The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth (review)

Nicolaus Steno studied medicine in his native Denmark, spent time in the Netherlands, where he befriended Baruch Spinoza, traveled to France, and then to Italy, and became Court Physician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. In Italy, he converted to Catholicism, was ordained, and subsequently made a bishop; he spent the last years of his life in Germany, where he met G. W. Leibniz. Steno's skills in dissection were legendary. He made significant anatomical discoveries, including the excretory duct of the parotid gland and the tear glands. He investigated the musculature of the heart and brain anatomy, both inquiries yielding conclusions at odds with those proposed by René Descartes, a powerful influence on Steno from early on. Steno also explained muscle action in mechanistic terms in a treatise written in more geometrico. The dissection of a great shark led him to examine its teeth and to hypothesize that glossopetrae or tongue stones were indeed shark teeth. This brought him to consider the problem of solids within solids, that is, of fossils, which resulted in the publication of his greatest work, the Prodromus, regarded as a foundational text in geology. Alan Cutler writes a biography of Steno for the general reader, concentrating on his scientific career: "A full-blown scholarly biography of Steno in English has yet to be written. This book is no more than a start. Because I was mainly interested in his contribution to science as a geologist, I had to leave out many details of his career as an anatomist and a priest" (p. 207). And he succeeds beautifully in this. Cutler's work is generally well informed and written in a simple, robust, and brisk style that befits its intended audience. I am sure that it meets or exceeds the customary standards for popular scientific biography.

This is not to say that the work is free of errors. For example, Cutler mistakes "Nicolai," the genitive form of Steno's first name, for another version of it (pp. 1, 18, and note). When talking about Steno circa 1665, we are told, "Descartes had been dead for fifteen years, but his posthumously-published book On Man had just been translated into French, and was the talk of Paris" (p. 40). Descartes's L'homme was published in 1664, two years after its Latin version; Steno certainly did not wait for the publication of the original French manuscript to criticize Descartes's theories of the heart and of the pineal gland contained in it. We are also told that Leibniz did not publish the manuscript of his geological work, Protogaea, but that it "was known, and when his collected philosophical works were published in 1749, Protogaea was among them" (p. 183), and further "Leibniz's Protogaea, finally published in mid-[eighteenth]-century, also in Latin and French, brought Steno's ideas to still more readers" (p. 188). The Protogaea was first published by itself in Latin and in German translation in 1749; the Latin treatise was included in Louis Dutens's six-volume collection of Leibniz's works in 1768; and it was translated into French in 1859.

These are, of course, all minor difficulties. Other difficulties, which I will not detail, have to do with the subtleties of Steno's work in a seventeenth-century context, as directed against the work of Athanasius Kircher and others, that is, the way in which Steno was trying to prove that fossils did not grow in situ by giving an account of their formation and a contrasting account of crystals that did grow within the earth. Or the analysis of Steno's association with Leibniz, who seems to be regarded as a mere follower; or the account of Steno...