Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
them (which yet ought to be pluckt out, or they will putrifie and
stink)', and preserving reptiles or small birds in 'small Jarrs, filled
with Rum, Brandy, or Spirit of Wine, which will keep them extremely
well.' Three hundred years later much the same methodology, but
with industrial alcohol or formaldehyde, is used to preserve many
biological specimens and Damien Hirst's sharks, pigs and sheep.
(Brandy is usually not wasted today for such purposes, but drunk or
used in brandy butter to complement and enhance one's Christmas
pudding.)
Later, in 1728, the year of his death, his general thoughts on
fossils were brought together in a volume entitled Fossils of all kinds,
digested into a method suitable to their mutual relation and affinity,
and in the year following his death a catalogue of his collection was
published.
How did Woodward's ideas on the Earth differ from those pre-
valent at the time? A unique tenet of his thesis was the physical
characteristics and dynamics of the sediments which he imagined
had been produced when an 'old' Earth had become dissolved by the
waters of the Flood.
The topography of his 'new' post-Flood Earth was formed as
internal waters flowed from cracks and streams onto the surface.
There sediments as well as organic remains settled out in distinct
layers that circled the globe, and became lithified as they dried out
under the effects of an internal heat source. Woodward imagined that
the sediments settled out according to their specific gravity so that the
densest settled first and the lightest last, and he noted that many of
these layers contained fossils.
Today, anyone with some knowledge of the Earth's surface
geology knows that there are many different rock types of varying
densities at the surface. Granite is relatively light, while basalt is
considerably denser; sand and sandstone, and lime and limestone
also have a lowish density; and yet all these rocks in parts of Britain
and Ireland can be found within a short distance of each other cropping
out on the surface. Woodward was clearly incorrect in his theory of the
