protable Cause of the Deluge. 37 
the rivers, and banks out the sea: rocks themselves yield 
up their fantastic forms to the effects of air, water, and 
heat; and Jand has been growing into the water ever since 
the deluge. Bat why should all assemblages of mountains 
be arransed like the little ridees of sand on the sea shore? 
Doubtless by having been produced by a superior tide, and 
Jeft to dry by an unreturning sea. Almost all great ranges 
of mountains run north and south: the Andes of the Cor- 
deleras; the Mountains of the Moon in Africa; the Do- 
franes, Caucasus, Appenine, Allevany, &c.—the Alps and 
Pyrenees excepted. 
- © As comets visit our system in all directions, why might 
not that in question have its motion from ss tyettt to south, 
and, dragging the sea afier it, determine the mountains to 
those points of the compass? From whence come the shells 
and fish-boncs we meet with on the tops of the highest 
mountains? We have not discovered any power in nature 
disposed to work such quantities of them through the bowels 
of the earth; and superstition has not yet been, so mad as 
to carry therh thither: they are not a fortuitous assemblage 
of atoms assuming such forms; not /usus nature, but bond 
Jide shelis and fish-bones, such as we meet with on ‘the 
sea-shore! We find them also deep buried in the bowels 
of the ground, far from the sea; we find them in rocks, 
and often ebriverted into stone; nay, why may not the fat 
of fish, jomned with vexetable substances, form the bitumen 
ofteoal 3 We have experiments that warrant such a sug- 
gestion. Now, if ever the sea was dvagged over the surface 
of the earth by the attraction of a comet, these effects must 
naturally follow. 
‘¢ In digging into the bowels of the earth, we have still 
stronger evidence that the flood was decasiaiia by the near 
approach of a comet. {tis well ascertained, that the united 
attraction of every atom of the carth forms that earth into 
a dense ball, and not any particular attraction in its centre. 
All matter being therefore affected by this power in propor- 
tion to its density, one might conclude that the heaviest 
bodies would he deepest, and the lightest near the surface ; 
but this is by no means the case: coal is lighter than stone 5 
various minerals lie upon light earths, &c. evidently prov- 
ing, that the general order of nature has at some time been 
disturbed, and the manner in which matter obeys the laws 
of gravity disarraneed. Hence the philosophic miner finds 
strata of various density in digging downwards; and in 
pursuing his vein of ore, finds ‘these strata broken and di- 
vided ; nay, if he loses the vein, he can easily tell where to 
C3 
