must have been,
more or less, in a state of softness and fluidity, without any species
of solution. I do not say that this fluidity had been without heat;
but, if that had been the case, it would have answered equally well the
purpose of my theory, so far as this went to explain the consolidation
of strata or mineral bodies, which, I still repeat, must have been
by simple fluidity, and not by any species of solution, or any other
solvent than that universal one which permeates all bodies, and which
makes them fluid.

Our author has justly remarked the difficulty of fire burning below the
earth and sea. It is not my purpose here to endeavour to remove those
difficulties, which perhaps only exist in those suppositions which are
made on this occasion; my purpose is to show, that he had no immediate
concern with that question, in discussing the subject of the
consolidation which we actually find in the strata of the earth, unless
my theory, with regard to the igneous origin of stony substances, had
proceeded upon the supposition of a subterraneous fire. It is surely one
thing to employ fire and heat to melt mineral bodies, in supposing this
to be the cause of their consolidation, and another thing to acknowledge
fire or heat as having been exerted upon mineral bodies, when it is
clearly proved, from actual appearances, that those bodies had been in
a melted state, or that of simple fluidity. Here are distinctions which
would be thrown away upon the vulgar; but, to a man of science, who
analyses arguments, and reasons strictly from effect to cause, this is,
I believe, the proper way of coming at the truth. If the patrons of
the aqueous origin of stony substances can give us any manner of
scientifical, _i.e._ intelligible investigation of that process, it
shall be attended to with the most rigid impartiality, even by a patron
of the igneous origin of those substances, as he wishes above all things
to distinguish, in the mineral operations, those which, on the one hand,
had been the effect of water, from those which, on the other hand, had
been the immediate effect of fire or fusion;--this has been my greatest
study. But, while mineralists or geologists give us only mere opinions,
What is science profited by such inconsequential observations, as are
founded upon nothing but our vulgar notions? Is the figure of the
earth, _e.g._ to be doubted, because, according to the common notion of
mankind, the existence of an antipod is ce