Dissertation on a Solid Body Naturally Contained Within a Solid

DISSERTATIONIS PRODROMVS.

That in the resolution of natural questions, most doubts not only remain undecided, but for the most part are increased according to the number of writers, seems to me to depend on two causes primarily.

The first is that few take upon themselves to examine all those difficulties, without the resolution of which the resolution of the question itself is left mutilated and imperfect. An evident example of this thing is the present question; only one difficulty exercised the Ancients, namely, how marine things were left behind in places remote from the sea, and it never came into question whether similar bodies had originated from elsewhere than the sea. In more recent centuries, the difficulty of the Ancients was urged more sparingly, since almost everyone was occupied with investigating the origin of the aforementioned bodies; those who attributed them to the sea labored to show that bodies of that kind could not have been produced otherwise; those who attributed them to the lands denied that the sea could have covered those places, and they were entirely occupied with praising the forces of Nature, little understood, as apt for producing anything whatsoever; and although a third opinion is thus sufficiently accepted, by which part of the said bodies is referred to the earth and part to the sea, nevertheless almost everywhere there is deep silence regarding the doubt of the Ancients, unless some mention floods and some indescribable series of years,