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A fossil Bible<br />
by Liz Baird, Assistant Archivist<br />
The Haldane Room was packed on 13 March <strong>2014</strong> for a talk by Professor Jim<br />
Kennedy (EF), retired Director of Oxford’s Natural History Museum, on the early<br />
days of the study of natural history and how it related to the Genesis stories of the<br />
Bible. His talk focused on the Swiss scientist Johannes Jacob Scheuchzer (1672–<br />
1733), whose Natural History of Switzerland (Helvetiae Historia Naturalis, 1716)<br />
was one of the chief sources for Schiller’s drama Wilhelm Tell (1804). He told us<br />
that Scheuchzer, like many of his contemporaries, accepted the Genesis account of<br />
Creation; he published several works on fossils – the word means, literally, ‘dug<br />
up’– and even had a fossil named after him: Andrias scheuchzeri. Scheuchzer believed it<br />
to be a child which had drowned in Noah’s Flood, but the French scientist Georges<br />
Cuvier (1769-1832) proved it was an amphibian. However, it has kept its name. The<br />
talk was accompanied by a display of the seventeenth-century Pentateuch Bible<br />
The Wolfson copy of Vitré’s Biblia Sacra, title page<br />
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