It is plain that the schisti had been indurated, elevated, broken, and worn by attrition in water, before the secondary strata, which form the most fertile parts of our earth, had existed.  It is also certain that the tops of our schistus mountains had been in the bottom of the sea at the time when our secondary strata had begun to be formed; for the pudding-stone on the top of our Lammermuir mountains, as well as the secondary strata upon the vertical schisti of the Alps and German mountains, affords the most irrefragable evidence of that fact.

It is further to be affirmed, that this whole mass of water-formed materials, as well as the basis on which it rested, had been subjected to the mineral operations of the globe, operations by which the loose and incoherent materials are consolidated, and that which was the bottom of the sea made to occupy the station of land, and serve the purpose for which it is destined in the world.  This also will appear evident, when it is considered that it has been from the appearances in this very land, independent of those of the alpine schisti, that the present theory has been established.

By thus admitting a primary and secondary in the formation of our land, the present theory will be confirmed in all its parts.  For, nothing but those vicissitudes, in which the old is worn and destroyed, and new land formed to supply its place, can explain that order which is to be perceived in all the works of nature; or give us any satisfactory idea with regard to that apparent disorder and confusion, which would disgrace an agent possessed of wisdom and working with design.

CHAP.  VII.

Opinions examined with regard to Petrifaction, or Mineral Concretion.

The ideas of naturalists with regard to petrifaction are so vague and indistinct, that no proper answer can be given to them.  They in general suppose water to be the solvent of bodies, and the vehicle of petrifying substances; but they neither say whether water be an universal menstruum, nor do they show in what manner a solid body has been formed in the bowels of the earth, from that solution.  It may now be proper to examine this subject, not with a view to explain all those petrifactions of bodies which is performed in the mineral regions of the earth, those regions that are inaccessible to man, but to show that what has been wrote by naturalists, upon this subject, has only a tendency to corrupt science, by admitting the grossest supposition in place of just principle or truth, and to darken natural history by introducing an ill conceived theory in place of matter of fact.