Free The Lying Stones of Marrakech by Stephen Jay Gould

treatise on fossil wood far transcends any visual likenesses, and resides instead in the nature of a conclusion, and a basic style of rhetoric and scientific procedure. Galileo presented his major discussion of Saturn in his book on sunspots (as quoted earlier in this essay)—where he stated baldly that an entirely false interpretation must be correct because he had observed the phenomenon with his own eyes. Stelluti’s treatise on fossil wood presents a completely false (actually backward) interpretation of Cesi’s discovery, and then uses exactly the same tactic of arguing for the necessary truth of his view because he had personally observed the phenomena he described!
    Despite some practical inconveniences imposed by ruling powers committed neither to democracy nor to pluralism—one might, after all, end up burned like Bruno, or merely arrested, tried, convicted, and restricted like Galileo—the first half of the seventeenth century must rank as an apex of excitement for scientists. The most fundamental questions about the structure, meaning, and causes of natural phenomena all opened up anew, with no clear answers apparent, and the most radically different alternatives plausibly advocated by major intellects. By inventing a simple device for closer viewing, Galileo fractured the old conception of nature’s grandest scale. Meanwhile, on earth, other scientists raised equally deep and disturbing questions about the very nature of matter and the basic modes of change and causality.
    The nascent science of paleontology played a major role in this reconstruction of reality—primarily by providing crucial data to resolve the two debates that convulsed (and virtually defined) the profession in Stelluti and Galileo’s time (see chapter 1 for more details on this subject):
    1. What do fossils represent? Are they invariably the remains of organisms that lived in former times and became entombed in rocks, or can they be generated inorganically as products of formative forces within the mineral kingdom? (If such regular forms as crystals, and such complex shapes as stalactites, can arise inorganically, why should we deny that other petrified bodies, strongly resembling animals and plants, might also originate as products of the mineral kingdom?)
    2. How shall we arrange and classify natural objects? Is nature built as a single continuum of complexity and vitality, a chain of being rising without a gap from dead and formless muds and clays to the pinnacle of humanity, perhaps even to God himself? Or can natural objects be placed into sharply separated, and immutably established, realms, each defined by such different principles of structure that no transitional forms between realms could even be imagined? Or in more concrete terms: does the old tripartite division of mineral, vegetable, and animal represent three loosely defined domains within a single continuum (with transitional forms between each pair), or a set of three utterly disparate modes, each serving as a distinct principle of organization for a unique category of natural objects?
    Cesi had always argued, with force and eloquence, that the study of small objects on earth could yield as much reform and insight as Galileo’s survey of the heavens. The microscope, in other words, would be as valuable as the telescope. Cesi wrote:
    If we do not know, collect, and master the smallest things, how will we ever succeed in grasping the large things, not to mention the biggest of all? We must invest our greatest zeal and diligence in the treatment and observation of the smallest objects. The largest of fires begins with a small spark; rivers are born from the tiniest drops, and grains of sand can build a great hill.
    Therefore, when Cesi found a puzzling deposit of petrified wood near his estate, he used these small and humble fossils to address the two great questionsoutlined above—and he devised the wrong answer for each! Cesi argued that