Thomas Burnet

Thomas Burnet c.1635-1715, English cleric and scientist, b. Croft, in Yorkshire, England. He was educated at Northallerton and Cambridge. Following travels in Europe, Burnet published in 1681 the first two parts of his theory of the formation of the earth under the title Telluris theoria sacra (English version Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684), in which he held that at the time of the Deluge the earth was crushed like an egg, the fragments of the shell becoming mountains. Burnet's book attracted much attention, and his description of the creation of mountains and his stress on the account of creation in Genesis influenced the new science of geology for a hundred years. In his Archaeologiae philosophicae (1692) he treated the account of the fall of man as an allegory.

Burnet, Thomas (?1635–1715), was the author of The Theory of the Earth (2 vols, 1684–90), an imaginative and romantic cosmogony, containing sonorous and magniloquent descriptive passages.

Burnet, Thomas (1635?–1715) A natural philosopher whose Sacred Theory of the Earth (1680, 1689) was an early diluvialist work. He tried to correlate the seven days of creation with Earth history, describing the Earth as a giant shell from which flood waters gushed when it was broken by God in the Deluge. The broken fragments of the crust formed mountains. See DILUVIALISM.