LES THOMSON, December 17,1780

TO CHARLES THOMSON.

Paris, December 17,1780.

Dear Sir,

A dislocation of my right wrist has for three months past disabled me
from writing, except with my left hand, which was too slow and awkward
to be employed often. I begin to have so much use of my wrist as to be
able to write, but it is slowly, and in pain. I take the first moment
I can, however, to acknowledge the receipt of your letters of April the
6th, July the 8th and 30th. In one of these, you say you have not
been able to learn, whether, in the new mills in London, steam is the
immediate mover of the machinery, or raises water to move it. It is the
immediate mover. The power of this agent, though long known, is but
now beginning to be applied to the various purposes of which it is
susceptible. You observe, that Whitehurst supposes it to have been the
agent, which bursting the earth, threw it up into mountains and vallies.
You ask me what I think of this book. I find in it many interesting
facts brought together, and many ingenious commentaries on them. But
there are great chasms in his facts, and consequently in his reasoning,
These he fills up by suppositions, which may be as reasonably denied
as granted. A sceptical reader, therefore, like myself, is left in the
lurch. I acknowledge, however, he makes more use of fact, than any other
writer on a theory of the earth. But I give one answer to all these
theorists. That is as follows. They all suppose the earth a created
existence. They must suppose a creator then; and that he possessed
power and wisdom to a great degree. As he intended the earth for the
habitation of animals and vegetables, is it reasonable to suppose, he
made two jobs of his creation, that he first made a chaotic lump,
and set it into rotatory motion, and then waited the millions of ages
necessary to form itself? That when it had done this, he stepped in a
second time, to create the animals and plants which were to inhabit it?
As the hand of a creator is to be called in, it may as well be called
in at one stage of the process as another. We may as well suppose he
created the earth at once, nearly in the state in which we see it, fit
for the preservation of the beings he placed on it. But it is said, we
have a proof that he did not create it in its present solid form, but in
a state of fluidity: because its present shape of an oblate spheroid is
precisely that, which a fluid mass revolving on its axis wo