For Calmet, see his Dissertation sur les Geants, cited in Berger de Xivery, Traditions Teratologiques, p.

191.
But the greatest champion appeared in England.

We have already seen how, near the close of the seventeenth century, Thomas Burnet prepared the way in his Sacred Theory of the Earth by rejecting the discoveries of Newton, and showing how sin led to the breaking up of the "foundations of the great deep," and we have also seen how Whiston, in his New Theory of the Earth, while yielding a little and accepting the discoveries of Newton, brought in a comet to aid in producing the Deluge; but far more important than these in permanent influence was John Woodward, professor at Gresham College, a leader in scientific thought at the University of Cambridge, and, as a patient collector of fossils and an earnest investigator of their meaning, deserving of the highest respect.

In 1695 he published his Natural History of the Earth, and rendered one great service to science, for he yielded another point, and thus destroyed the foundations for the old theory of fossils.

He showed that they were not "sports of Nature," or "models inserted by the Creator in the strata for some inscrutable purpose," but that they were really remains of living beings, as Xenophanes had asserted two thousand years before him.