Natural History 135Earth, for example, took as their point of departure the observations of
the “sacred historian” Moses, presumed author of the fi rst fi ve books of
scripture. In 1695, John Woodward (1665–1728), professor of physic at
Gresham College, London, published his Essay towards a Natural History
of the Earth (1695). In this work he resorts to Moses’s account of the for-
mation of Earth—only in the latter’s capacity “as an Historian” he assures
us—even though he is engaged in the writing of a “physical discourse.”^91
In doing so, Woodward was following the lead of other authors who had
also sought to combine natural and sacred history, the most famous ex-
ample of which was Telluris Theoria Sacra (Sacred Theory of the Earth) of
Thomas Burnet (1635?–1715), which appeared in 1681. Burnet’s work sets
forth “the original of the earth, and all of the general changes which it
hath already undergone or is to undergo till the consummation of all
things” and represents an interesting reversal of the usual relation of natu-
ral history and natural philosophy, for it is an application of Descartes’
natural philosophy to an aspect of natural history.^92 It was the fi rst in
a series of similar works that attempted to combine the natural history
of Earth with sacred chronology. These include the Essay of Woodward,
A New Theory of the Earth (1696) by Newton’s successor in the Lucasian
Chair, William Whiston, and Thomas Robinson’s New Observations of the
Natural History of this World of Matter, and of this World of Life (1696).
A number of these works also involved speculations about the origin
and development of living things. The biblical narratives of the Fall and
Flood suggested mutations both of Earth and of its human inhabitants. In
the seventeenth century, Burnet and Whiston had already explained how
these events in sacred history had wrought changes in the bodies of both
humans and animals. During the eighteenth century natural historians
took up the story. For them, the diversity of the human race called for
some account of the changes wrought on successive generations of hu-
man beings that had altered them from the unity of their original created
perfection. These changes were usually accounted for in terms of degen-
eration from an original ideal. The biblical account of the Fall meshed
neatly with a predominant renaissance theme that stressed the perpetual
degeneration of all natural things. Added to this was the long- standing
Aristotelian principle that what is stable, fi xed, and immutable is superior
to that which is subject to vicissitude. The diversity of human customs
and manners, of modes of divine worship, of languages—all bore witness
to the deviation of Adam’s race from an originally perfect physiognomy,
robust health, adherence to a single universal language and the one true
religion. Climatic change, together with the dispersion of living things
over the face of Earth—both of which could be directly linked to human