I stated to him the fact as advanced by Voltaire, and found he was, of all men, the best to whom I could have addressed myself.  He told me he had been in correspondence with Voltaire on that very subject, and was perfectly acquainted with Monsieur de la Sauvagiere, and the Faluniere where the fact is said to have taken place.  It is at the Chateau de Grillemont, six leagues from Tours, on the road to Bordeaux, belonging now to Monsieur d’Orcai.  He says, that De la Sauvagiere was a man of truth, and might be relied on for whatever facts he stated as of his own observation; but that he was overcharged with imagination, which, in matters of opinion and theory, often led him beyond his facts; that this feature in his character had appeared principally in what he wrote on the antiquities of Touraine; but that as to the fact in question, he believed him.  That he himself, indeed, had not watched the same identical shells, as Sauvagiere had done, growing from small to great; but that he had often seen such masses of those shells of all sizes, from a point to a full size, as to carry conviction to his mind that they were in the act of growing; that he had once made a collection of shells for the Emperor’s cabinet, reserving duplicates of them for himself; and that these afforded proofs of the same fact; that he afterwards gave those duplicates to a Monsieur du Verget, a physician of Tours, of great science and candor, who was collecting on a larger scale, and who was perfectly in sentiment with Monsieur de la Sauvagiere, and not only the Faluniere, but many other places about Tours, would convince any unbiassed observer, that shells are a fruit of the earth, spontaneously produced; and he gave me a copy of De la Sauvagiere’s Recueil de Dissertations, presented him by the author, wherein is one Sur la vegetation spontanee des coquilles du Chateau des Places.  So far, I repeat from him.  What are we to conclude?  That we have not materials enough yet, to form any conclusion.  The fact stated by Sauvagiere is not against any law of nature, and is therefore possible; but it is so little analogous to her habitual processes, that, if true, it would be extraordinary:  that to command our belief, therefore, there should be such a suite of observations, as that their untruth would be more extraordinary than the existence of the fact they affirm.  The bark of trees, the skin of fruits and animals, the feathers of birds, receive their growth and nutriment from the internal circulation of a juice through the vessels of the individual they cover.  We conclude from analogy, then, that the shells of the testaceous tribe receive also their growth from a like internal circulation.  If it be urged, that this does not exclude the possibility of a like shell being produced by the passage of a fluid through the pores of the circumjacent body, whether of earth, stone, or water; I answer, that it is not within the usual economy of nature, to use two processes for one species of