Fossil
originally, "all bodies whatever that are dug out of the earth are by naturalists commonly called by the gen- eral name of fossils.' eral name of At present, any body, or the traces of the existence of any body, whether anor vegetable, which has been buried in the earth by natural causes; one of the bodies called organic remains.
Even the cast of a fossil shell, that is the impression which it has left on the rock, is deemed a fossil. (Used often in the plural.) In the early part of the 16th century fossils were supposed by some Italians have been formed in the hills by the FOSSIL SKELETON OF HYRACOTHERIUM VENTICOLUM, FROM EOCENE STRATA action of the stars, a view which, prior to 1579, Leonardo da Vinci combatted.
Then the hypothesis arose of a plastic force, or, according to Andrea Mattioli, a fatty matter capable of fashioning stones into organic forms. But the hypothesis which held its place longer than any other, and is not yet extinct among the unscientific, is that they were relics of the Mosaic deluge. It is now thoroughly proved that the relics are really those plants and a animals, that they were nearly all of them in existence ages before the Mosaic deluge, that they are not nearly contemporaneous with each other, but differ in age by untold millions of years, that there is at least a progression among them, if not even the FOSTER evolution of the last from the more antique. There are breaks or gaps in the series of fossiliferous strata, especially one between the Paleozoic and the Secondary strata, and another between the Secondary and the Tertiary. Mr.
Darwin showed that it is almost exclusively strata desposited in seas or lakes which at the time were slowly sinking that have been preserved; those formed when land was rising have as a rule, been washed away. In the older strata, and sometimes in those not so ancient, fossils have been destroyed by metamorphic action, and when any rock is called non-fossiliferous or azoic, the cautious geologist means by the term only that fossils have not been found in it up to the present time.