The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth by Alan Cutler. Dutton, $23.95, 228 pages.


The Chapel Hill News


September 21, 2003

Fact, Faith, and Seashells


By Phillip Manning


The belief systems of science and religion — one based on fact, the other on faith — can coexist within a human heart. Sometimes, though, one ousts the other. Charles Darwin’s life in science converted him from devout Christian to contented atheist. However, some conversions conclude less happily. What follows illustrates the perils of such a change of heart. It is the story of a renowned scientist who solved a troublesome mystery, died a disappointed bishop, and was honored too late in both domains.

The tale begins with a question that had puzzled mankind for millennia and stimulated much speculation. How did seashells get inside rocks on mountaintops far from the sea? The shells were formed in place by spontaneous generation, said Aristotle. Christian writers allowed that they were relics of Noah’s flood. The right answer came in the seventeenth century from a pious Dane named Nicolaus Steno.

Steno was a brilliant scientist who earned his reputation as an anatomist. After leaving his homeland for lusher scientific pastures in Holland and France, Steno moved to Italy. He became intrigued by geology when he dissected the head of a shark and noticed that the shark’s teeth closely resembled the curious stones called glossopetrae. After comparing the two, Steno concluded that glossopetrae must be petrified shark’s teeth. If fossilized shark’s teeth could be dug from the ground, he reasoned that seashells might also be buried far from the sea.

To explain the shells he uncovered in the Tuscan hills near Florence, Steno knew that he needed to understand the rocks that captured them. In the “The Seashell on the Mountaintop” (Dutton, $23.95), geologist Alan Cutler tells how Steno found order in the rocks where others saw only confusion. He started with a simple but powerful idea that layers of fossil-containing rock began as sediments on a sea bottom. He realized that the bottom layer must have formed first and the top layer last. Steno’s insight contains a deep implication. Cutler sums it up admirably, “It means that, layer by layer, the history of the world is written in stone.”

Steno published his results in 1669. At the bottom of ancient seas, he wrote, clams and cockles died and were buried in mud. When the sea receded, the mud hardened into rock rich in seashells. When the seas advanced again, the process was repeated. Subterranean forces later lifted the rock layers, forming mountains with fossilized seashells embedded in them. Steno’s book was attacked immediately by Protestants, who believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

The Anglican scholar James Ussher had analyzed the Biblical “begats” a few years earlier and published a chronology, which showed that God created the Earth on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C. All those rock layers that Steno claimed represented successive inundations of the Earth could not have formed in a mere 5,600 years, his critics cried. The English naturalist John Ray pointed out that Steno had compared the fossil shells of Italy to the shells of living organisms. However, ammonite fossils were plentiful in England, but living ammonites had never been found. Where were the ammonites? Ray asked. The loss of even one of God’s species was inconceivable, according to Protestant doctrine. Steno must be wrong.

Steno was raised as a Lutheran, but the Protestants’ dogmatic view of the Bible had troubled him earlier. Which Bible to believe, he wondered, the Greek, Hebrew, or Latin version? It seemed more likely to him that God’s word was intended to be interpreted by a single authority — the Catholic Church. Thus, before publishing his work on geology, Steno had converted to Catholicism.

He took his new religion seriously and was ordained a priest. The accomplished scientist, the man who had solved the problem of seashells on mountaintops, immediately took a vow of poverty. “From being a great physicist,” said his equally brilliant friend Gottfried Leibnitz, “he became a mediocre theologian.” A few years later, the Church made Steno a bishop. He was to minister to the few Catholics in northern Europe who survived the Thirty Years’ War.

Isolated as a bishop, disillusioned with Church politics, and forgotten as a scientist, Steno spent the last years of his life giving away what little he owned. He lived “without a house, without a servant, devoid of all life’s comforts, lean, pale and emaciated,” wrote a friend. He died soon afterward at age 48.

Steno’s scientific and religious reputation has grown over the years. In the century after his death, scientists slowly accepted Steno’s explanation of why seashells were found on mountaintops. His religious contributions were recognized more slowly, but in 1988, Nicolaus Steno was beatified by Pope John Paul II. The Pope praised Steno’s saintly life and contributions to science.
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