produced ly the Action of the Ocean. 23 



tyrbid. But it is not necessary to insist on this circumstance; 

 for the transportation which I contend for is not such a 

 sudden disruption as would give to the current all the muddy 

 opacity of a land flood, but such a gradual and progressive 

 attrition, as, in carrying off the materials, the propulsion of 

 the water and the superior gravity of ihe transported parti- 

 cles would effectually prevent from appearing at the surface. 

 The extensive transportation and spread of the various ex- 

 terior materials of our globe, are facts of which we are as 

 certain as of the light and heat of the solar luiiiinary ; and 

 it is equally certain that the medium of those vast transitions 

 can be no other than the ocean itself. It should also seem 

 to follow from the fairest inductive reasoning, that its cur- 

 rents, while they are the most simple and natural, are alsp 

 the only marine agency at all equal and applicable to suqh 

 stupendous effects. 



Were it objected that the transportation and formation of 

 strata by marine currents must be local like the currents 

 themselves, it is only necessary to observe, that the male- 

 rials of all our present countries are so evidently the remain- 

 ing fragments of the waste and disintegration of other 

 countries, which no longer exist, and bear such palpable 

 characters of such frequent interchanges and successions of 

 land and water, as remove all locality of such currents far 

 beyond the reach of geological determination. 



Such, Mr. Editor, are a few of the principal data which 

 authorize our identifying the present operations of the ocean 

 with its former action on our continents, when they too 

 were botton)S of the " vasty deep." The limits of your very 

 pelect publication have necessarily circumscribed the present 

 outline of so extended a subject : but however brief and im- 

 perfect it may be, it is an indispensable preliminary to that 

 investigation of the general phitnomena of geology, which 

 my first paper announced j and in my next I shall pursue the 

 subject by continuing to trace those probabilities, for they 

 are yet no higher in the scale of evidence, which cncourai^e 

 us to imagine that our globe, in common with all its mul- 

 tifarioua and iutercstilig species of production, possesses 



within 



