s which seem to us to have been
always, or to have been in the original construction of this earth.

To suppose the currents of the ocean to have formed that system of
hill and dale, of branching rivers and rivulets, divided almost _ad
infinitum_, which assemble together the water poured at large upon the
surface of the earth, in order to nourish a great diversity of animals
calculated for that moving element, and which carry back to the sea the
superfluity of water, would be to suppose a systematic order in the
currents of the ocean, an order which, with as much reason, we might
look for, in the wind. The diversity of heights upon the surface of the
earth, and of hardness and solidity in the masses of which the land is
formed, is doubtless governed by causes proper to the mineral kingdom,
and independent either of the atmosphere or sea; but the form and
structure by which the surface of the earth is fitted peculiarly to the
purpose of this living world, in giving a fertility which sustains both
plants and animals, is only caused by those powers which work upon the
surface of the earth,--those powers, the operation of which men in
general see with indifference every day, sometimes with horror or
apprehension.

The system of sustaining plants and animals upon a surface where
fertility abounds, and where even the desert has its proper use, is to
be perceived from the summit of the mountain to the shore within the
region of the sea; and although we have principally taken the Alps,
or alpine situations, for particular examples, in illustrating this
operation of the waters upon the surface of the earth, it is because the
effects are here more obvious to every inquirer, and not because there
is here to be acknowledged any other principle than that which is to be
found on all the surface of the earth, a principle of generation in one
sense, and of destruction in another.

We may also find in this particular, a certain degree of confirmation
to another part of the same theory; a part which does not come so
immediately within our view, and concerning which so many contradictory
hypotheses have been formed. Naturalists have supposed a certain
original construction of mountains, which constitution of things,
however, they never have explained; they have also distinguished those
which have evidently been formed in another manner, that is to say,
those the materials of which had been collected in the ocean. Now, here
are two thin