Abstract

Summary The development of stratigraphy started with the work of the Danish scientist Nicolaus Steno (1638–1696), who ascribed the formation of strata to the gradual deposition of sediment in the sea. In the course of the eighteenth century, his work was complemented by the independent observations of various European scientists, who recorded deposits of fossilized plants and animals in sedimentary strata. Late in the eighteenth century, William Smith (1769–1839) discovered the specificity of fossil deposits in successive strata, an observation that allowed the identification of sedimentary layers by their fossil contents as well as by their lithological composition. These findings paved the way for the establishment of biostratigraphy as an additional tool for geognostic studies and later for the establishment of evolutionary biology. Stratigraphy—initially an interdisciplinary field between palaeontology and geognosy—thus achieved a transdisciplinary status as a new discipline in its own right. This paper traces the course of the concurrent development of biostratigraphy on the one hand and lithostratigraphy on the other, and their geognostic or stratigraphic application. In addition, there were the implications for naturalists asking for the history of life in the first third of the nineteenth century. The present study is based on the examples of printed and unprinted historical sources from that period, with special reference to developments in Central Europe.