Nicolaus Steno was a Danish scientist, a pioneer in both anatomy and geology who became a Catholic bishop in his later years. established the law of superposition and the law of constancy of interfacial angles. His investigations and his subsequent conclusions on fossils and rock formation have led scholars to consider him one of the founders of modern stratigraphy and modern geology.
Background
Nicolas Steno was born on January 1, 1638 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the son of a Lutheran goldsmith who worked regularly for King Christian IV of Denmark. He became ill at age three, suffering from an unknown disease, and grew up in isolation during his childhood. In 1644 his father died, after which his mother married another goldsmith. In 1654-1655, 240 pupils of his school died due to the plague.
Education
Steno entered the University of Copenhagen in 1656 to begin studies in medicine which he continued in Amsterdam and Leiden. After completing his university education, Steno set out to travel through Europe.
Career
In 1660 Steno went to Amsterdam to study human anatomy, and while there he discovered the parotid salivary duct, also called Stensen’s duct. In 1665 he went to Florence, where he was appointed physician to Grand Duke Ferdinand II.
Steno traveled extensively in Italy, and in 1669 he published his geological observations in De Solido Intra Solidum Naturaliter Contento Dissertationis Prodromus (The Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno’s Dissertation Concerning a Solid Body Enclosed by Process of Nature Within a Solid). In this work, a milestone in the literature of geology, he laid the foundations of the science of crystallography. He reported that, although quartz crystals differ greatly in physical appearance, they all have the same angles between corresponding faces. In addition he proposed the revolutionary idea that fossils are the remains of ancient living organisms and that many rocks are the result of sedimentation.
Steno was the first to realize that the Earth’s crust contains a chronological history of geologic events and that the history may be deciphered by careful study of the strata and fossils. He rejected the idea that mountains grow like trees, proposing instead that they are formed by alterations of the Earth’s crust. Hampered by religious intolerance and dogma, Steno was constrained to place all of geologic history within a 6, 000-year span.
Upon becoming a Roman Catholic in 1667, Steno abandoned science for religion. He took holy orders in 1675, was made a bishop in 1677, and was appointed apostolic vicar of northern Germany and Scandinavia.
Membership
Member of Accademia del Cimento