Bacon, Brought Home

Natural History, June, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

   These specimens were sent to me by the most learned Dr. J. D. Horst, the
   archiater [chief physician] to the most illustrious Landgrave of
   Darmstadt.... Dr. Horst states the following about the strength of these
   objects: these stones are, without doubt, useful in treating any loosening
   or constriction of the womb in females. And I think it not silly to
   believe, especially given the form of these objects [I assume that he
   refers here to hysteroliths that resemble female parts on one side and male
   features on the other], that, if worn suspended around the neck, they will
   give strength to people experiencing problems with virility, either through
   fear or weakness, thus promoting the interests of Venus in both sexes
   (Venerem in utroque sexu promovere).

But Worm's enthusiasm did not generate universal approbation among scholars who considered an origin for hysteroliths within the mineral kingdom. Anselm de Boot, in the 1644 French translation of his popular compendium on fossils (in the broad sense of anything found underground), writes laconically, "Elles n'ont aucone usage que je scache" ("They have no use that I know").

By the time that J.C. Kundmann--who wrote in vernacular German and lived in Bratislava, relatively isolated from the "happening" centers of European intellectual life--presented the last serious defense for the inorganic theory of fossils in 1737, the comfortable rug of Neoplatonism had already been snatched away by time. (The great Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher had written the last major defense of Neoplatonism in paleontology in 1664, in his Mundus subterraneus, or "Underground World.") Kundmann therefore enjoyed little intellectual maneuvering room beyond a statement that the resemblances to female genitalia could only be accidental--for after all, he argued, a slit in a round rock can arise by many mechanical routes. In a long chapter devoted to hysteroliths, Kundmann allowed that these fossils might be internal molds of shells and even admitted that some examples described by others might be so formed. But he defends an inorganic origin for his own specimens because he finds no evidence of any surrounding shell material or form--"an excellent argument that these stones have nothing to do with clamshells, and must be considered as lapides sui generis" (figured stones that arise by their own generation: a signature phase used by supporters of an inorganic origin for fossils).

3. Idols of the Marketplace in the Eighteenth Century: Reordering the Language of Classification to Potentiate the Correct Answer. As stated above, the inorganic theory lost its best potential rationale when the late-seventeenth-century triumph of modern scientific styles of thinking (the movement of Newton's generation that historians of science call the scientific revolution) doomed Neoplatonism as an acceptable mode of explanation. In this new eighteenth-century context, with the organic theory of fossils victorious by default, a clear path should have opened toward a proper interpretation of hysteroliths.