Top Quotes & Sayings by Agostino Scilla

Explore popular quotes and sayings by Agostino Scilla.
Last updated on December 7, 2024.
Agostino Scilla

Agostino Scilla was an Italian Baroque painter, paleontologist, geologist, numismatist, and a pioneer in the study of fossils and in scientific illustration. In addition to his paintings, he published an early text on paleontology: La vana speculazione disingannata dal senso which was introduced to English audiences by William Wotton of the Royal Society in 1696. He was among the first to promote a scientific understanding of fossils in contrast to fantastic Biblical and divine interpretations.

August 10, 1629 - May 31, 1700
It would indeed be a great delusion, if we stated that those sports of Nature [we find] enclosed in rocks are there by chance or by some vague creative power. Ah, that would be superficial indeed! In reality, those shells, which once were alive in water and are now dead and decomposed, were made thus by time not Nature; and what we now find as very hard, figured stone, was once soft mud and which received the impression of the shape of a shell, as I have frequently demonstrated.
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