2 Mr. Lyell's Reply to the Rev. Mr. Conybeare 



which I have cited from Aristotle and Seneca relating to the 

 supposed periodical revolutions of the globe, had been pre- 

 viously collected and commented upon in Dr. Prichard's 

 " Egyptian Mythology," a work to which I have been careful 

 to refer in no less than four places in my second chapter, and 

 to which Mr. Conybeare has also acknowledged his obliga- 

 tions in his Introduction (p. 39). In regard to other citations 

 from Aristotle's Meteorics, besides that they must be familiar 

 to all who are at once scholars and naturalists, Mr. Conybeare 

 can hardly be ignorant that they have been referred to again 

 and again, not only in the works of the early Italian writers 

 on geology, but also by Hooke, Ray, and Biirnet *, the last- 

 mentioned of whom has given a translation of the passage in the 

 Meteorics, lib. 1. 14. to which Dr. Prichard and Mr. Cony- 

 beare refer. An enumeration of all the passages in Pliny re- 

 lating to the birth of new islands and analogous subjects is to 

 be found in Raspe's workf; but even Raspe lies open to an ac- 

 cusation from Mr. Conybeare of having copied his citations 

 from previous writers, and among others from Hooke. The 

 last-named philosopher has called attention to the same no- 

 tices by Pliny on the formation of new lands by river-alluvions, 

 to which Mr. Conybeare refers J. The learned mathematician 

 has moreover enlarged , as well as Whiston || after him, on 

 " the burying of Typhceus under Etna," and other mytho- 

 logical stories of the gigantomachia ; and passages on this 

 subject from Pindar, Sophocles, Plutarch, Apollodorus, Vir- 

 gil, Ovid, Lucan, and several others, are quoted by these 

 writers, many of which allusions have been revived by some 

 of the learned of our days, and perhaps regarded by them in 

 the light of original discoveries in the mines of classic lo're. 



The only passage in Strabo mentioned in the " Outlines," 

 is one not alluded to by me, but which had been already given 

 at full length by Raspe more than sixty years before, in his 

 copious extracts from the writings of the ancients on volcanic 

 phaenomena ; but I have looked in vain for that " partial and 

 imperfect reference" which Mr. Conybeare says may be traced 

 in his own two pages to that doctrine of Strabo respecting ele- 

 vation by earthquakes, of which I have endeavoured to point 

 out the importance. 



Is it then the trite quotation from the Metamorphoses of 

 Ovid which has laid me open to so sweeping a charge of pla- 



* Sacred Theory of the Earth, vol. i. p. 214. 

 t De Novii Insults, 1763. 



Hooke's Discourse of Earthquakes : Posthumous Works, p. 299. 



Ibid. p. 323. 



New Theory of the Earth, &c. p. 201. 



giarism ? 



