14 THEORY OF THE EARTH. 



The changes in the level of the waters have 

 not, therefore, consisted solely in a more or less 

 gradual, or more or less general retreat ; there 

 have been various successive irruptions and re- 

 treats, the final result of which, however, has been 

 a universal depression of the level of the sea. 



Proofs that these Revolutions have been sudden. 



It is of much importance to remark, that 

 these repeated irruptions and retreats of the 

 sea have neither all been slow nor gradual ; on 

 the contrary, most of the catastrophes which have 

 occasioned them have been sudden ; and this is 

 especially easy to be proved, with regard to the 

 last of these catastrophes, that which, by a two- 

 fold motion, has inundated, and afterwards laid 

 dry, our present continents, or at least a part 

 of the land which forms them at the present 

 day. In the northern regions, it has left the car- 

 cases of large quadrupeds which became enveloped 

 in the ice, and have thus been preserved even to 

 our own times, with their skin, their hair, and 

 their flesh. If they had not been frozen as soon 

 as killed, they would have been decomposed by 

 putrefaction. And, on the other hand, this eter- 

 nal frost could not previously have occupied the 

 places in which they have been seized by it, for 

 they could not have lived in such a temperature. 



It was, therefore, at one and the same moment 



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