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the French stile; for he misquotes. He tells us, " Mr. St. 

 " Fond's treatise contains many instances, of basalts being 

 " absolutely a part of the matter, which tioAved from a 

 " volcano, in a state of liquid fire; which evidently ap- 

 " pears, from the same mass of lava, situated near its 

 " crater, being wholly, or in part, columnar." 



I Avish Mr. Whitehurst had been so good, as to name 

 the pages, where these instances are to be found. I cer- 

 tainly never met with any thing, in Mr. St. Fond's works, 

 to warrant the strength of this passage. It seems, also, to 

 have escaped Mr. Whitehurst, that Mr. Strange (as I have 

 stated before) positively denies, that columnar basalt is to 

 be found in the vicinity of a volcano: and Mr. Desmarest 

 himself, aware of the aM'kwardness of this unexpected fact, 

 feels himself under the necessity of accounting for it. 



Mr. Whitehurst, too, seems as ready, as his French pre- 

 decessors, to make postulates, to enable him to get oyer 

 his difficulties. I have shewn, in more instances than one, 

 the modes they have devised, to account for the total want 

 of volcanic features, in countries, according to their theories, 

 decidedly volcanic. Mr. Whitehurst's conjecture is new : the 

 reader must judge of its ingenuity. 



He says, " an immense tract of land, towards the north, 

 " has been aijSokitely sunk, and swallowed up into the 

 " earth, at some remote peiiod of time, and become the 

 " bottom of the Atlantic ocean:"' ' • ' 



Whence, " he is almbst ' tempted ' to think, that Ireland 

 " was, originally, a part of the island Atlantis; which, ac- 



" cording 



