OF THE EARTH. 511 



the causes of its destruction are also provided, in the 

 threat Chemistry of the Earth. The assertion is there- 

 fore what I called it ; and this imaginary analogy is 

 consequently nothing. 



When, lastly, it is said, or insinuated, that there are 

 no marks of a commencement in the Earth, the answer 

 is also found in what has preceded. The retrocession 

 of forms which I have traced, leads us constantly back 

 to a preceding condition, under which the form of the 

 surface was simpler, and the rocks less numerous than 

 in the next succeeding one : under which retrograda- 

 tion, we exhaust, especially, or approach to the ex- 

 haustion of, the calcareous strata. The last earth in 

 this backward chain, though I should not have dis- 

 covered it, consisted but of a single series of strata ; 

 and a preceding one should therefore have possessed 

 none. Whatever rocks it did contain, must therefore 

 have been the produce of fusion ; and from these were, 

 of course, formed the first strata. This inference is 

 inevitable, from what has preceded ; and therefore, 

 though every visible unstratified rock is posterior to 

 the strata with which it is connected, there is, or has 

 been, an unstratified rock older than any strata. This 

 is the first formation of rock ; and it is the produce of 

 cooling. Hence the state anterior to that, place it 

 where we may, is the fluid state which so many 

 other phenomena tend to prove ; and thus are we 

 carried back, by a connected series of facts and infe- 

 rences, to the proof of that which was probable on 

 other grounds ; to an originally fluid globe. And if 

 this is not the commencement of the earth, or its 

 creation, it is still that approximation which implies a 

 commencement; while if we admit La Place's views, 

 and believe that this fluid was the produce of a pre- 

 vious gaseous sphere, the approach to creation becomes 



