This optimism about what science might achieve was typical of the age, but it reached its highest point in Hooke, whose mind was remarkably free of the magical and religious superstitions that muddled and constricted some of the best brains of his day. This freedom enabled him to make suggestions about the changing shapes of continents, climatic change, the formation of rocks and the development of species which anticipated and perhaps influenced the ideas of James Hutton in the eighteenth century and Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth.
