Detrital Theory of Geology. 325 



boniferous era, or some of the numerous organic bodies of 

 the silurian age ? 



ItMs again repeated, that the laws in operation in the 

 tertiary period being the same as those now in operation, 

 why do we not find, as the effect of trituration and drift, 

 organic bodies transported from the secondary to the tertiary 

 formations with as much ease and frequency as such small 

 objects as boulders are, and now and then small masses of 

 rock ? Is it that organic bodies, once petrified and con- 

 solidated by pressure, cling with a tenacity stronger than 

 life to their native fatherland ? 



If such is to be the admitted assumption, how strangely 

 have we ignored our premises. For is there a shore, say a 

 Norfolk crag, a southern chalk cliff, or a northern coal bed, 

 which is washed by the ocean's waves, and the sea border 

 in close proximity does not contain with the debris the organic 

 products of that border, whilst the mid-ocean is loaded with 

 organic bodies peculiar to, and distinctive of, the present era ? 



It is beyond dispute that such a state of things is now 

 going on, and every sea deposit has its derived organic re- 

 mains from the shore to which it lies contiguous ; no matter 

 what that stratum is in which organic bodies are contained, 

 the contiguity of that rock to a shore occasions the corre- 

 sponding sea deposit to partake of derived impurities, which, so 

 far as letters engraven in stone can attest, most plainly and 

 silently express the fact that the era which classified organic remains 

 in special compartments has passed for ever. And should an era 

 follow the present historical era, our successors, by a process 

 of natural selection, being of a higher order than ourselves 

 (providing the SELECTION be not like that of the mare for 

 the male donkey), would find organic remains not only alike 

 in genera and family, but of precise and individual species 

 with those belonging to rocks of old formations, as of chalk, 

 oolite, permian, silurian, &c., &c., mixed and commingled 



