this
is a subject which I am always willing to examine in the most impartial
manner, having a desire to know the true effect of aqueous solution in
the consolidation of mineral bodies, and having no objection to allow it
any thing which it can possibly produce, although denying that it can do
every thing, as many mineralists seem to think.

The question, with regard to this example of our author's of a mineral
alkali with its water of crystallization, must be this, Whether those
saline bodies had been concreted by the evaporation of the aqueous
solvent with which they had been introduced, or by the congelation of
that saline substance from a fluid state of fusion; for, surely, we are
not to suppose those bodies to have been created in the place and state
in which we find them. With regard to the evaporation or separation
of the aqueous solvent, this may be easily conceived according to the
igneous theory; but, the aqueous theory has not any means for the
producing of that effect in the mineral regions, which is the only place
we are here concerned with. Therefore, this example of a concreted body
of salt, whatever it may prove in other respects, can neither diminish
the evidence of my Theory with regard to the igneous origin of stony
substances, nor can it contribute to support the opposite supposition of
an aqueous origin to them.

But to show how little reason our author had for exulting in that
question which he so confidently proposed in order to defeat my
argument, let us consider this matter a little farther. I will for a
moment allow the aqueous theory to have the means for separating
the water from the saline solution, and thus to concrete the saline
substance in the bowels of the earth; this concretion then is to be
examined with a view to investigate the last state of this body, which
is to inform us with regard to those mineral operations. But, our author
has not mentioned whether those masses appear to have been crystallised
from the aqueous solution, or if they appear to have been congealed from
the melted state of their _aqueous fusion_.--Has he ever thought of
this? Now this is so material a point in the view with which that
example has been held out to us, that, without showing that this salt
had crystallised from the solution, he has no right to employ it as an
example; and if, on the other hand, it should appear to have simply
congealed from the state of aqueous fusion, then, instead of answering
the