which one of the most confirmed sceptics has recently
admitted the merit of truth?

The diluvial deposits are found not only in the lower grounds, but on
the tops and sides of lofty mountains; we have ourselves noted them
distinctly characterized at high elevations upon the Kaatskills; they
are found among the Alps at Valorsine, 6000 feet above the level of the
sea, and in another place at more than 7000 feet. The excavations made
in the extension of the city of New-York at Corlaer's Hook, have laid
open a vast mass of diluvium, and afforded means for studying it with
great facility. It in fact presented the appearance of a great cabinet
of specimens of primitive and transition rocks, and it was possible in
many cases to determine the very mountain whence the fragments had been
torn. The most remarkable boulder, for instance, of a weight of at least
an hundred tons, was distinctly recognisable as identical in every
respect with the granitic syenite of Schooley's mountain, distant at
least forty miles. Others had no known type nearer than Connecticut, in
the opposite direction, while the gneiss and mica slate of the island of
New-York, with their various embedded minerals, the serpentine and many
of the magnesian minerals of Hoboken, with sandstone and trap of the
Pallisadoc range, were distinctly recognisable. In this great
excavation, where a region of a mile square was wholly removed, to a
depth, in many places, of thirty feet, no animal remains, as far as can
be learnt, were detected; thus marking a most important difference
between these deposits and those of the Old continent. Such is the
remark of an intelligent geologist, whom we are proud to reckon as our
_collaborateur_, and to whom that branch of Natural History is under no
small obligations.

"Fragments of granite and other primitive rocks, cast here and
there upon stratified formations, and interpersed in
diluvium,[10] present a fact as certain as it is astonishing.
All the chains of Mount Jura, all the mountains that precede
the Alps, the hills and plains of Germany and Italy, are strewn
with blocks of granite, often of a great dimension, and always
of a composition as pure, and as perfect a crystallization, as
the granites of the higher Alps. The same phenomenon is
repeated in the plains of Russia, of Poland, of Prussia, of
Denmark, and of Sweden. From Holstein to Eastern Prussia,
diluvial[11]grounds