It presented revolutionary interpretations but rooted them in well-established, widely accepted scientific principles.
Frere could, for example, assume that his readers would readily agree that the objects he found were stone tools, shaped by human hands. The decline of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas during the seventeenth century had put an end to the once-popular belief that such objects were formed, where they lay, by the "generative powers" of Earth itself. It made far more sense, within the mechanical view of nature popularized by René Descartes (1596-1650) and Isaac Newton (1642-1727), to conclude that objects that looked like stone axe heads were just that. The human origins of such objects were, by Frere's day, regarded as self-evident. Frere knew that he could display a picture of one, call it a human artifact, and go on to more complex issues.
Frere could also assume his readers' acceptance of the idea that the oldest layers of sediment in the sequence he described would be at the bottom and the youngest at the top. That premise, too, was an idea from the late seventeenth century that scientists of the late eighteenth century regarded as axiomatic.
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