rtainly to be denied?

I am not avoiding to meet that question with regard to the providing
of materials for such a mineral fire as may be required; no question I
desire more to be asked to resolve; but it must not be in the manner
that our author has put that question. He has included this supposed
difficulty among a string of other arguments by which he would refute my
theory with regard to the igneous origin of stony substances, as if I
had made that fire a necessary condition or a principle in forming my
theory of consolidation. Now, it is precisely the reverse; and this is
what I beg that mineral philosophers will particularly attend to, and
not give themselves so much unnecessary trouble, and me so disagreeable
a talk. I have proved that those stony substances have been in the fluid
state of fusion; and from this, I have inferred the former existence of
an internal heat, a subterraneous fire, or a certain cause of fusion by
whatever name it shall be called, and by whatever means it shall have
been procured. The nature of that operation by which strata had been
consolidated, like that by which they had been composed, must, according
to my philosophy, be decided by ocular demonstration; from examining the
internal evidence which is to be found in those bodies as we see them in
the earth; because the consolidating operation is not performed in our
sight, no more than their stratification which our author has also
denied to have been made, as I have said, by the deposits of materials
at the bottom of the sea. Now, with regard to the means of procuring
subterraneous fire, if the consolidating operation shall be thus decided
to have been that of fusion, as I think I have fully shown, and for
which I have as many witnesses, perhaps as there are mineral bodies,
then our author's question, (how I am to procure a fire) in the way that
he has put it, as an argument against the fusion, would be at least
useless; for, though I should here confess my ignorance with regard to
the means of procuring fire, the evidence of the melting operation, or
former fluidity of those mineral bodies, would not be thereby in the
least diminished. If again no such evidence for the fusion of those
bodies shall appear, and it be concluded that they had been consolidated
by the action of water alone, as our author seems inclined to maintain,
he would have no occasion to start difficulties about the procuring of
fire, in order to refute a theory whic