nd so on with the whole list.
Why--are we to go out of our way to seek improbable explanations,
when there is a probable one staring us in the face?

Next--and this is well worth your notice--if you will examine the
pebbles carefully, especially the larger ones, you will find that
they are not only more or less rounded, but often scratched; and
often, too, in more than one direction, two or even three sets of
scratches crossing each other; marked, as a cat marks an elder stem
when she sharpens her claws upon it; and that these scratches have
not been made by the quarrymen's tools, but are old marks which
exist--as you may easily prove for yourself--while the stone is still
lying in its bed of clay. Would it not be an act of mere common
sense to say--These scratches have been made by the sharp points of
other stones which have rubbed against the pebbles somewhere, and
somewhen, with great force?

So far so good. The next question is--How did these stones get into
the clay? If we can discover that, we may also discover how they
wore rounded and scratched. We must find a theory which will answer
our question; and one which, as Professor Huxley would say, "will go
on all-fours," that is, will explain all the facts of the case, and
not only a few of them.

What, then, brought the stones?

We cannot, I think, answer that question, as some have tried to
answer it, by saying that they were brought by Noah's flood. For it
is clear, that very violent currents of water would be needed to
carry boulders, some of them weighing many tons, for many miles. Now
Scripture says nothing of any such violent currents; and we have no
right to put currents, or any other imagined facts, into Scripture
out of our own heads, and then argue from them as if not we, but the
text of Scripture had asserted their existence.

But still, they may have been rolled hither by water. That theory
certainly would explain their being rounded; though not their being
scratched. But it will not explain their being found in the clay.

Recollect what I said in my first paper: that water drops its
pebbles and coarser particles first, while it carries the fine clayey
mud onward in solution, and only drops it when the water becomes
still. Now currents of such tremendous violence as to carry these
boulder stones onward, would have carried the mud for many miles
farther still; and we should find the boulders, not in clay,