Cambridge Library Collection - Earth Science
2 total works
To the naturalist John Woodward (c.1665–1728), fossils were 'much neglected, and left wholly to the Care and Treatment of Miners and meer Mechanicks'. He had built up a large personal collection of these samples of the Earth's petrified remains and spent much of his life developing a system for their classification, the results of which were published in this important illustrated work of 1728. A distinguished physician and a fellow of the Royal Society, Woodward wrote extensively on scientific topics, and had developed a theory that fossils were creatures destroyed in the flood described in the Bible. These ideas attracted critics and supporters in equal measure, but his contribution to techniques of fossil collection and classification were influential. In the present work, he devotes the early chapters to questions of description and classification, while the later sections contain some of his letters to his scientific contemporaries, including Isaac Newton.
For the physician and natural historian John Woodward (c.1655–1728), fossils were the key to unlocking the mystery of the Earth's past, which he attempted to do in this controversial work, first published in 1695 and here reissued in the 1723 third edition. Woodward argues that the 'whole Terrestrial Globe was taken all to Pieces, and dissolved at the Deluge', and that fossilised remains were proof of the flood as described in the Bible. In the first part of the work, Woodward examines other theories of the Earth's history before presenting evidence - much of it based on his own fossil collection - in support of his theory. The work immediately prompted heated debate among his scientific contemporaries. Despite the controversy, Woodward was acknowledged as an expert on fossil classification, cementing this reputation with his influential Fossils of All Kinds (1728), which is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.