If I understand our author’s argument, the particles of stone are, by their mutual attractions, to leave those hard and solid bodies which compose the strata, that is to say, those hard bodies are to dissolve themselves; but, To what purpose?  This must be to fill up the interstices, which we must suppose occupied by the water.  In that case, we should find the original interstices filled with the substances which had composed the strata, and we should find the water translated into the places of those bodies; here would be properly a transmutation, but no consolidation of the strata, such as we are here to look for, and such as we actually find among those strata.  It may be very easy for our author to form those explanations of natural phenomena; it costs no tedious observation of facts, which are to be gathered with labour, patience, and attention; he has but to look into his own fancy, as philosophers did in former times, when they saw the abhorrence of a vacuum and explained the pump.  It is thus that we are here told the consolidation of strata arises from the mutual attraction of the component particles of stones to each other; the power, by which the particles of solid stony bodies retain their places in relation to each other, and resist separation from the mass, may, no doubt, be properly enough termed their mutual attractions; but we are not here inquiring after that power; we are to investigate the power by which the particles of hard and stony bodies had been separated, contrary to their mutual attractions, in order to form new concretions, by being again brought within the spheres of action in which their mutual attractions might take place, and make them one solid body.  Now, to say that this is by their mutual attraction, is either to misunderstand the proper question, or to give a most preposterous answer.

It is not every one who is fit to reason with regard to abstract general propositions; I will now, therefore, state a particular case, in illustration of that proposition which has been here so improperly answered.  The strata of Derbyshire marbles were originally immense collections at the bottom of the sea, of calcareous bodies consisting almost wholly of various fragments of the entrochi; and they were then covered with an indefinite number of other strata under which these entrochi must have been buried.  In this original state of those strata, I suppose the interstices between the fragments of the coralline bodies to have been left full of sea-water; at present we find those interstices completely filled with a most perfectly solid body of marble; and the question is, whether that consolidating operation has been the work of water and solution, by our naturalist’s termed infiltration; or if it has been performed, as I have maintained, by the softening power or heat, or introduction of matter in the fluid state of fusion.  Our author does not propose any other method for the consolidation of those loose and incoherent bodies,