Here the experience of our naturalist amounts to this, that, in those operations by which the solid land is wasted, and the hard materials worn by attrition and transported, it is not always evident from whence had come every particular body of stone or mineral which had travelled by means of water; nor the particular route which, in descending from a higher to a lower place, the protruded body had been made to take, although, in general, these facts may be discovered without much difficulty.  Now, this state of things is no other than the natural consequence of the great wasting of the surface and solid parts of our land, and the unequal degradation of this surface, by which means the shape of the earth is so changed, that it would often be impossible, from the present state, to judge of the course in which many bodies had been travelled by water.

M. de Saussure has described a very curious appearance of this kind:  It is the finding the travelled materials of Mont Blanc, or fragments detached from the summit and centre of the Alps, in such places as give reason to conclude that they had passed through certain openings between the mountains of the Jura.  This is a thing which he thinks could not happen according to the ordinary course of nature; he therefore ascribes this appearance to some vast debacle, or general flood, which had with great impetuosity transported all at once those heavy bodies, in the direction of that great current, through the defiles of the Alps, or the openings of those mountains.

In giving this beautiful example of the wasting and transporting operations of this earth, this naturalist overlooks the principles which I would wish to inculcate; and he considers the surface of the earth, in its present state, as being the same with that which had subsisted while those stones had been transported.  Now, upon that supposition, the appearances are inexplicable; for, How transport those materials, for example, across the lake of Geneva?  But there is no occasion to have recourse to any extraordinary cause for this explanation; it must appear that all the intervening hollows, plains, and valleys, had been worn away by means of the natural operations of the surface; consequently, that, in a former period of time, there had been a practicable course in a gradual declivity from the Alps to the place where those granite masses are found deposited.  In that case, it will be allowed that there are natural means for the transportation of those granite masses from the top of the Alps, by means of water and ice adhering to those masses of stone, at the same time perhaps that there were certain summits of mountains which interrupted this communication, such as the Jura, etc. through the openings of which ridges they had passed.

In this case of blocks of alpine stones upon the Jura, the question is concerning the transportation of those stones; but, in other cases, the question may be how those blocks were formed.