partly to Dr. Charles Hartmann, the translator of this work into
German.

[99] Cuvier, Eloge de Desmarest.

[100] Journ. de Phys. vol. xiii. p. 115; and Mam. de l'Inst.,
Sciences Mathamat. et. Phys. vol. vi. p. 219.

[101] Journ. de Phys. tom. xxxv. p. 191.

[102] Ib. tom. xxxvii. part ii. p. 200.

[103] Cuvier, Eloge de Desmarest.

[104] Ed. Phil. Trans. 1788.

[105] Playfair's Works, vol. iv. p. 75.

[106] "Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal."--Dante's _Inferno_, canto iii. Cary's Translation.

[107] Playfair's Works, vol. iv. p. 55.

[108] In allusion to the theories of Burnet, Woodward, and
other physico-theological writers, he declared that they were
as fond of changes of scene on the face of the globe, as were
the populace at a play. "Every one of them destroys and
renovates the earth after his own fashion, as Descartes framed
it: for philosophers put themselves without ceremony in the
place of God, and think to create a universe with a
word."--Dissertation envoyae a l'Academie de Boulogne, sur les
Changemens arrivas dans notre Globe. Unfortunately, this and
similar ridicule directed against the cosmogonists was too well
deserved.

[109] See the chapter on "Des Pierres figuras."

[110] In that essay he lays it down, "that all naturalists are
now agreed that deposits of shells in the midst of the
continents are monuments of the continued occupation of these
districts by the ocean." In another place also, when speaking
of the fossil shells of Touraine, he admits their true origin.

[111] As an instance of his desire to throw doubt
indiscriminately on all geological data, we may recall the
passage where he says, that "the bones of a reindeer and
hippopotamus discovered near Etempes did not prove, as some
would have it, that Lapland and the Nile were once on a tour
from Paris to Orleans, but merely that a lover of curiosities
once preserved them in his cabinet."

[112] "Some drill and bore The solid earth, and from the strata there
Extract a register, by which we learn That he who made it, and
revealed its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age." The Task,
book iii. "The Garden."

[113] P. 577.

[114] P. 59.

[115] Introd. p. 2.