es.

The second are formed in a great measure of marine productions, are
often no less consolidated than those of the first class, and frequently
no less changed in their natural shape and situation.

The third again have for character, according to this learned theorist,
the containing of those organised bodies which are proper to the earth,
instead of those which in the second class had belonged to the sea;
in other respects, surely there is no essential difference. It is not
pretended that these tertiary strata had any other origin, than that of
having been deposited in water; it is not so much as suspected, that
this water had been any other than that of the sea; the few marine
bodies which M. Pallas here acknowledges, goes at least to prove this
fact: and with regard to the mineral operations which had been employed
in consolidating those water formed strata, it is impossible not to be
convinced that every effect visible in the other two are here also to be
perceived.

From this view of mineral bodies, taken from the extensive observations
of the Russian dominions, and from the suppositions of geologists in
relation to those appearances, we should be led to conclude that the
globe of this earth had been originally nothing but an ocean, a world
containing neither plant nor animal to live, to grow and propagate its
species. In following a system founded on those appearances, we must
next suppose, that to the sterile unorganised world there had succeeded
an ocean stored with fish of every species. Here it would be proper to
inquire what sustained those aquatic animals; for, in such a system as
this, there is no provision made for continuing the life even of the
individuals, far less of feeding the species while, in an almost
infinite succession of individuals, they should form a continent of land
almost composed of their _exuviae_.

If fish can be fed upon water and stone; if siliceous bodies can, by
the digesting powers of animals, be converted into argillaceous and
calcareous earths; and if inflammable matter can be prepared without the
intervention of vegetable bodies, we might erect a system in which this
should be the natural order of things. But to form a system in direct
opposition to every order of nature that we know, merely because we may
suppose another order of things different from the laws of nature which
we observe, would be as inconsistent with the rules of reasoning in
science, by which the specul