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John Muir
The whole wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly.
What allows a particular earth to become stone?
Anselmus Boetius de Boodt (1550–1632), a Flemish physician and scholar of gems born in Bruges, studied precious stones at the court of Rudolf II in Prague. Anyone identifying a gem for a collection looks for features that distinguish it from its neighbours. In his history of gems and stones, de Boodt asks a question that comes earlier in time. What must already be at work in a particular piece of earth for a stone to form there?
Looking where a stone forms
Any earth, then, that turns to stone or becomes a gem contains within it a stone-forming spirit as the immediate efficient cause of stones and gems. It is the nearer efficient cause of movement and of change towards form.
– Anselmus Boetius de Boodt, Gemmarum et lapidum historia, 1636, p. 24–25.[1]
The expression for a stone-forming spirit names a cause. This cause belongs to the earth undergoing the change and operates close to the event itself. The distinction allows de Boodt to separate quite different kinds of answer. One could ask about the order of the whole universe, or point to the surroundings of a mineral deposit. His appeal to a spirit is meant to account for matter acquiring a definite shape at this spot. An unseen activity takes its name from its visible result.
Asking for the nearest cause
For someone examining a finished specimen, the order of enquiry runs the other way. The result is already in hand, and the question is how it came about. Hardness under the fingers offers a starting point but leaves the process to be explained. De Boodt takes that interval seriously. Giving a mineral its name in a cabinet and tracing the history of its formation are, in his account, two different kinds of knowledge.
My First Summer in the Sierra · p. 319
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