Telluris Theoria Sacra (The Sacred Theory of the Earth)

Thomas Burnet's 1681 (English 1684) Sacred Theory of the Earth is the most influential late-seventeenth-century attempt to give a unified natural-philosophical account of the Genesis cosmology. Burnet argued that the pre-Flood Earth was a smooth, paradisal sphere whose collapse produced the Flood and the present-day continental relief. The work is a foundational text in the early-modern engagement with the antediluvian world, and the principal Latinate source through which diluvium / antediluvian terminology entered scholarly English usage.