Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
his health to fail and ultimately led to his death in Stockholm on
11 February 1650. Possibly Descartes' discussions had an effect on the
eccentric Queen Christina, for she refused to marry, then abdicated her
throne in 1654, converted to Catholicism, was eventually granted a
pension by the Pope, and died in 1689. Descartes' head was detached
from his body and the body was buried first in the Adolf Fredrik
Kyrkog˚rd in Stockholm, but later reinterred in Paris at the church of
Saint-Germain-des-Pr´s. His skull, it has been said, turned up at an
auction about a hundred years later, and was returned to France where
it eventually came into the possession of the celebrated anatomist
Baron Cuvier in Paris. Phrenologists who examined it noted that the
anterior and superior regions of his skull were rather small. In this
part of the brain is the cortical organ where, it was believed, rational
thought occurred. The German Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832)
suggested that this small size clearly indicated that Descartes was not
such a great thinker as had previously been believed. Today Descartes'
skull is cared for in the Mus
´
e de l'Homme at the Palais de Chaillot in
Paris alongside the other 35,000 human skulls in the collection.
Descartes' Principia philosophiae, published in 1644, does not
contain much in the way of geology exposition but what he did write
had a major influence on European writers on the subject for quite
some time following. He described the Earth as having been formed
from material derived from an extinguished star and having settled out
in layers as it cooled. This theory of planetary formation, which
broadly resembles what astronomers today think happened after the
Big Bang, was first expounded in 1633, but only published after his
death. Descartes thought that planets formed through the gravita-
tional pull of a star which concentrated matter in space until it con-
densed from a gas, cooled, and formed planets.
The planet, or to be more precise the Earth, developed a distinc-
tive internal layering as it cooled in four phases from the outside in.
The whole planet was surrounded by an atmosphere (his layer B), while
a dense crust of solid material (E) is underlain by a liquid layer (D),
which itself overlies a hard layer of corpuscles, formed of small
