The Cosmogonists Buffon 



demonstrated the condition of the globe not to have been 

 always what it is now, any true theory of the earth must 

 trace the history of the planet back to a time before the 

 present condition was established. With great insight, 

 he saw that this history must be intimately linked with 

 that of the solar system, of which it formed a part. He 

 thought that the various planets were originally portions 

 of the mass of the sun, from which they were detached 

 by the shock of a comet, whereby the impulse of rotation 

 and of revolution in the same general plane was com- 

 municated to them. In composition, therefore, they are 

 similar to their parent sun, only differing from that body in 

 temperature. He inferred that at first they were intensely 

 hot and self-luminous, but gradually became dark as they 

 cooled, the central sun still remaining in a state of 

 incandescence. 



Though we now believe the hypothesis of a cometary 

 shock to be untenable, it is impossible to refuse our admira- 

 tion to the sagacity of the man who first tried to solve the 

 problem of the solar system by the application of the 

 laws of mechanics. His theory, however, was loaded with 

 several crude conceptions. The enormous numbers and 

 wide diffusion of fossil shells, which had so vividly im- 

 pressed his imagination, proved to him that the land must 

 have lain long under the sea. But he had no idea of any 

 general cause that leads to elevation of the sea-bottom into 

 land. He was thus constrained to resort to his imagination 

 for a solution of the problem. Burnet had supposed the 

 original ocean to be contained within the earth, and that it 

 only escaped at the time of the Flood, when, by the heat 

 of the sun, the crust of the globe had cracked, and thus 



