The following passage comes from the book Protogaea, an early work of deep time history, by the famous early modern philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (d. 1716). This fascinating work- which he had planned to be the prefatory volume to a massive multi-volume history of the House of Brunswick- includes a diverse array of approaches and sources of information generally having to do with the history of the earth itself and of the life revealed in fossil form therein. The passage here is an argument for the biological origin of fossils, a matter still being debated in the early modern period, with other thinkers suggesting fossils were formed in a manner akin to crystals, the resemblance with living things merely coincidental. Leibniz not only argues for the biological origin of fossils but displays a real sensitivity to what we would now call paleontologically-informed investigation, speculating on taphonomic processes and working to use fossilized organisms as ‘documents’ with which to read local history and from local history the history of the earth as a whole.
[XXIV. The various kinds of shells were not created inside the stone, as is evident from their forms and positions]
At first glance, the most striking similarity is obvious everywhere: the color, features, folds, twists, coils of the nautilus, of the trumpet, the urchin, and the hystrix; the spines, vertebrae, and teeth of sea animals; and all of it in true fashion, so that you see the species themselves, as they are shown in cabinets of curiosities, in the stone. Sometimes it appears that the shells were crushed, cut in half, or broken and imperfect before being enclosed in stone, striking evidence that they were not placed there by nature, but by chance. Sometimes the perfect shape, printed in clay that hardened afterward, demonstrates that the prototype, which now only remains partially, or has been entirely consumed, was once complete. This is the case among those shells that scholars call airy or deceptive. That these shells did not arise in the rock, but were mixed together with the mud, is evident from the confused variety of species that one often observes in the same place. Thus, the same Malta stone sometimes reveals an urchin, a snail, a millepore, and the tooth of a large fish. In one rock was seen a sea crab, squeezing a shellfish in its pinchers, and one found shell pieces mixed with clay inside sea urchins, but they were always smaller than the urchin’s opening, so that they could only have come in from the outside. Sometimes the material inside the shell is different from what surrounds it, almost as if it was first filled up and then carried away. And these bony bodies are not rooted in the stony matrix, nor do they extend filaments as if they were born there; rather, they form an island with its own law, and they are bounded by their own, often polished, surfaces. And these shells are borne like fruit, not only by clay or other kinds of earth, but the whole stone is often filled out by gravel, small stones of various colors, or piles of barren sand, checkered with the remains of animals. You can easily see then that the same fate brought everything together in a single heap, cemented by the same bond.
[XXV. The excavated shells and bones of marine animals can be identified as the parts of real animals]
The more closely you observer these body parts, the less you doubt their origin. In fact, they bear up under scrutiny, unlike those playful imitations of people or houses in marble, whose likeness depends on seeing them from afar. A more careful examination will show that petrified shells, no less than those from the seashore, are composed of the same textures, crusts, fibers, and, so to speak, seams; that they are divided into chambers; that they can also be dissolved in vinegar, insofar as they are covered with stony material more than penetrated by it; and that one sometimes finds pearls in them, and even the animal itself, as if it had been embalmed in its shell by the juice of the stone. Morever one has found what are clearly shells in layers of the earth near Volterra in Tuscany and near Reggio in Calabria, and they display absolutely no change and were not at all petrified. Similarly, in our region, remains of animals are dug out of the mud in a cave near Sharzfeld that the locals call the Cave of Dwarves. There is thus no reason we should not assume the same origin where earth has turned to stone.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Protogaea, translated and edited by Claudine Cohen and Andre Wakefield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 61, 65.