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“As breeders of domestic animals, when they choose certain varieties in preference to others to breed from, speak technically of their method as that of 'selecting,' Mr. Darwin calls the combination of natural causes, which may enable certain varieties of wild animals or plants to prevail over others of the same species, 'natural selection.”

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 410

“Quirini, in 1676, contended in opposition to Scilla, that the diluvian waters could not have conveyed heavy bodies to the summit of mountains, since the agitation of the sea never (as Boyle had demonstrated) extended to great depths, and still less could the testacea, as some pretended, have lived in these diluvian waters, for 'the duration of the flood was brief, and the heavy rains must have destroyed the saltness of the sea! He was the first writer who ventured to maintain that the universality of the Noachian cataclysm ought not to be insisted upon. …Visionary as was this doctrine, it gained many proselytes even amongst the more sober reasoners of Italy and Germany, for it conceded both that fossil bodies were organic, and that the diluvial theory could not account for them.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 35
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

“Fabio Colonna deserves to be distinguished; for, although he gave way to the dogma that all fossil remains were to be referred to the Noachian deluge, he resisted the absurd theory of Stelluti, who taught that fossil wood and ammonites were mere clay, altered into such forms by sulfurous waters and subterranean heat; and he pointed out the different states of shells buried in the strata, distinguishing between, first, the mere mould or impression; secondly, the cast or nucleus; and thirdly, the remains of the shell itself. He had also the merit of being the first to point out, that some of the fossils had belonged to marine, and some to terrestrial testacea.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 31
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1