magnitude, which have been drifted (mostly in a 

 direction from north to south) a distance some- 

 times of many hundred miles from their native 

 beds, across mountains and valleys, lakes and 

 seas, by force of water, which must have possessed 

 a velocity to which nothing that occurs in the 

 actual state of the globe affords the slighest pa- 

 rallel." 



On a more minute survey of the circumstances 

 to which Buckland thus cursorily alludes, we 

 find still more striking indications of the changes 

 occasioned by the resistless torrent of a univer- 

 sal flood. It is this, as appears by the evidence 

 of various striking phenomena, which has shaped 

 our mountains, and scooped out our valleys ; 

 which has thrown up the remarkable undulations 

 of our less elevated hills of gravel and loam, at 

 the bottom of our mountain ranges ; which has 

 strewed the whole face of the earth with broken 

 fragments of rock, rounded, by detrition, into 

 stones and boulders ; which has cast a fertilizing 

 mould over the surface of our lower grounds ; 

 and which has submerged in the debris of the 

 antediluvian world, those organic remains that 

 bear such unequivocal testimony to the existence 

 of the present races of plants and animals before 

 that great catastrophe, and of the wide spread 

 destruction which attended its progress. 



These hintsand they deserve no higher ap- 

 pellation may serve to disabuse the public mind, 

 by shewing that the study of geology, so far from 

 tending to encourage scepticism and infidelity, 



