Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Theorem', American Journal of Physics 49, part 7 (1991), 658-661. A similar treat-
ment is found in R. L. Reese and S. M. Everett, 'J. J. Scaliger and the Julian Period',
Griffith Observer (May 1981), 17-19.
Chapter 3. Models of Aristotelian infinity and sacred
theories of the Earth
Descartes is the subject of many topics and monographs. Stephen Gaukroger, John
A. Schuster and John Sutton's Descartes' Natural Philosophy (London: Routledge,
2000) and Daniel Garber's Descartes Embodied: Reading Cartesian Philosophy
Through Cartesian Science (Cambridge University Press, 2001) provide a great deal
of information about this philosopher and his thinking, and may be read with
profit. Joscelyn Godwin's Athanasius Kircher: a Renaissance Man and the Quest
for Lost Knowledge (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979) is the most up-to-date
treatment of this versatile man and priest. The account of his life and work in
James J. Walsh, Catholic Churchmen in Science (New York: Books for Libraries,
1968, reprint of 1908 original edition) is moderately useful, although it fails to
document or discuss his work in geology. A synopsis of the Cartesian and
Kircherian models of the Earth appears in Ezio Vaccari, 'European views on terres-
trial chronology from Descartes to the mid-eighteenth century', Lewis and Knell,
The Age of the Earth (2001), pp. 25-37. Vaccari also discusses the reception in
Europe of the ideas presented in various seventeenth century topics by the biblical
theorists. Oldroyd, Thinking About the Earth (1996) gives a good outline of
Kircher's geological ideas.
Excellent accounts of the sacred theories of Burnet, Woodward and Whiston
are given in Gordon L. [Herries] Davies, The Earth in Decay (New York: Elsevier,
1969); Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660-1815
(Cambridge University Press, 1977); and Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists Were
Historians, 1665-1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Stephen Jay Gould,
Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological
Time (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) discusses Burnet's Telluris
in some detail in Chapter 2. The quotations from Thomas Burnet are taken from
Dennis R. Dean, Annals of Science (1981), and that of the Bishop of Hereford from
Davies The Earth in Decay (1969), p. 73. Burnet's The Sacred Theory of the Earth
was reprinted in 1965 with a commentary by Basil Willey (London: Centaur Press,
1965). Two recent topics on Whiston and his thinking are those by James E. Force,
William Whiston, Honest Newtonian (Cambridge University Press, 1985) and
Maurice Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism Through the Centuries (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996). Joseph M. Levine's Dr Woodward's Shield: History,
