world, why convert it into every other thing? Surely,
for no better reason than that there has not occurred to this mineralist
any other way of explaining certain natural appearances which aqueous
solution could not produce. Here is no dispute about a matter of fact;
it is on all hands allowed, that in certain cavities, inaccessible to
any thing but heat and cold, we find mineral concretions, which contain
no water, and which, according to the known operations of nature, water
could not have produced; must we therefore have recourse to water acting
according to no known principle, that is to say, are we to explain
nature by a preternatural cause?

[Note 43: Water is now considered by men of science, as a compound
substance; this doctrine, which seems to follow so necessarily from the
experiments of the French philosophers, must be tried by the growing
light of chemical science. In the oxygenating operation of inflammable
and combustible bodies when burning, those ingenious chemists overlooked
the operation of _phlogistic matter_, which has no weight, and
which escapes on that occasion, as I have had occasion to show in a
dissertation upon phlogiston, and in the Philosophy of Light, Heat,
and Fire. How far this view, which I have given of those interesting
experiments, may lead to the explanation of other collateral phenomena,
such as that of the water produced, I will not pretend to conjecture.
One thing is evident, that if the weight of the water, procured in
burning inflammable and vital air, be equal to that of those two gasses,
we would then have reason to conclude, either that water were a compound
substance, or that vital air, and inflammable vapour were compounds of
water and the matter of light, or solar substance.]

I dare say that this is not the view that M. Monnet takes of the
subject, when he thinks to explain to himself the concretion of
those different substances by means of water; but, according to my
apprehension of the matter, his theory, when sifted to the bottom, will
bear no other construction; and, unless he shall consider water like the
matter of heat, as capable of producing the fluidity of fusion, and of
being also again abstracted from the fluid, by pervading the most solid
body, which would then be a substance different from water, he must
employ this aqueous substance as a menstruum or solvent for solid
bodies, in the same manner as has been done by those naturalists whom
he he justly censu