250 THE JUSSIEUS AND THE NATURAL METHOD, 



concussions which have produced great openings through which tlie waters of 

 the pea have entered ; without speaking of the fearful overthrow of vast moun- 

 tains which, in their fall, have occupied a great space in the bed of the sea, and 

 thrown its waters far inland, there is no ivant of proof that the greater part of 

 outlauds, which seem to have been inhabited from time immemorial, were origi- 

 nally covered with the water of the sea, which has since either irjsensibly or 

 suddenly abandoned them." No ; truly, there is no loant of j>r oof thai the greater 

 part of the land has been covered by the waters of the sea, and not only origi- 

 nally, as Antoine says, but repeatedly ; for originally will not suffice ; and in 

 the present case it is evidently necessary that the earth, before being covered 

 by the sea, should have been first dry land, since it had already produced ter- 

 restrial plants ; there had been, therefore, two epochs, and there are two facts : 

 the irruption of the seas and their retreat. " From the moment," says Antoine, 

 " that it is apparent that different places have been covered with water, it is easily 

 comprehended that impetuous Hoods, impelled from north to south, and again 

 repelled from south to north, whether by the resistance of high mountains or by 

 violent hurricanes, have swept with them the animals and vegetables of southern 

 countries, and that in this reflux the waters having entered and remained in 

 the recesses where certain mountainous fornuitions have constituted bays or 

 basins, have there retained these light bodies, some entire, others broken." 

 Thus, impetuous floods driven to and fro, violent Jiurricanes, arrangements of 

 mountains, constitute the mechanism which Antoine imagines for such grand 

 effects, and which draws from Fontenelle the remark that " in such matters it is 

 enough to obtain the faintest glimpse of a system." It was enough for the time. 

 Limited explanations must precede comprehensive ones ; and, in regard to the 

 causes, so long hidden, of the displacement of seas, one could scarcely expect 

 from a botanist who wrote in 1718, the bold and profound system which has 

 been only granted in these latter days to the persistent efforts of the most in- 

 trepid of our geologists, Leopold von Buch. 



I may dismiss the other memoirs more briefly. In the second our botanist 

 examines a fossil seed, which he believes to be that of the arhor tristis, (Nycfante 

 de Vlnde,) of which marvelling travellers had related that it blossoms at night, 

 and that its flowers fall at daybreak, because they open in the evening and close 

 in the morning; in the third he considers the Jiorns of Ammon, which he takes 

 for the shell of the nautilus ; no wide mistake, since these fossils, or, as we now 

 call them, ammonites, a species wholly lost, were, in fact, cephalopods mollusks, 

 closely allied to the nautilus ; in the fourth he treats of adders' eyes and toad- 

 stones, which, notwithstanding their absurd names, he rightly recognizes for the 

 teeth of certain fishes, and in one case, with rare precision, for the teeth of the 

 ■pogonias ; and in the fifth he discusses caxiain fossil hones, which he properly 

 refers to the hippopotamus ; thus, in the early years of the last century, presenting 

 some curious attempts, to which their date at least gives an interest, in fields 

 of inquiry which have most largely occupied the science of modern times. I 

 find the same sagacity, and, if I may so term it, precocious curiosity in another 

 memoir, which has remained unpublished, and which is entitled ''On the necessity 

 of a new arrangement of plants in reference to the foreign ones recently 

 discovered'' The author, in the first place, earnestly deprecates any intention of 

 interfering with the method of Tournefort. " At the proposal," he says, " of a 

 new arrangement of plants, there is perhaps no one who will not suppose 

 that some innovation is contemplated in the method invented by M. de Tourne- 

 fort, and that it is on the ruins of the work of that illustrious academician that 

 changes of importance are to be introduced, under pretext of rendering more 

 easy the study of botany ; but we are very far indeed from wishing to interfere 

 with an arrangement of classes and genera so happily conceived, and which has 

 united the suftVages of men the most expert in this science. The aim, on the con- 

 trary, is only to give to that method a new degree of perfection resulting from 



