133 An Inquiry into the Terrestrial Phcenomena 



midst of vast seas, popping up the bald point of a peaked 

 rock, with scarcely surface enoufrh of hatching room for 

 one of mother Carey's chicketis. 



Mr, Kirwan, whose various chemical and mineralogical 

 researchts have added so extensively to the acquirenienl and 

 spread of natural science, reprobating these internal fires, as 

 chronologically heathenish and pagan, has let in upon them 

 dti orthodox ocean, which has chained off our present seas 

 to fourteen thousand feet below their former depth, leaving 

 countless myriads of bivah'cd, univalved, and other marine 

 animals, gaping in helpless anguish for their briny beverage, 

 on the summits of our highest mountains. Whetherthere is 

 inore of ingenuity in providing or in filling up such enormous 

 cavernous excavations in the profound bosom of our consoli- 

 dated globe, I shall not stop to inquire. 



To account for the great elevation and other anomalous 

 irregularities in the strata, Mr. Farey, whose indefatigable 

 personal researches have already added, and are yet likely to 

 add, so much to our practical acquisitions, has announced 

 his intention of employing an extinct erratic satellite, whose 

 near approach to our globe is to reverse the direction of gravity, 

 and excite by its attractive force rebellious movements in 

 the upper strata, heaving them up in successive and doubt- 

 ful movements, whither to continue attached to their parent 

 planet, or, yielding to the usual and dangerous seductions of 

 novelty, to fly off to the evanescent stranger. Nay, it should 

 even seem that some of the undutiful profjeny have ac- 

 tually made this most singular elopement, and that the de- 

 nudated tops of our eminences exhibit naked proofs of these 

 paternal derelictions. As, however, the vertical strata and 

 oilier anomalies wiiich this lunation lever is made to heave 

 up arc disseminated in local patches all over the earth, the 

 movements of the heavenly visitant, unlike the even and 

 equable progression of all its aerial prototypes, must have 

 been strangely vagarious, and made in every latitudinary 

 direction, by occasional dips and irregular snatches, like the 

 plunderous dash of a hungry hawk at a flight of passincr 

 pigeons. 



It is in itself farcical to apply any serious argument to 

 such hypothetical reveries as these ; and this consideration, 

 I truit, will apologize for departing altogether from the 

 decorous gravity of philosophical disquisition. 



As far as we have yet made any successful discoveries in- 

 to the operations of Nature, we find them all the result of 

 periuanent laws, which, acting with j)rovident wisdom and 

 rotative perpetuity, give a precision, a stability, and a du- 

 ration, 



