OF THE ORGANIC: FOSSILS. 



substance; and therefore are their remains marine, 

 thus far. These waters disappear daily, while the 

 fossils continue in the dried lands : and thence the 

 much wider and far more erroneous conclusion also, 

 that the sea has retired in recent times from those 

 tracts of sand. 



The case of the more distant aestuaries of the pre- 

 sent ocean is another : they have, equally, been mis- 

 taken for tertiary strata, and for collections of trans- 

 ported fossils, according to the circumstances ; and 

 these in particular, have repeatedly, and. now, very 

 recently and perseveringly, been attributed to deluges, 

 and to the Mosaic deluge. System will, in some, 

 supply the place of ignorance in others : it is doubly 

 unfortunate when system and bad observation are 

 united. Though found more than a thousand miles 

 from the sea, in India, these are but the tranquil de- 

 posits of the Indian ocean. Transportation there 

 must be, if terrestrial and marine remains are inter- 

 mixed : but this is nothing more than what I shall 

 now explain, by what offers a solution for perhaps 

 every case of such mixture yet described, whether in 

 rocks or alluvia, antient or recent. And though the 

 levels of such deposits should, in any case, exceed that 

 of the present ocean, it would not alter these con- 

 clusions ; since, as I shall hereafter show more fully, 

 there is a vacillation of level between the sea and the 

 land, in many parts of the world ; and, even in our 

 own island, the most undoubted proofs of the gradual 

 elevation of the latter. 



Of such transportations, even of land animals, I 

 mentioned the case of the Solway firth. This oc- 

 curred in 1794, when more than two thousand bodies 

 of horses, cows, sheep, and smaller animals, were 

 carried into it in one day. And it is a valuable fact. 



