 A second tradition established a series of published reflections in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that came to be known in subsequent literature as “theories of the earth”. This tradition commenced with the Telluris theoria sacra, published in 1681 (English edition 1684) by the English clergyman, Thomas Burnet (1635–1715). Burnet sought to reconcile a Cartesian-derived historical account of the origins of the Earth with the creation account of the Mosaic tradition. In Burnet’s account, the Earth began from an original chaos fashioned by divine action into the existing Earth through a series of changes that involved the gradual separation of the continents, the reversal of the poles, and the Mosaic flood. To explain the origin of living beings, Burnet relied on the “spontaneous fruitfulness of the ground” in the primeval Edenic world, rather than on the direct creation of forms through divine action (Burnet 1684: bk 2, chp. 2, para. 4, p. 187 [1965: 141]). By connecting this account to the Biblical story of the first chapter of Genesis, Burnet broke with Cartesian counterfactualism, offering for the first time a presumably literal interpretation of a Cartesian-style developmental history of nature that also included the origins of living forms.