Bacon, Brought Home

Natural History, June, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

Classical authors, particularly Pliny in his Natural History, spoke in a limited way about fossils, usually (and correctly) attributing the shells found on mountain-tops to a subsequent elevation of land from ancient seabeds. A few medieval authors (particularly Albert the Great in the thirteenth century) added some comments, while Leonardo da Vinci, in the Codex Leicester (written in the early 1500s), made extensive and brilliant paleontological observations that were, however, not published until the nineteenth century and therefore had no influence on the field's later development. Essentially, then, the modern history of paleontology began in the mid-sixteenth century with the publication of two great treatises on fossils by two remarkable scholars: the first published in 1546 by the German physician and mining engineer Georgius Agricola, and the second in 1565 (the year of the author's death in an epidemic of plague in Zurich) by the Swiss polymath Conrad Gesner.

In the compendium of Latinized folk names then used to identify fossils, most designations noted either a similarity in appearance to some natural or cultural phenomenon or a presumed and legendary mode of origin. Thus, the flat and circular components of crinoid stems were called trochites, or wheel stones; the internal molds of rounded pairs of clamshells were bucardites, or bulls' hearts (see figure, left); well-rounded concretions of the appropriate size were enorchites, or testicle stones (and if three were joined together, they became triorchites, or "three balls"); and sea urchin tests were brontia, or thunder stones, because they supposedly fell from the sky in lightning storms.

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A prominent group of fossils in this old taxonomy, and a puzzle (as we shall see) to early paleontologists, was called hysteroliths--also known, in various vernaculars, as woman stones, womb stones, mother stones, or vulva stones (with the scholarly name derived from the same root as "hysteria," an example cited earlier in this essay). The basis for this taxonomic consensus stands out in the first drawing of hysteroliths ever published--by the Danish natural historian Olaeus Worm in 1665. A prominent median slit on one side (sometimes both) of a rounded and flattened object can hardly fail to suggest the anatomical comparison--or, to cite Worm's own words, "quod muliebre pudendum figura exprimat"--"because the form imitates the female genitalia." (Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the literature on hysteroliths are mine, from Latin originals.) Interestingly, as Worm's second figure (below) shows, the opposite side of some (but not all) hysteroliths seems to portray, albeit less obviously, a figure of the male counterpart (at right, below). The men who wrote the founding treatises of modern paleontology could hardly have failed to emphasize such a titillating object (especially in an age that provided few opportunities for approved and legitimate discussion and illustration of such intimate subjects).