LfS Report on a Manuscript Work o/M. Andre. 



this view, the surface of the globe, and the trifling portion 

 of its interior where we are able to penetrate it, if there had 

 not been found minerals entirely crude. As these mine- 

 rals must have been originally disposed in some order, we 

 should not at first have seen in their disposition proofs of 

 sii cessive action and of revolutions, if a very great part of 

 their beds had not been replete with the remains of orga- 

 nized bodies. The fossils and petrifactions indeed, by ex- 

 citing curiosity and arousing the imagination, have given a 

 too rapid impulse to geology, have raised it too superficially 

 above its first basis, which should be founded on facts, and 

 carried it to search for causes which should have been its 

 final result. In a word, from a science of facts and obser- 

 vations it has changed 'into a tissue of hypotheses and con- 

 jectures, so vain and so contradictory that it is become al- 

 most impossible to pronounce its name without a smile. 



At first fossils and petrifications were c6nsidered as lusas 

 nature?, without considering what it really meant. But 

 when a more profound study had shown that their general 

 forms, their texture, and in many cases their chemical 

 composition, were the same as those of analogous parts in 

 living bodies, it became necessary to admit that these objects 

 had also possessed life, and that consequently they had ex- 

 isted at the surface of the earth, or in the waters of the sea. 

 How did they become buried under immense masses of 

 stones and earth ? How were marine bodies transported to 

 the summits of mountains? But above all, How was the 

 order of the climates reversed, so that we find the produc- 

 tions of the torrid zone near the pole ? 



When it. was perceived that almost the whole surface of 

 the globe was thus covered, the general and powerful causes 

 which had so dispersed them began to be considered. Ge- 

 nesis, and the traditions of almost all Heathen nations, of- 

 fered one, to which it was natural that philosophers should 

 first have recourse : it was the deluge. The petrifications 

 passed as proofs of it ; and during nearly a century the works 

 on geology consisted either of efforts to find the physical 

 causes of this great catastrophe, or to deduce from it as an 

 effect the actual state of the surface of the globe. Their 



authors 



