440 Answers to 
However excentric, I am of opinion that the ocean has been, 
is, and will be the grand emporium and conservator of insect, 
reptile, and vegetable life. The rivers are daily running into 
the sea loaded with the spoils of the earth, carrying along with 
them the egg and chrysalis of the insect, the spawn of the rep- 
tile, with many of the reptiles themselves. These get imbedded 
in the calcareous and siliceous deposites of the waters. As this 
settles down, the animal keeps turning and moving; aud as the 
soft substance begins to press upon its inmate, the creature, by 
pressure against the sides of the still impressive mass, bakesa 
bed, and keeps open sufficient space for itself, where it is destined 
to remain for time inconceivable. In the progressive revolu- 
tions of matter this mass consolidates, and petrifies around its 
prisoner, and in this state have the banished reptiles been found 
alive in the stratifications and formations of a former world. 
Here, the duration of latent life is beyond the extent of human 
knowledge. 
The seeds of every plant of every region of the earth may be 
carried by the mountain torrents to the sea. Seed from the 
highest pinnacle of the mountains that verge the western shores 
of Southern America may be carried down the Amazonia, Rio 
Plata, &c., and meet those of other tribes from the interior of 
Africa, on or in the South Atlantic; while the expanse of the 
North may be furnished by the river St. Lawrence, &c. Seeds from 
the mountains and shores of the Volga, the Danube, the Po and 
the Rhone, &c. may fill the Black Sea, the Archipelago, and the 
- Northern Mediterranean, while the Nile fills up the African shores. 
The Western European rivers plenish the North and the German 
Oceans; the Ganges, &c. the Indian Seas: and there these seeds 
remain, in store and in entire preservation for the incidents of 
futurity. 
Many proofs have been adduced of that portion of the globe 
which we inhabit, having at one period been the bottom of the 
ocean : if so, vice versd, what was then inhabited and clothed 
in all the verdure of botanical glory, must now lie at the bottom 
of the mighty waters. In this case, kad seeds of vegetables or 
eggs of vermes been perishable, all nature must have died, and 
the present world would have presented nothing but the bare 
surface of the water-worn rock and the noxious sludge and pu- 
trid deposites of by-gone ages, where food for neither man nor 
beast could have been found : ‘nothing but one dreary waste of 
fearful extent would have covered the globe. Every maturized 
seed is an egg of the plant that produced it, and, like the animal 
ovum, contains within itself all the requisite powers and princi- 
» ples of evolving into life, of assuming the same organized sym- 
metry 
