Nicolas Steno is rarely heard of outside Intro to Geology,
在地质学概论以外的地方，很少有人听说过尼古拉斯·斯坦诺。
but anyone hoping to understand life on Earth should see how Steno expanded and connected those very concepts:
但是任何一个想要理解地球上的生命的人，都应该看看斯坦诺如何扩展并连接了这些个概念：
Earth, life, and understanding.
地球、生命、理解。
Born Niels Stensen in 1638 Denmark, son of a goldsmith, he was a sickly kid whose school chums died of plague.
本名尼尔斯·斯丹森，出生于1638年的丹麦，父亲是一名金匠。他年幼时多病，而他的很多校友都死于瘟疫。
He survived to cut up corpses as an anatomist, studying organs shared across species.
他活了下来并成为一个尸体解剖学家，研究不同物种间共有的器官。
He found a duct in animal skulls that sends saliva to the mouth.
他在动物头骨内发现了输送唾液的管道。
He refuted Descartes' idea that only humans had a pineal gland,
他驳斥了笛卡尔的只有人类有松果体腺的观点，
proving it wasn't the seat of the soul, arguably, the debut of neuroscience.
证明了它不是灵魂之所在，这可以说是神经科学的开端。
Most remarkable for the time was his method.
就当时来说，最非凡的是他所采用的方法。
Steno never let ancient texts, Aristotelian metaphysics, or Cartesian deductions overrule empirical, experimental evidence.
斯坦诺从来不让古文献，如亚里士多德的形而上学或者笛卡尔的演绎法，影响到经验性的、实验性的证据。
His vision, uncluttered by speculation or rationalization, went deep.
他的洞察力不被臆测或理性限制，因而深远。
Steno had seen how gallstones form in wet organs by accretion.
斯坦诺曾观察胆结石如何在湿润的器官上累积生长。
They obeyed molding principles he knew from the goldsmith trade,
其过程与他在金匠行业中所习得的锻造原理相符合，
rules useful across disciplines for understanding solids by their structural relationships.
这些通过固体的结构间的关系来了解固体的规则对各个学科都有用。
Later, the Grand Duke of Tuscany had him dissect a shark.
后来，托斯卡纳大公让他解剖了一条鲨鱼。
Its teeth resembled tongue stones, odd rocks seen inside other rocks in Malta and the mountains near Florence.
鲨鱼的牙齿和舌石相似，是一种在其他石头中发现的奇怪石头，在马耳他以及佛罗伦萨附近的山上可见。
Pliny the Elder, old Roman naturalist, said these fell from the sky.
古罗马时期的自然学家老普林尼认为这些石头是从天上掉下来的。
In the Dark Ages, folks said they were snake tongues, petrified by Saint Paul.
在黑暗时代，民谣中传说它们是蛇的舌头，被圣保罗变成石头。
Steno saw that tongue stones were shark teeth and vice versa, with the same signs of structural growth.
斯坦诺发现舌石就是鲨鱼的牙齿，反之亦然，因为它们有相同的结构生长迹象。
Figuring similar things are made in similar ways,
他认为类似的东西有着类似的形成过程，
he argued the ancient teeth came from ancient sharks in waters that formed rock around the teeth and became mountains.
他主张这些古代的牙齿来自古代水中的鲨鱼，岩石在牙齿周围生长而后形成山脉。
Rock layers were once layers of watery sediment, which would lay out horizontally, one atop another, oldest up to newest.
岩层在早年曾是水系沉积物，它们水平生长，一层又一层，从下层最古老的一直到上层最新的。

If layers were deformed, tilted, cut by a fault or a canyon, that change came after the layer formed.
如果岩层变形、倾斜、被断层或峡谷切开，这些变化都是在岩层形成后才发生的。
Sounds simple today; back then, revolutionary.
这在今天听起来很简单，而当时这是革命性的。
He'd invented stratigraphy and laid geology's ground work.
他创立了地层学，并为地质学奠定了基础。
By finding one origin for shark teeth from two eras by stating natural laws ruling the present also ruled the past,
通过发现来自不同时期的鲨鱼牙齿有着同一起源，并陈述当前的自然规律在过去也通用，
Steno planted seeds for uniformitarianism, the idea that the past was shaped by processes observable today.
斯坦诺为均变论埋下了种子，其中心思想是过去所发生的改变和现在正在进行的作用方式相同。
In the 18th and 19th centuries, English uniformitarian geologists, James Hutton and Charles Lyell,
到了18世纪和19世纪，英国均变论地质学家詹姆斯·赫顿和查尔斯·莱尔
studied current, very slow rates of erosion and sedimentation
研究了当前十分缓慢的侵蚀和沉积过程，
and realized the Earth had to be way older than the biblical guestimate, 6000 years.
意识到地球的年龄要远远老于圣经中所猜测的6000年。
Out of their work came the rock cycle, which combined with plate tectonics in the mid-twentieth century
他们在研究中发现了岩石循环，在20世纪中期它和板块构造学说一起
to give us the great molten-crusting, quaking, all-encircling theory of the Earth,
给予了我们有着熔化的地壳、震动的、包容万象的地球理论，
from a gallstone to a 4.5 billion-year-old planet.
从一颗胆结石到一个45亿年历史的星球。
Now think bigger, take it to biology.
现在，往大处想，来看看生物学。
Say you see shark teeth in one layer and a fossil of an organism you've never seen under that.
假设你在某一岩层找到了鲨鱼牙齿，在其下方找到了某种你从未见过的生物的化石。
The deeper fossil's older, yes?
更深的化石年代更老，对吗？
You now have evidence of the origin and extinction of species over time. Get uniformitarian.
你现在有证据表明物种随着时间起源并灭绝。拿均变论来说。
Maybe a process still active today caused changes not just in rocks but in life.
某一种过程可能现在仍在进行，导致岩石、甚至生命发生变化。
It might also explain similarities and differences between species found by anatomists like Steno.
这也可能解释了由斯丹诺这样的解剖学家所发现的物种间的相似和不同之处。
It's a lot to ponder, but Charles Darwin had the time on a long trip to the Galapagos,
有很多可以思考的地方，但是查尔斯·达尔文有时间在前往加拉帕戈斯群岛的漫长旅途中
reading a copy of his friend Charles Lyell's 'Principles of Geology,' which Steno sort of founded.
阅读其好友查尔斯·莱尔的书《地质学原理》，这可以说是斯坦诺所创立的学科。
Sometimes giants stand on the shoulders of curious little people.
有时伟人站在好奇的小人物的肩膀上。
Nicolas Steno helped evolve evolution, broke ground for geology,
尼古拉斯·斯坦诺帮助发展了进化论，为地质学奠基，
and showed how unbiased, empirical observation can cut across intellectual borders to deepen our perspective.
并展示了无偏见的经验观察如何能跨越知识的疆界来深化我们的洞察力。
His finest accomplishment, though, may be his maxim,
然而他最出色的成就可能是他的格言，
casting the search for truth beyond our senses and our current understanding as the pursuit of the beauty of the as yet unknown.
超越我们的感官和现有的理解来寻求真理，如同追寻未知之美。
Beautiful is what we see, more beautiful is what we know, most beautiful, by far, is what we don't.
我们所见的很美，我们所知的更美，而最美的是我们所未知的。