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    The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth
    The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth
    The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth
    Audiobook5 hours

    The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth

    Written by Alan Cutler

    Narrated by Grover Gardner

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    How could a seashell get into a rock? And how could that rock get to the top of a mountain? The "seashell question" plagues 17th century thinkers who fervently believed the planet was young and the human race supreme.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 28, 2003
    ISBN9781598871913
    The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius who Discovered a New History of the Earth

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    Reviews for The Seashell on the Mountaintop

    4/5

    69 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is like a Dava Sobel book. Fascinating topic, middling writing.
    • 3/5
      Acceptable as a popular history, but without any citations or even a full bibliography, and nowhere near a complete biography of the fascinating Nicolaus Steno (it focuses almost strictly on his geologic studies). A few examples of anecdotal mistakes crept in, too, so even though there isn't much out there on Steno, this may be skippable notwithstanding.
    • 4/5
      Usually science books leave me cold; they are too abstruse and hard to read. This was a happy exception: the biography of the 'father of geology', his theories and how they were gradually accepted by the scientific community, and then by us laypeople. I can't imagine any other explanation than those Steno gave us, for basic geological principles.
    • 4/5
      The amazing biography of Saint (!?) Nicolas Steno: skilled anatomist, delicate "dissectionist", Lutheran turned devout Catholic, the "Galileo of Geology". This short book comprises an amazing amalgam of fossils, spontaneous generation, sharks and shark teeth, The Medicis, Ammonites, the Reformation, Genesis theories, The 30-years war, Descartes, Newton and a pack of other fascinating characters. With a flicker of ongoing boyhood interest in paleontology, how did I not know about this guy?
    • 4/5
      One of the loveliest science history books I have ever read. Gives a great account of the life and times of the 17th C Danish scientist Nicolaus Steno who should (if he is not) be hailed as one of the founders of the science of geology.Loved it!
    • 5/5
      A wonderful first book for lovers of popular science and history of science.
    • 4/5
      The Seashell on the Mountaintop is on the one hand, a biography of the scientist known in English as Nicolaus Steno, a fascinating man in his own right. But it's also a history of the foundation of the science of geology, and it's a window into the early days of scientific exploration.Steno, a Dane, started as a brilliant anatomist, wandering Europe dissecting and teaching. He was the fist to propose the idea that muscular action comes from the contraction of muscle fibers not the ballooning of the muscle mass, the accuracy of which was not recognized for a hundred years. It was the dissection of a great white shark's head that lead to Steno to recognize that its teeth were identical to "tongue stones" found high up on the mountaintops all throughout Italy. That, along with other marine fossils that had been found in the Alps and the Alpines in Italy, led him to conclude that much of Europe had been covered by water and not just once simply to launch Noah, but again and again. Contrary to both the literal interpretation of the bible and the popular theory that the earth had some sort of "plastic power" that produced stones in the shapes of sea creatures, or anything else. He later publishes a short but more formal thesis of ideas entitled Concerning Solids naturally contained within solids. In which he lays down his four fundamental principles of stratigraphy: law of superposition, principle of original horizontality, principle of lateral continuity, and the principle of cross-cutting discontinuities (oddly omitted from the book). Ideas that for the most part were soundly rejected by his contemporaries for several decades after is death.Steno later abandons his life as a renown scientist to live the life of an improvised priest after converting from Lutheranism to Catholicism. Steno dies rather sadly before he can complete more through treatment of his ideas. Leaving it up to his contemporaries: Hooke, Ray, and Leibniz to convince the scientific community that he was right.Aside from a straight forward biography of Steno a defacto history of the early years of the science of geology right up to Hutton, Cutler also takes the time to explain a brief history of science from the ideas of the pre-Socrates (thinking) to the ideas that emerged during the enlightenment and scientific revolution (doing).
    • 5/5
      Outstanding book about the birth of geology. Brilliant discussion of how a very religious person can hold true to their faith, even in the face of evidence to the contrary! Loved it!