is no more tlrau a parcel of little stones : doubtless, 

 therefore, they must have begun to exist, and keen 

 formed by the same laws that stones were formed by. 

 Now stones were formed first ink) hard and solid 

 'masses, in proportion to the' quantity of similar "mate- 

 rials," and proper cement. Where there was a great 

 quantity*^' lapideous particles, and few heierogenous 

 mixtures, there strata, rocks, and large stones were 

 formed. But where the lapideous particles were scat- 

 tered and disunited by the intervention of other bodies, 

 there small rubble-stones, grave!, girts, and the smallest 

 and most numerous of all stones, sand, coalesced into-' 

 minute glebes. This probably was the process in every 

 part of the earth ; so that sand is one of the primaeval 

 bodies, concreted at the same time with stones, upon 

 the highest mountains as well as in the valleys; and at 

 the bottom of the sea, as well as upon dry land. 



Besides this natural sand, there is also a factitious one, 

 which owes its origin to the fretting of river or sea- , 

 water. For water, always in motion, preys upon the 

 stones and grinds them by degrees into stony powder, 

 which we call sand; hence it is that the sand of a par- 

 ticular stone, cove, or bay, has generally the same 

 colour, and, in a microscope, the same structure, as the 

 rocks and stones of the adjacent cliff, and the strata 

 under the sea, upon which the waves are perpetually 

 working, and driving into the sea what they dash off 

 from those strata. 



3. We have heard of large bodies of sand moving 

 together in the Deserts of Arabia. But has any thing 

 of the kind been know in England 1 There has, and 

 that very lately. It is not a century, says Mr. Wright, 

 since our sands, wear De>vnham, in Suffolk, first broke 

 prison. la a warren near Lakenheath, an impetuous 

 south-west wind having broken the sand of some sand- 

 hills, the sand blew upon the adjacent grounds, -which 

 being much of the same nature, the thin crust of 

 barren earth was soon rotted and dissolved by this 

 sand laying upon, it, and thereby fitted to bear it 

 B3 



