That versatile and observing genius, Bernard Palissy, as early as 1580, in a book entitled _The Origin of Springs from Rain-water_, and in other writings, criticized the notions of the time, especially of Italian writers, that petrified shells had all been left by the universal deluge. "It has happened," said Fontenelle, in his eulogy on Palissy, delivered before the French Academy a century and a half later, "that a potter who knew neither Latin nor Greek dared, toward the end of the sixteenth century, to say in Paris, and in the presence of all the doctors, that fossil shells were veritable shells deposited at some time by the sea in the places where they were then found; that the animals had given to the figured stones all their different shapes, and that he boldly defied all the school of Aristotle to attack his proofs."[63] Then succeeded, at the end of the seventeenth century, the forerunners of modern geology: Steno (1669), Leibnitz (1683), Ray (1692), Woodward (1695), Vallisneri (1721), while Moro published his views in 1745. In the eighteenth century Réaumur[64] (1720) presented a paper on the fossil shells of Touraine. Cuvier[65] thus pays his respects, in at least an unsympathetic way, to the geological essayists and compilers of the seventeenth century: "The end of the seventeenth century lived to see the birth of a new science, which took, in its infancy, the high-sounding name of 'Theory of the Earth.' Starting from a small number of facts, badly observed, connecting them by fantastic suppositions, it pretended to go back to the origin of worlds, to, as it were, play with them, and to create their history. Its arbitrary methods, its pompous language, altogether seemed to render it foreign to the other sciences, and, indeed, the professional savants for a long time cast it out of the circle of their studies."