The era, it is true, of the expected millennium had passed away; and for five hundred years after the fatal hour, when the annihilation of the planet… - Charles Lyell

We learn from a passage in Strabo, that it was a dogma of the Gaulish Druids that the universe was immortal, but destined to survive catastrophes both of fire and water. That this doctrine was communicated to them from the East, with much of their learning, cannot be doubted.

Cesalpino, a celebrated botanist, conceived that fossil shells had been left on the land by the sea, and had concreted into stone during the consolidation the soil; and in the following year (1597), Simeone Majoli went still farther, and coinciding for the most part with views of Cesalpino, suggested that the shells and matter of the Veronese, and other districts, might have cast up, upon the land, by volcanic explosions, like those gave rise, in 1538, to Monte Nuovo, near Puzzuoli.- This hint was the first imperfect attempt to connect the position fossil shells with the agency of volcanoes, a system more fully developed by Hooke, [Antonio] Lazzaro Moro, Hutton, and other writers. Two years afterwards, Imperati advocated the animal origin of fossilized shells, yet admitted that stones could vegetate by force of 'an internal principle,' and, as evidence of this, he referred to the teeth of fish, and spines of echini found petrified.

We find in certain localities subterranean deposits of coal consisting of vegetable matter formerly drifted into seas and lakes. ...These seas and The commercial prosperity and numerical strength of a nation may now be mainly dependent on the local distribution of fuel determined by that ancient state of things.