It goes on to explain that a great flood (Noah's flood) at one point covered the entire Earth with water and, when it receded, the animals carried in Noah's ark repopulated the Earth. The stories of Genesis and Noah had a profound impact on early speculations regarding the formation of the Earth and the nature of its visible features, an impact that lasted for hundreds of years.
Because of the widespread acceptance of the Bible as an infallible history of the Earth, virtually all early theories of the Earth were based on trying to fit observations into a biblical framework. So, for example, the presence of clam fossils far inland was assumed to mean that water had once covered that part of the land, depositing clams that were stranded and fossilized when the waters receded. An alternate theory was that marine fossils found far inland were simply the remains of traveler's lunches that somehow became fossilized in only a century or so. These views of the Earth began to slowly change during the Renaissance.
Agricola (the latinized name of Georg Bauer) was a German mining engineer and scholar who wrote one of the first treatises on techniques of mining.
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