244 EXPERIMENTS ON METAMOEPHISM AND 



Descartes had given a new proof of his admirable penetration of 

 mind in attributing tlie dislocations of the terrestrial arch to the cool- 

 ing and contraction of the internal mass.* 



Stenon, relying on the precise observations which he made in 

 Tuscany, thought, as early as 1669, that he had grounds for conclud- 

 ing that the stratified formations had lost their first horizontality, 

 probabl}'- from the influence of subterraneous vapors, t He published 

 his work after having remained two years in Paris in company with 

 Descartes,:]; whose system made a profound impression upon him. 



The beautiful conception, however, of the French philosopher rela- 

 tive to the origin of the asperities of the globe, notwithstanding the sup- 

 port given to it by Stenon, was for a long time slighted, and gave place 

 to hypotheses which we now know have no foundation. Leibnitz him- 

 self, although founding his opinions on the ideas and observations of 

 these two great men, preferred to attribute the drying up of the an- 

 cient beds of the sea to the infiltration of a part of the water into 

 abysses which he supposed to have been produced by the ebullition of 

 the primitively melted mass. 



Buffon, although attributing much to primitive heat, was not more 

 happy than Leibnitz in the two opposite and contrary opinions which 

 he successively published on the formation of mountains. § It was, 

 in fact, only after a century that Hutton, James Hall, and Saussure, 

 were brought back by new paths to the ver}^ prolific idea of Descartes. |1 

 It still, however, remained vague, unsettled, and veiled, as it were, 

 by the school of Werner, when Leopold de Buch, and afterwards 

 Elie de Beaumont, gave it definitively a fundamental importance, by 



-» "The fissures enlarging, the external parts could no longer sustain themselves, and 

 the arch breaking up suddenly made it fall in large pieces on the superiicies of the inte- 

 rior ; but as this superficies was not sufficiently large to receive all the pieces in the same 

 situation in which they previously were, it was necessary that some should fall to one side 

 and should rest the one on the other." — (§42, page 322, Works of Desmerets, edition cited 

 above.) 



f The work published by the Danish savant, alike anatomist and geologist, under the 

 title, De Solido infra Solidum naturaliier contento, Dissertalio Prodromus, in an extent of 76 

 pages only, constitutes, by the justness and importairce of the observations which are 

 noticed, by the connexion and vigor of its reasoning, the precision of its style, and the 

 somewhat geometrical form that its author has given it, one of the most remarkable 

 works on geology, as Dr. Bertrand de St. Germain has well remarked. 



A long time since Elife de Beaumont called attention to the principal conclusions of 

 Stenon in the An7iales des Sciences Naturelles, vol. xxv, 1832. 



Stenon also distinguished volcanic from stratified rocks, and, among these last, ancient 

 and recent beds. 



JFrom 1 664 to 1666. 



§ Eitlier in the sea, by the motion and sediment of the waters, [Theorie de la Terre,) or by 

 fire at the time when the globe was still incandescent and consequently long before there 

 were seas and living beings, Epoques de la Nature, which, as we know, appeared nearly 

 thirty years after the first work. 



|[ We are indebted, however, to Robert Hooke for very exact observations in regard to 

 earthquakes, 1705; to Lazzaro Moro, 1740; to Fichtel, Veher die Karparlhm, 1791; Heim, 

 Geologischen Be-schreibung des Thuringewalds, third part. This last observer had entered into a 

 number of ingenious considerations on the possibility of the upheaval of mountain chains 

 by basalts and porphyrys, on the sublimations of metals and minerals in rocks, as well as 

 on the alterations produced in different rocks by igneous eruptions. 



