even attempted to follow, so it was religions gain but sciences loss when he decided to follow his heart rather than his head.
In the mids, a Danish anatomist, Nicholas Stensen Steno traveled to Italy and published a little book called El Solido, whichyears later was finally recognized as the foundation for the developing fields of geology and paleontology.
He became a Roman Catholic priest and did not publish his dissertation which has been lost to science, However, his findings and ideas upturned the Biblical timescales for earth's creation and sent the earth sciences on a new path, The Seashell on the Mountaintop is a biography of Nicolaus Steno pronounced STAYno a Danish anatomy scholar who lived betweenand was an early contributor to the field of geology.
Although Stenos discoveries seem rather obvious today, they can be better appreciated if you have a basic understanding of the prevailing beliefs at the time.
These were influenced in large part by the ancient Greeks and the Christian Church,

With respect to science, the writings of Aristotle and the ancient Greeks still held considerable influence in thes thanks to the intervening period where little new research was performed that we now call the Dark Ages.
As for religion, most Europeans were biblical literalists, They thought that the Earth and all living things were created by god in their present form, As a result, people believed all sorts of things that seem childishly simplistic today assuming you live outside of the bible belt, For example, they thought:
The Earth was,year old,
Many creatures were believed to arise through a process of spontaneous generation, For example that flies were created by meat as it decomposed,
Fossils were thought to be naturally occurring phenomena that were formed in the earth that just happened to look like such things as seashells, bones or shark teeth.

The Genesis flood story was thought to be literally true providing a convenient explanation as to how those titular seashells wound up on the tops of mountains.


With that as a background, lets return to Steno who was studying anatomy at the time and had become somewhat of a sensation thanks to his dissection skills.
One day he came into possession of a sharks head and noticed that the teeth looked a lot like the things people called glossopetrae or "tongue stones" because they were thought to be petrified tongues of dragons and snakes which is kind of adorable.


Many were convinced that these tongue stones formed naturally within the rocks in which they were found or fell from the sky.
Steno was convinced that the stones were actual teeth, but noticed that the composition of his fresh teeth differed from those found in rock.
Steno argued that the corpuscles in the teeth were replaced bit by bit, by corpuscles of minerals corpuscles being minute particles akin to molecules though molecules hadnt yet been discovered.
In this gradual process, the teeth were able to retain their shape as they turned from tissue to stone which is a pretty decent explanation as to how fossilization works.


If fossil shells and teeth were the remnants of actual animals then this gives rise to additional questions:
How did fossilized shells get to locations far from the sea, such as the tops of mountains
Why were some of these shells entirely different from those that existed in the present

To answer these questions Steno began a broader investigation of geology and this is where he made his greatest scientific contribution.
Noticing that rocks were arranged in layers, he came up with what would become known as Steno's law of superposition, which stated that 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.


This seems obvious today, but was an entirely novel idea at the time, . . an idea with dangerous implications, Recall that biblical literalists were convinced of the Earths six day creation as depicted in Genesis, How could rocks be older the deeper they are found if the universe was created indays Steno solved this riddle using his powerful intellect in combination with what psychologists refer to today as motivated reasoning.
Referring to Genesis:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.


So, the waters were there first, In the next few verses God creates light, then separates the sky from the water, Then:
And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear, ”

Steno figured that when solid land was created the heavier particles settled out of the water first creating the older, bottom layers of the earth.
Subsequent, younger layers, then precipitated out of solution in turn and Voila!! science and religion are made compatible in Stenos mind at any rate.


After this landmark discovery Steno decided to give up science and became a bishop in the Catholic church, To show his devotion he chose a life of voluntary poverty and personal deprivation, Living on a bread and beer diet he became emaciated and died at the age of, The Catholic Church has proceeded down the path to canonize Steno as a saint if only evidence of a miracle could be found,

So what did we learn from Stenos story Id boil it down to two key points,
. The human struggle towards understanding: Its always interesting to see how people grappled with scientific issues that have since been solved, With/hindsight you can see how they were on the right track here, were sidetracked there and instances where they were tantalizingly close, but the answer remained just beyond their grasp.
Stenos tale contains all of these elements,
. Where Steno went furthest afield from reality, he did so for religious reasons, just as many today deny objective reality because it conflicts with their faith should you have any doubts feel free to perform a web search for the phrase ark park.


This story has a hopeful ending, Thanks to science we now understand with a high degree of certainty all of the questions with which Steno was struggling so desperately, We know, for example that: the Earth is,billion years old, that continents move on plates plate tectonics, about the processes of uplift and subduction, that species evolve and sometimes go extinct, and how mountains and landscapes form and change with time.
The scientific method has provided the human species the means to tell true hypotheses from false ones, It is, in a nutshell, a window on the truth, Religion, being unable to test factual claims, is often just the opposite,

Well end with the following quote:
In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitchblack night a blind man is the best guide he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see.
When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides,
Heinrich Heine, Gedanken Und Einfalle I was a little disappointed, this is a biography of a man who started asking the first questions about how seashells got on the top of the Alps, which to me is pretty miraculous and I know how they got there.
Imagine being in the time where no one knew! But the tone wasn't very engaging or interesting, I still can't believe that people in that day and age's thought mountains were hideous and offended God, . . but they did. I did like that Steno started as an anatomist so there are parallels to exploring the human body and exploring the earth that were cool.
Alan Cutler does a fine job of providing us with an introduction to Father Niels Stensen's achivements, and he left my interest piqued, Cutler writes from the perspective of a paleontologist, and so the aspects of Stensen's life of most interest to me personally were not treated in much detailthough I might almost be grateful for this, given the way religious themes are often handled by those not familiar with them! Cutler is quite respectful, however, and manages to offer some rough sketchwork on what Stensen was struggling to reconcile in his own life, and what led him to abandon what had every appearance of being a tremendous scientific career for a thankless life as a Catholic bishop in Protestant territory.
Perhaps "thankless" is not the right wordbeing beatified by John Paul II inis certainly meaningful in some sense! Noncatholic readers should be informed of of the difference between beatification and canonizationhaving received only the former and not the later, Catholics do not consider Stensen a "saint" but prefix his name with the term "blessed".


The most interesting parts of this book pertained to the discoveries and theories Stensen advanced before taking his leave of the scientific community.
Cutler does a fine job of portraying the voraciousness and wideranging scope of his subject's mind, He also includes an excellent bibliography at the end with many suggestions for further readingalmost a requirement for anyone more interested in a more substantial look at other areas of Stensen's life and interests, especially his theological ones.
No finer summary could be offered than the words of the man himself, spoken at the dedication of Copenhagen's newest anatomical theater in:

Beautiful is what we see.

More beautiful is what we understand,
Most beautiful is what

we do not comprehend,

.