Indeed. You'll note that I did not quote Galileo's 1623 article declaring that comets were a sublunary (within the sphere of the Moon's orbit around the Earth) phenomenon, for example.
Still, I would be willing to wager that if you had modern biologists compare, say, Darwin's writings from the voyage of the Beagle to his death even to those of contemporaries such as Alfred Russell Wallace - an independent inventor of the theory of natural selection - he would fare extremely well.
Do you attribute that to his greater experience and access to data, or some innately better understanding of biology?
A monthly thread for posting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently (or had stored in your quotesfile for ages).