e years previous to the publication of the
_Hydrogeologie_. He restricts the term "fossils" to vegetable and animal
remains, since the word in his time was by some loosely applied to
minerals as well as fossils; to anything dug out of the earth. "We find
fossils," he says, "on dry land, even in the middle of continents and
large islands; and not only in places far removed from the sea, but even
on mountains and in their bowels, at considerable heights, each part of
the earth's surface having at some time been a veritable ocean bottom."
He then quotes at length accounts of such instances from Buffon, and
notices their prodigious number, and that while the greater number are
marine, others are fresh-water and terrestrial shells, and the marine
shells may be divided into littoral and pelagic.

"This distinction is very important to make, because the
consideration of fossils is, as we have already said, one of the
principal means of knowing well the revolutions which have taken
place on the surface of our globe. This subject is of great
importance, and under this point of view it should lead naturalists
to study fossil shells, in order to compare them with their
analogues which we can discover in the sea; finally, to carefully
seek the places where each species lives, the banks which are
formed of them, the different beds which these banks may present,
etc., etc., so that we do not believe it out of place to insert here
the principal considerations which have already resulted from that
which is known in this respect.

"_The fossils which are found in the dry parts of the surface of the
globe are evident indications of a long sojourn of the sea in the very
places where we observe them._" Under this heading, after repeating the
statement previously made that fossils occur in all parts of the dry
land, in the midst of the continents and on high mountains, he inquires
_by what cause_ so many marine shells could be found in the explored
parts of the world. Discarding the old idea that they are monuments of
the deluge, transformed into fossils, he denies that there was such a
general catastrophe as a universal deluge, and goes on to say in his
assured, but calm and philosophic way:

"On the globe which we inhabit, everything is submitted to continual
and inevitable changes, which result from the essential order of
things: they take place, in truth, with more or less promptitude or
slowness, acco