ward, who consumed the latter part of the seventeenth century in wrangling about 'formed stones,' 'plastic forces,' and 'lusus naturæ.'

The learned Dr Robert Plot, the first Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, in that valuable Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677), which was the model for many goodly volumes in other counties of England, after carefully describing many Ophiomorphites, Ostracites, Belemnites, and Cockles lying in their stony sepulchres, is brought to consider the great question then so much controverted in the world.

'Whether the stones we find in the form of shellfish, be lapides sui generis, naturally produced by some extraordinary plastic virtue latent in the earth or quarries where they are to be found? Or whether they rather owe their form and figuration to the shells of the fishes they represent, brought to the places where they are now found by a deluge, earthquake, or some other such means, and there being filled with mud, clay, and petrifying juices, have in tract of time been turned into stones, as we now find them, still retaining the same shape on the whole, with the same lineations, sutures, eminences, cavities, orifices, points, that they had whilst they were shells. 'In the handling whereof' (he tells us), 'though I intend not any peremptory decision, but a friendly debate; yet having according to the wishes and advice of those eminent virtuosi, Mr Hook and Mr Ray, made some considerable collections of these kind of things, and observed many particulars and circumstances concerning them; upon mature consideration, I must confess I am inclined rather to the opinion of Mr Lister, that they are lapides sui generis; than to theirs, that they are thus formed in an animal mould. The latter opinion appearing at present to be pressed with far more and more insuperable difficulties than the former. For they that hold these stones were thus formed in the shells of fishes, must suppose either with Steno, that they were brought hither by the Deluge in the days of Noah; or by some other more particular and perhaps national flood, such as the Ogygean or Deucalionian in Greece, than either of which there is nothing more improbable.'

His argument against the Noachian origin of the figured stones is very complete; first, that it was not universal, but confined to the continent of Asia; and next, that if it were universal it could not have produced the effects which require to be explained, whether it were occasioned by rain, or the breaking up of the sea, and whether it were violent or gradual.

R. L.

N

CATACLYSMS.

Sufficient as they were, and satisfactory as they ought to have been, these arguments against the diluvial origin of the 'figured stones,' did not prevent the adoption of it by many writers who had gained the right faith in regard to their nature and origin. Woodward, the great founder of the Chair, which has been so worthily filled by Mitchell and Sedgwick, who ransacked the British Islands for fossils, and devoted all his mind to "observation of the present state of the earth, and of the site and condition of the marine bodies which are lodged in and upon it," adopts the hypothesis which Plot rejected, to account for phenomena which that author had not rightly valued. His Natural History of the Earth (1695), contains these propositions and reflections:

1. 'That the marine bodies were borne forth of the sea by the universal deluge; and that upon the return of the water back again from off the earth, they were left behind at land.'

2. 'That during the time of the deluge, whilst the water was out upon and covered the terrestrial globe, all the stone and marble of the antediluvian earth; all the metals of it; all mineral concretions; and in a word all fossils whatever that had before

obtained any solidity, were totally dissolved, and their constituent corpuscles all disjoined, their cohesion perfectly ceasing. That the said corpuscles of these solid fossils, together with the corpuscles of those which were not before solid, such as sand, earth and the like; as also all animal bodies and parts of animals, bones, teeth, shells, vegetables and parts of vegetables, trees, shrubs, herbs; and to be short, all bodies whatsoever, that were either upon the earth or that constituted the mass of it, if not quite down to the abyss, yet at least to the greatest depths we ever dig; all these were assumed up promiscuously into the water, and bodies in it, and made up one common confused mass.'

3. 'That at length all the mass that was thus borne up in the water, was again precipitated and subsided toward the bottom-according to the laws of gravity-forming the strata, including the organic fossils according to their specific gravity.'

He then goes on to explain the solidification of the strata, their original parallelism, their subsequent dislocation by a force from within, and the production by this means of the irregularities of the surface of the earth, and makes these explanations on the whole:

'Here was, we see, a mighty revolution; and that attended with accidents very strange and amaz

N2

ing; the most horrible and portentous catastrophe that nature ever yet saw; an elegant, orderly, and habitable earth, quite unhinged, shattered all to pieces, and turned into a heap of ruins: convulsions so exorbitant and unruly; a change so exceedingly great and violent, that the very representation alone is enough to startle and shock a man.'

ALL LIFE DERIVED FROM THE SEA.

By degrees, however, the great truth fixed by geology, that we stand on the dried bed of the ancient sea, began to influence the ingenious writers who followed close upon Plot and Scheuchzer. Among these De Maillet, in the singular work called 'Telliamed,' (his own name reversed,) is conspicuous for the perverse resolution with which he follows out the evil consequences of an 'inappropriate idea1" on this subject. Believing that the old sea-beds were laid dry by the retirement and diminution of the water, about three feet in a thousand years, he feels no hesitation in deriving all the plants and animals of the land from prior productions of like nature in the sea, though at present circumstances may fail which contributed formerly to spontaneous

1 See Whewell's Inductive Sciences for examples of 'appropriate ideas.'